Guide to Digital Marketing for Tours, Activities, & Attractions
At a glance
- 85% of travellers research experiences online before trips, making direct digital presence essential for attractions seeking advance bookings.
- Direct online bookings enable higher profit margins, greater customer control, and upselling opportunities compared to third-party distribution channels.
- Multi-channel strategies across social media, search, display, and video advertising improve brand visibility and conversion across traveller journey stages.
- Website optimisation—mobile-friendly design, minimal purchase steps, clear calls-to-action—reduces booking abandonment and strengthens brand trust.
What the report covers
Sojern's guide addresses digital marketing strategy for tours, activities, and attractions operators. It examines the importance of direct online bookings, foundational digital marketing principles, channel optimisation, and tactics to enhance marketing effectiveness. The report targets experience marketers navigating unique distribution and engagement challenges in the tours and attractions segment, drawing on industry expertise and case studies.
Key findings
The report emphasises that 85% of travellers research experiences online before booking trips, underscoring the critical importance of a robust digital presence for attractions. Direct online bookings deliver measurable business advantages: higher profit margins, greater control over customer data and relationships, and opportunities to upsell complementary packages. Building strong digital channels ensures potential customers convert directly rather than via intermediaries.
Multi-channel marketing is presented as essential for reaching travellers across their entire booking journey. The report identifies social media (Facebook, Instagram), search engine marketing (SEM), display advertising, and video as core channels. A balanced mix allows marketers to connect with audiences on preferred platforms, increasing brand visibility and improving conversion probability across segments.
Website optimisation directly impacts conversion rates and customer experience. The report highlights mobile-friendly interfaces, streamlined checkout processes with minimal steps, and prominent calls-to-action as critical features for reducing abandonment. Investment in user experience and design reinforces customer trust and drives direct sales, creating competitive advantage for attractions.
Programmatic advertising is introduced as a data-driven approach enabling precise audience targeting. The technology uses algorithms to identify and reach specific demographic and interest-based audiences regardless of online location, then measure whether targeted users visit the website or complete bookings. This approach combines audience discovery with performance measurement to optimise marketing spend.
Key numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Percentage of travellers researching experiences online before trips | 85% |
Figures as published in the source; forecasts and survey results are labelled as such in the note.
Why it matters
DMOs & destinations
Destination marketing organisations benefit from understanding that attractions' digital maturity directly affects visitor spend and repeat visits. Multi-channel strategies and direct booking optimisation at attraction level improve destination-level visitor satisfaction and economic impact, while reduced dependency on OTAs strengthens local operator margins.
Hotels & hospitality
Hotels increasingly partner with or compete against attractions and activities for visitor engagement. Understanding digital marketing best practices for experiences—particularly direct booking incentives and multi-channel reach—informs hotel packages, ancillary revenue strategies, and guest experience upselling throughout the stay lifecycle.
Travel tech & distribution
Platforms and distribution technology providers must recognise the shift toward direct online bookings and programmatic advertising in the experiences segment. The emphasis on website optimisation, audience data, and cross-channel measurement signals demand for integrations, APIs, and analytics tools that support attractions in bypassing intermediaries while measuring performance accurately.
Methodology and limits
This brief is based on the publicly available summary only. The full report content is gated behind an email registration form and unavailable in the source text. The summary describes report themes—direct booking importance, channel strategy, website optimisation, and programmatic advertising—supported by one cited statistic (85% of travellers researching online). No information about survey methodology, sample size, research period, or primary data collection is disclosed. The one key figure appears observational rather than forecasted.
Official source
The report is © Sojern. This brief is an original editorial summary by TourismIntel — it quotes only figures published in the source and never reproduces the document.
Check the official statistics on Pulse
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