PPC Agency for Travel & Tourism Brands

CONVERT WANDERLUST INTO BOOKINGS WITH PAID ADS

FROM FIRST CLICK TO CONFIRMED BOOKING

Paid Media Specialists for Travel & Tourism Brands

At boxChilli, we plan and manage paid media campaigns for travel and tourism brands that need to reach the right travellers at the right moment and turn that reach into direct bookings, ticket sales and actual revenue. If your advertising campaigns across Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok are generating clicks without conversions, or your budget is being absorbed by peak-season competition without a clear return, those opportunities are being captured by competitors running sharper, more commercially-focused campaigns.

Trusted since 2006, our in-house paid media team has supported travel operators, transport providers, destinations and attractions across the UK, Europe and South America. We build integrated, cross-channel PPC campaigns that align platforms, audiences and business objectives from day one, with accurate conversion tracking and reporting that shows exactly where your budget is going and what it’s delivering. Travel is a complex, high-competition space where timing, creative and intent all matter, which is why our approach is built around those commercial realities, helping you get more from every pound of ad spend, while reducing your reliance on OTAs and high-commission third-party platforms.

  • REDUCE YOUR RELIANCE ON OTAS

  • MAXIMISE ROAS ACROSS PEAK SEASONS

  • GOOGLE, META, TIKTOK AND MICROSOFT ADS

  • CAMPAIGNS BUILT AROUND TRAVELLER INTENT

  • NEED PAID MEDIA CAMPAIGNS TAILORED TO YOUR CONSUMER’S BEHAVIOUR?

TRAVEL BRANDS THAT HAVE CHOSEN BOXCHILLI

Hovertravel company logo in blue and red text.
Visit Eastleigh company logo with stylised text and location pin.
Iconic Santorini logo
Oborishte 63 logo

MOST MARKETING & COMMERCIAL TEAMS CAN BENEFIT FROM OUR PAID MEDIA SERVICES IF THEY...

The Paid Media Agency That Gets The Travel & Tourism Industry

Are spending heavily on paid search or paid social, but can't clearly see which campaigns are actually driving bookings or conversions.

Struggle to maintain efficient ad spend during peak season when CPCs spike and competition intensifies across travel keywords.

Rely on OTAs and aggregators for too much of your booking volume and want paid media to build a stronger, lower-cost direct channel.

Have seasonal campaigns that launch reactively rather than strategically, resulting in missed demand in the weeks that matter most.

Know their audience is browsing and booking across multiple platforms (search, social and video), but campaigns haven't kept pace with that behaviour.

Want a paid media partner who understands booking windows, feeder markets, and what it actually takes to convert a traveller mid-research.

FULL-FUNNEL PAID ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS

Paid Media Campaigns Built Around The Traveller Journey

Travel brands face a unique paid advertising challenge: your customers begin planning weeks or months before they buy, they compare obsessively across devices, they’re heavily influenced by creative and they’re being constantly targeted by OTAs with enormous budgets. Getting paid search and social right in this environment means understanding not just the platforms, but the psychology and behaviour of the traveller at each stage of their journey.

Our campaigns are built to do exactly that. From high-intent search ads that capture travellers who are ready to book, to awareness-driving paid social that inspires consideration during the dreaming phase, every campaign is structured around how your audience actually moves from interest to action. All activity is backed by accurate conversion tracking, so you have a clear and honest view of what your ad spend is delivering.

Pay-per-click (PPC)

Travel is one of the most competitive and expensive verticals in paid search. Without careful campaign structure, precise keyword targeting, and disciplined bid management, PPC budgets can be consumed by broad, low-intent searches that generate traffic, but not bookings. This is especially true during peak periods, when CPCs rise sharply and efficiency becomes harder to maintain.

Our PPC services for travel brands are built around commercial intent: the searches that signal a traveller is actively planning, comparing, or ready to book. We structure campaigns to prioritise high-value queries (routes, destinations, packages and availability-led terms), refine bidding strategies to protect efficiency during peak periods and align ads with landing pages designed to convert. The result is a more predictable, scalable channel for direct bookings, rather than a budget that disappears into a competitive auction without a clear return.

Google Ads

Google Ads gives travel brands the ability to appear at the exact moment someone is searching for a destination, route, experience or tour. That visibility is valuable, but performance depends on how campaigns are structured, targeted, and managed over time. Poorly built accounts, unfocused budgets, and limited tracking are the most common reasons travel brands feel like they’re spending without seeing results.

