Google ROAS
north of 12x
across our travel & tourism accounts
Prepared for World Expeditions
Prepared for World Expeditions
What we found inside World Expeditions' acquisition engine.
You sell a considered purchase in a category that spends like it sells an impulse one. That gap is where the opportunity sits.
Brad, this is an outside read on the adventure travel category and where we'd point the money first.
$183Mspent by tour operators & agencies last year
The thing that caught our eye
Your category outspends the airlines, and most of it is chasing the wrong moment.
Tour Operator and Agency was the single biggest slice of the Travel & Tourism category last year at $183M, ahead of Airlines ($107M) and OTAs ($126M). But a large share of that money still runs through Newspapers and Television, the two channels least able to catch a person mid-research on a multi-week trek.
World Expeditions sells a trip people plan for months. That long consideration window is your unfair advantage, if the media is built to stay present across it rather than shout once and disappear.
We've solved thisAcross our travel accounts we've held ROAS north of 12x by owning the research window, not the launch moment.
When the category wakes up
Everyone buys in January. Almost nobody researches then.
Category spend peaks in January and bottoms out in December. For an expedition brand with lead times measured in months, that means the demand you convert in January was built long before it. The cheap attention sits in the troughs.
The window to seed a Q1 booking opens the previous winter · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Who you're bidding against
The names sharing your auction.
You aren't just competing with other trekking brands. In the same category spend pool sit Flight Centre and Scenic Tours, both with the budget to hold share of voice across the year. Knowing where they lean tells you where the gaps are.
Bigger budgets buy presence; sharper targeting buys the person who's already researching Nepal · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Want the trough-month plan mapped against your top three trip departures? We'll sketch it in an afternoon.
Let's talkWhat you only learn from the inside
Things we know about selling expeditions that aren't on any dashboard.
The 90-day quiet stretch
Expedition buyers vanish from the funnel for weeks between first click and enquiry while they clear leave and convince a partner. Cut retargeting too early and you hand the booking to whoever's still there in week ten.
Difficulty grade is a targeting signal
The person who filters for a Grade 5 Himalayan trek is a different, cheaper-to-convert buyer than the one browsing a gentle Tasmania walk. Most accounts pool them into one audience and pay the average.
Solo travellers convert on reassurance
A large share of adventure bookings are solo. They don't respond to a price cut, they respond to proof they won't be the odd one out. That's a creative lever, not a bidding one.
Departure guarantees move the needle
"Guaranteed to depart" language lifts click-through more than any discount because the fear isn't cost, it's booking a trip that gets cancelled for low numbers. Feed that flag into the ad, not just the landing page.
The shoulder season is the margin
Off-peak departures carry the thinnest volume and the best economics. Pointing spend at them, not the sold-out July Kilimanjaro dates, is where paid media actually earns its keep.
Past travellers are your cheapest revenue
Someone who's done one expedition with you is worth chasing for the next continent. That list, segmented by region already walked, outperforms cold prospecting on cost per purchase every time.
Travel & Tourism, by the numbers
Where the category's money actually went.
$677M
Total category spend, last year
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
$208M
Still spent on Newspapers
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
$193M
Digital & Social spend
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
27%
Of category spend is tour operators
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Where the category still puts its money
Newspapers took more than Digital last year.
$208M into Newspapers, $146M into Television, against $193M in Digital and Social. For a brand whose buyers self-select by trip difficulty and destination, that traditional weighting is where the inefficiency, and your opening, lives.
The category is still buying reach where you could be buying intent · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
One honest comparison
What we've delivered against category-typical performance.
These are our own trailing-twelve-month results across Australian and New Zealand travel accounts. Deliberately rounded, real, and the kind of numbers a competitor can't pull off Google.
Cost per purchase
under $20
on Google, with our best accounts well below
Meta CPM
single digits
holding attention costs down at scale
Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026. Directional, not spend-weighted.
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Segment the media by trip difficulty
Split audiences and creative by grade and region, not one "adventure travel" bucket. The Grade 5 trekker and the gentle walker deserve different messages and carry different costs. This alone usually pulls cost per purchase down noticeably.
Track recordSharper segmentation is how we've held cost per purchase under $20 on Google.
02
Fund the troughs, not the peak
January is when the category floods in and attention is dearest. We'd seed demand in the quiet months against your top departures so you convert in-season on attention you bought cheap.
Track recordOwning the research window is how we've kept ROAS north of 12x.
03
Re-engage past travellers by continent walked
Your repeat buyer is your cheapest revenue. Segment your traveller list by where they've already been and pitch the next expedition. Warm retargeting consistently beats cold prospecting on efficiency.
Track recordOur best travel accounts run ROAS well past 20x on warm audiences.
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
Everything above is what we can read from the outside. Here's what we'd bring to the inside.
Nielsen Ad IntelCategory & competitor ad-spend tracking
Roy MorganAudience & consumer profiling
Google Premier PartnerTop tier of Google agencies
Meta Business PartnerVerified platform access
This briefing is what we can see from the outside. Imagine what we'd build with the data on the inside.
Proof, not promises
Check out our success stories.
We've done this for travel & tourism brands right across Australia. See the campaigns, and the results, for yourself.
Check out our success storiesWhat this is actually worth
Here's the size of the prize.
$1M+
Revenue sitting in the gap between category-average and top-quartile paid efficiency
Here's our read: if your current paid program runs at roughly category-average efficiency, moving it toward the top of the range we deliver (from around 12x ROAS toward the low-20s) recovers a meaningful multiple of revenue on the same spend. On a national tour operator's media investment, applied to a high-value expedition basket, that delta lands north of seven figures a year. It's the first number we'd chase.
We'll tighten this against your actuals. The figure moves; the opportunity doesn't.
One brief per category per quarter
The next step
Let's map your trough-month plan.
A short reply gets you the seasonality and channel breakdown built against your actual departures, not the category average.
Just hit replyor just reply to the email this came in, I read every one.
This isn't a pitch in disguise. Worst case, you get a sharper view of where the category is wasting money and keep it.
- ✓
Your seasonality, mapped
Where the cheap attention sits against your key departures.
- ✓
The channel reallocation
What moves out of reach media and into intent.
- ✓
The prize, tightened
That seven-figure number, run against your real spend.