24 Apr, 2025
Written by
CJ
With events continuing to influence travel decisions and uncertainty often curtailing plans, how’s travel holding up? To answer this (and a raft of related questions), we assembled a panel comprising Alexandra Djivanovic from Assembly Global, Annie Bristow from TrainPal, Colin Carter from Weather2Travel.com and George Greaves from Airtime. Expertly moderated by our own Obi Ezekwo at the CJ Travel Afternoon, we got their perspective on how things are faring.
Watch the full video
So, what did we discover?
While traffic has picked up to pre-pandemic levels, conversion rates are lower. Average order values are up, but this is more a result of rising prices than people trading up. And cost is impacting those demographics with less disposable income who are choosing not to travel.
However, price pressures are leading to changes. Increasingly, for train travel, we’re seeing split ticketing – where travel to a destination is split into two journeys with two tickets – proving popular by offering considerable price savings for travellers.
To avoid purely focusing on price, which leads to a race to the bottom, brands are adjusting their offers and messaging. They’re highlighting the added experiences people can get by booking with them directly to shift the narrative to value and avoid just competing on price.
There’s also a desire to experience through travel, which is shifting spend. Younger and luxury travellers are prioritising experiences above the need to buy items. In Q1, some brands saw experience-based travel grow by 27%, fuelling an interest in more diverse locations.
“We’re making sure our clients are talking about the added experiences travellers get from booking with that brand. Rather than being in a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, we're ensuring they’re giving the customer something extra that makes it worth the price.”
Alexandra Djivanovic, Affiliate Account Director, Assembly Global.
In an increasingly competitive environment, transactional data is proving decisive. Tapping into this rich data, including where people spend their money, where they book, which companies they book with, and how many holidays they take, is helping advertisers engage in-market travellers by elevating their targeting through behavioural information.
People are also going beyond just using their phones to research their travel. Now they are comfortable buying on them.
Coupled with this, 50% of the population has a mobile travel app, which is becoming key to engaging customers. And with 66% of people being brand loyal to a downloaded travel app on their mobile, using affiliate marketing to drive app traffic is increasingly important. Doing so provides opportunities to turn them into loyal customers and grow their critical first-party data.
However, mobile is not the only factor important in travel decision-making. When it comes to social media, video and TikTok engage people and help them make booking decisions, so brands must test their value in building sales.
Meanwhile, technology should be used to improve travellers’ lives. Sometimes, it’s the little things that make the difference. One example is allowing travellers to save their e-tickets in their mobile wallets when they buy them. Doing so helps save them time (and frustration) later when they can’t remember where they’ve put them.
“AI is helping elevate the application of rich data to deliver incredible targeting at scale by using machine learning to understand consumer behaviours. And this enables brands to reach them at just the right time and get ahead of their competitors or even steal them from them.”
George Greaves, Head of Sales, Airtime.
Measurement is critical to proving campaign success, but it remains an issue in affiliate marketing. With brands running internal analytics alongside their affiliate network and CLO partners, different data sources reporting on different areas make getting an accurate picture difficult. And this is further muddied by a lack of visibility on social platforms, making it harder to track campaign impact in the traditional affiliate way. That’s why it’s essential to be clear up front with clients about their objectives and what they consider their source of truth.
One interesting area is to focus on the share of wallet. By choosing a partner who has a full view of spend, they can help benchmark your performance against the industry.
This can also be used to focus on a competitor. Then you can see how targeted rewards shift spend to you on top of any AOV or frequency of spend increases.
Ultimately, measurement should never stand still, so always look to understand incremental lift.
“When it comes to pure engaging of incrementality, using a control group to see those incentivised versus those not incentivised and see the lift allows you to measure the direct impact of the campaign, so when your CFO comes banging down your door, you can say, here, look, we did that.”
George Greaves, Sales Director, Airtime
Traditionally, affiliates were pigeonholed as a ROAS driving channel. But that’s changing. Now there’s a recognition it can do so much more. Working with a broader range of partners allows different outcomes to be delivered across the funnel so you can influence each stage of the buying journey.
There’s also no substitute for regular communication to grow relationships and your business. And the best partnerships happen when there is dialogue and knowledge sharing in both directions, whether consumer trends or insights into new offers.
“We've got a very hands-on approach and are onboarding new partners consistently as we grow. To sustain these relationships, we go out to meet them frequently, have frequent calls and continually have new offers to fortify them.”
Annie Bristow, Senior Partner Marketing and Affiliate Manager, TrainPal
And if you’re looking for some quick ideas to succeed in today’s market, these were the top pieces of advice from our panellists:
Learn more about what the panel had to say by watching this video.
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