We manage Google Ads across Search, Display, and Performance Max for travel brands, building campaigns around high-intent booking searches and real audience signals rather than broad reach. Seasonal demand is built into campaign planning from the outset, so budgets shift intelligently as booking windows open. With ongoing optimisation and robust conversion tracking, Google Ads becomes a controllable growth channel rather than an unpredictable cost.

Microsoft Ads

Microsoft Advertising reaches a search audience that is often overlooked in travel marketing, but can deliver high-quality bookings at a meaningfully lower cost-per-click than Google.

We build and manage Microsoft Ads campaigns that extend your paid search coverage beyond Google, targeting high-intent travel searches while maintaining strong budget control. This approach mirrors the discipline we apply across all paid search activity: precise targeting, structured campaigns, and continuous optimisation to improve efficiency and booking volume.

Paid Social

The travel decision rarely starts with a search, but with a scroll: a video of a destination, a friend’s post about a weekend away, an ad for a tour that matches exactly what someone has been thinking about. Paid social is where travel brands can intercept that early inspiration phase and keep their brand front-of-mind throughout the consideration phase.

We manage paid social campaigns across social platforms for travel brands, tailoring creative, targeting, and budget to how users engage on each channel. Campaigns are structured to cover everything from broad awareness and destination storytelling to retargeting for high-intent audiences who have already shown interest. Performance is tracked and optimised continuously, so spend is always working harder, not just reaching further.

Meta Ads

Meta platforms sit at the heart of travel inspiration for many audiences. The challenge is that without the right structure — well-defined audience segmentation, creative that reflects how people consume content on these platforms, and proper tracking through the booking journey — budgets can be spent generating engagement that never converts into real revenue.

Our Meta ad campaigns for travel brands are built around booking behaviour, not just reach. We build audiences based on travel intent signals and past interaction, test creative systematically to understand what drives action, and use retargeting to re-engage travellers who showed interest, but didn’t complete a booking. Everything is designed to move people closer to conversion.

TikTok Ads

TikTok has become a powerful channel for travel discovery, particularly for experiences, destinations, and brands targeting younger audiences. Travellers find inspiration through short-form video in ways that traditional search advertising can’t replicate. Brands that show up well here often enjoy strong downstream conversion, as that inspiration can turn into active search and booking.

We use TikTok Ads to support demand generation and brand discovery for travel brands, creating campaigns that align with how users engage on the platform, rather than repurposing content from other channels. Activity is tracked, tested, and refined using conversion data, so TikTok becomes a practical contributor to booking volumes, not just a source of views and impressions.

PAID MEDIA CONSULTANCY & STRATEGY

Sometimes the challenge isn’t the execution, but knowing where to focus. Our paid media consultancy service works with travel and tourism brands to build clear, commercially grounded paid media strategies that connect platforms, audiences, and budgets to real booking objectives. Whether you’re launching into paid media for the first time, rethinking an underperforming account, or planning ahead for a key season, we provide the strategic direction to make your investment count.

Paid Media Audits & Reporting

If your paid media isn’t delivering the bookings your spend should be generating, the answer is usually in the data. Our paid media audits for travel brands identify exactly what’s holding performance back, whether that’s poor campaign structure, misaligned bidding, weak creative, broken conversion tracking, or budget being directed at the wrong audiences. You’ll receive clear, prioritised recommendations you can act on immediately.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT BY WORKING WITH US

We're Not Just Another Travel PPC Agency

Travel brands come to us after experiencing one of a small number of familiar frustrations: campaigns that spend freely, but link poorly to actual bookings, agencies that don’t understand the seasonal pressures of the industry, or reporting that shows impressions and clicks without ever getting to revenue. Our approach to paid media was developed specifically to address those gaps. It’s built on commercial transparency, genuine sector knowledge and the kind of ongoing optimisation that keeps campaigns performing beyond the initial launch.

UNDERSTANDING HOW TRAVEL BOOKINGS ACTUALLY WORK

Booking a holiday, an experience, or a journey is rarely a single-session decision. Travellers browse across devices, return to the same pages multiple times, compare alternatives, and can take weeks to convert. Our campaigns are planned around that reality. We structure activity to maintain visibility throughout the research window, re-engage travellers who drop off, and ensure your budget is working at every stage of that journey — not just at the top of the funnel.

