120+
Travel brands tracked
+250M
Aggregate spend
2025
Full-year data
Propellic Travel Marketing Index
Travel Industry Paid Media
Benchmark Report
The most comprehensive paid media dataset ever built for travel, benchmarked across 120+ brands and tens of millions in ad spend.
This report aggregates anonymized performance data from over 120 global travel brands across Propellic's data warehouse, calibrated specifically for the travel purchase journey. The findings below are a representative sample.
Register for the free live briefing below to get the report on launch day.
ABOUT THIS REPORT
Capturing demand. Even with a higher cost of capture.
If you run paid media for a travel brand, you've probably asked some version of the same question: am I actually buying growth, or am I paying for bookings that would have happened anyway? Platform costs have risen, traveler behavior grows more complex, and the gap between average and top-performing brands has widened in ways that don't look the same across sectors. This report analyzes $250M+ in paid media spend across 120+ travel brands to define what "good" and "great" look like across every major channel, sector, and tactic.
The findings below are a representative sample. They point to clear, actionable patterns in seasonality, funnel structure, and sector-level performance that separate the top quartile from the rest. The full report and every data point will be walked through live on May 21st and available for download after.
The findings below are a representative sample. They point to clear, actionable patterns in seasonality, funnel structure, and sector-level performance that separate the top quartile from the rest. The full report and every data point will be walked through live on May 21st and available for download after.
What separates the top quartile depends on your sector.
Top-quartile paid media performance isn't a universal story. The gap between average and the top 25% is 68% in OTAs, 31% in Day Tours, and 4% in Multi-Day, three sectors with three different opportunity profiles.
Macro efficiency
For multi-day operators, peak booking season is the worst time to spend.
Multi-day tour operators see paid ROAS more than double in shoulder season vs. peak booking demand, 6.3x vs. 2.6x, at nearly identical AOV.
The asymmetry tracks with booking arc length: the longer the consideration window, the more peak-season auction premiums decouple from actual booking outcomes.
The asymmetry tracks with booking arc length: the longer the consideration window, the more peak-season auction premiums decouple from actual booking outcomes.
Seasonality
Where the non-brand spend really goes.
Across travel sectors, 83-90% of paid media spend goes to non-brand search, but conversions don't track. Part of the gap is attribution reality; part of it is measurement infrastructure most operators haven't built yet. The brands pulling ahead aren't spending differently, they're measuring it.
Funnel structure
This is just the surface.
The most comprehensive paid media dataset ever built for travel. We're talking anonymized performance data from 120+ global travel brands, across tens of millions in ad spend, calibrated specifically for the travel purchase journey. It's based on full-year 2025 figures, a clean, stable baseline that makes your own numbers actually mean something.