SEASONAL STRATEGY THAT STAYS AHEAD OF DEMAND

One of the most costly mistakes in travel paid media is treating seasonality as something to react to, rather than plan for. By the time peak-season search volume spikes, CPCs are already high and the efficient inventory is gone. We build seasonal campaign planning into strategy from day one — mapping booking windows, key travel periods, and demand patterns so budgets are in place, creative is ready, and campaigns are live before competition intensifies.

CUTTING OTA DEPENDENCY THROUGH DIRECT CAMPAIGNS

Paying commission on bookings that could have been direct is one of the most persistent and avoidable costs in travel marketing. Paid media, when structured correctly, is one of the most effective ways to reclaim that revenue. We build campaigns that make direct booking easy for travellers, strengthening brand visibility in search, improving landing page conversion, and reducing the proportion of bookings that go through third-party platforms.

CROSS-CHANNEL CAMPAIGNS THAT WORK TOGETHER

Paid search, paid social, display, and retargeting each play a different role in the traveller journey. When those channels are managed in silos — with different strategies, inconsistent creative, and no shared view of conversion data — spend increases and efficiency drops. Our campaigns are planned and managed across channels from the outset, with a shared understanding of how each touchpoint contributes to a booking and where budget will have the greatest impact.

STRAIGHT-TALKING, PROACTIVE COMMUNICATION

We don’t report on metrics in isolation. Every update you receive explains what the numbers mean, what we’ve done about them, and what we’re planning next. If something isn’t working, we say so and bring a solution. If a new opportunity emerges (a competitor pulling back spend, a surge in demand for a relevant destination, a platform update that creates an advantage), we flag it early and act quickly.

PROVEN EXPERIENCE IN TRAVEL & TOURISM PAID MEDIA

We’ve been running paid media campaigns for travel and tourism brands for two decades. From transport operators managing seasonal route demand to destination-led businesses competing against OTAs with ten times their budget, we understand the commercial pressures that shape decisions in this industry. That experience is built into how we plan, structure, and optimise every campaign we run.

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REAL REVIEWS, FROM REAL CLIENTS

TRUSTED BY GLOBAL BRANDS THAT VALUE RESULTS

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

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Q. Will I have a dedicated account manager for my travel paid media campaigns?

A.

You’ll have a dedicated point of contact who takes the time to understand your business, your booking calendar, and your commercial targets. They act as your main liaison while coordinating the paid search and paid social specialists managing your campaigns day-to-day. You won’t be passed around between teams or left waiting for updates — if something happens that affects your performance, you’ll hear from us first.

Q. How do you handle seasonal budget changes and campaign planning?

A.

We build seasonal planning into the structure of the partnership, not just campaign execution. That means working with you ahead of key booking windows to make sure budgets are in the right place, creative is prepared, and landing pages are conversion-ready before demand peaks. We don’t wait for search volume to spike before reacting. We plan around your travel calendar so campaigns are live and optimised at the moments that matter most for your business.

Q. Can you run paid media campaigns internationally or across multiple markets?

A.

Yes, we have experience managing multi-region and multilingual campaigns across the UK, Europe, and further afield. International travel paid media adds complexity around audience targeting, currency, language, and platform behaviour — all of which we factor into campaign planning from the outset. Whether you’re attracting inbound visitors from specific feeder markets, or promoting tours and experiences across borders, we’ll make sure your campaigns are structured and targeted appropriately for each market.

Q. How often will I receive reports and performance updates?

A.

You’ll receive structured monthly reporting that covers performance, insight, and commercial impact. It will be written in plain language, not just a dashboard of numbers. Beyond that, we maintain regular contact throughout the month. If performance shifts materially, if a competitor makes a move that affects your share of search, or if we spot an opportunity worth acting on quickly, we’ll be in touch.

Q. Can you work alongside our in-house team or existing agency partners?

A.

Yes, and we do this regularly. Whether you have an internal marketing team managing brand or social activity, a PR agency generating coverage, or another digital partner responsible for a specific channel, we integrate into that structure and work collaboratively. Our focus is on strengthening your overall marketing performance rather than operating in isolation. Clear communication and shared goals are central to how we work.

Q. Why is paid media particularly competitive in the travel sector?

A.

Travel is one of the highest-spend verticals in digital advertising. OTAs such as Booking.com and Expedia invest enormous sums in paid search, which drives up CPCs for route, destination, and accommodation terms across the board. Add in the complexity of seasonal demand spikes — when competition intensifies precisely when you most need visibility — and you have an environment where campaign structure, bidding discipline, and creative quality all matter significantly more than in most other industries. Brands that treat travel PPC as a set-and-forget activity tend to find their budgets disappear quickly without a corresponding return.

Q. Which paid media channels work best for travel and tourism brands?

A.

It depends on the business model and the stage of the traveller journey you’re trying to reach. Paid search (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads) is most effective at capturing high-intent demand: travellers who are actively comparing routes, destinations, packages, or availability. Paid social (Meta, TikTok) works earlier in the funnel, reaching people during the consideration phase — particularly for experience-led or destination-driven brands where visual creative does a lot of the heavy lifting. For most travel brands, a blended approach delivers the strongest commercial return, with each channel supporting a different moment in the booking journey.

Q. How quickly can paid media deliver results for a travel brand?

A.

Faster than SEO, but the timeline still depends on the starting point. If you’re launching campaigns from scratch, early weeks are typically spent building structure, establishing conversion tracking, and gathering initial performance data. Meaningful optimisation follows from there. If we’re taking over existing campaigns, we can often identify and resolve inefficiencies quickly — so improvements can come sooner. Either way, real scalability comes from sustained testing and refinement rather than a single launch.

Q. Can paid media help us compete with OTAs on branded and destination terms?

A.

Yes, though it requires a clear strategy. OTAs can outspend most travel brands on broad destination keywords, so trying to match them pound-for-pound is rarely the right approach. We focus on the searches where your brand has a genuine advantage: your specific routes, experiences, properties, or packages; branded terms where you should always appear; and high-intent queries where a well-structured campaign with a strong landing page can outperform a generic OTA listing even at lower spend levels.

Q. What does good conversion tracking look like for a travel brand?

A.

It means being able to see clearly which campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and creatives are driving completed bookings — not just clicks or form submissions. For travel brands with booking engines, this typically involves tracking the final confirmation step as a conversion event, with additional micro-conversions (such as booking engine entries or date selections) to give a fuller picture of where in the journey drop-off occurs. Without accurate tracking, optimisation is guesswork.

Q. How does boxChilli approach paid media strategy for travel and tourism brands?

A.

We start by understanding your commercial model: how bookings are generated, where the current friction is, which audiences drive the most valuable demand, and what the competitive landscape looks like across your key search terms and platforms. From there, we audit existing activity (if applicable), analyse booking data and search demand, and build a campaign structure aligned to your actual revenue targets, rather than generic paid media benchmarks. Strategy is reviewed and refined continuously.

Q. How do you adapt campaigns as traveller behaviour and platform algorithms change?

A.

Paid media in travel is never static. Platform algorithms evolve (Google’s shift toward automation, Meta’s changing audience targeting options), traveller behaviour shifts with economic confidence and booking trends, and competitive dynamics change season to season. We monitor all of it — tracking performance signals, platform updates, and broader market shifts — and adapt campaigns accordingly. The goal is to stay ahead of changes rather than react to them after the fact.

Q. How do your values shape the way you work with travel clients?

A.

Everything we do is guided by integrity, creativity, and being client-focused. Integrity means transparent reporting: you’ll always know how your budget is being spent and whether campaigns are delivering against commercial targets, or not. Creativity shapes the way we approach campaign structure, audience thinking, and creative direction, particularly important in a sector where standing out against well-funded competitors requires more than just competent bid management. And being client-focused means your booking targets, seasonality, and commercial pressures stay at the centre of every decision we make.

Q. What makes boxChilli different from other paid media agencies working in travel?

A.

We don’t operate in channel silos: paid search, paid social, and strategy are planned and managed together, which means campaigns reinforce each other rather than pulling in different directions. We have genuine travel sector experience, which means we don’t need to spend the first three months learning how booking windows, feeder markets, and seasonal demand patterns work. And we’re honest about performance, including when something isn’t working and needs to change, rather than defaulting to vanity metrics that look impressive, but don’t connect to revenue.

Q. How do you measure success for travel and tourism paid media campaigns?

A.

Success is defined by your commercial objectives, not by platform metrics in isolation. For most travel brands, that means cost-per-booking, ROAS, direct booking volume, and contribution to overall revenue, tracked accurately from first click-through to confirmed booking or ticket sale. We set these targets collaboratively at the start of the engagement, report against them consistently, and use them to guide optimisation decisions throughout the campaign.

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