Adventure Travel Ecommerce Trends & Strategies for 2024
The adventure travel and tourism market size is expected to develop exponentially in terms of both revenue and compound market growth rate (CAGR) during the forecast period from 2024-2031, according to the Adventure Tourism Market 2024 Report published by Market Research Pulse in July 2024.
With top adventure travel providers world-wide recognised by the research as including Travelopia, REI Adventures, Abercrombie & Kent Group, G Adventures, Intrepid Travel, Butterfield & Robinson, Austin Adventures, Natural Habitat Adventures and Mountain Travel Sobek, our ecommerce strategy analysis found these top adventure travel companies either use a “one website to rule them all ecommerce strategy” like Natural Habitat Adventures.
Alternatively, many top adventure tour operator brands opt for a “multi-site ecommerce strategy” with a collection of niche brand websites each specialising in activities, destinations or audiences like Travelopia’s Exodus Travels, Sawadee and Headwater.
Since specialising in growing travel ecommerce revenues for brands including BUNAC, Scott Dunn, Wayfairer, Finest Stays, Travel Nation and Unique Holiday Stays since 2011, the ThoughtShift team have seen travel ecommerce booking values steadily growing with bookings within the tens of thousands now being regularly purchased via ecommerce and the proportion of online bookings versus offline bookings growing from ~5-50% in the 2010s on average to the majority share in 2020s as travel ecommerce platforms are invested in and ultimately become more sophisticated to replicate the self-service ecommerce experience customers expect.
Adventure Travel Market Trends for 2024
Asian, Mediterranean and South American adventure destinations are key drivers of growth
Based on analysis of the largest year on year bookings uplift between 1st Jan 2024 – 31st March 2024 from over 150 markets across the key experience categories of adventure and nature, culture and history, immersive and unique, GetYourGuide’s proprietary travel experience data published in April 2024, found the hottest trending global experience destinations in 2024 to be:
- Hoi An, Vietnam - up by 284%
- Kyoto, Japan - up by 254%
- Istanbul, Turkey - up by 208%
- Surat Thani Province, Thailand - up by 200%
- Siem Reap, Cambodia - up by 175%
- Rotorua, North Island, New Zealand - up by 173%
- Marrakech, Morocco - up by 170%
- Tokyo, Japan - up by 170%
- Agadir, Morocco - up by 167%
- Buenos Aires, Argentina - up by 152%
Walking, cycling, nature and cultural adventure experiences prove popular
Top trending adventure travel activities remain hiking/trekking/walking, cultural, culinary/gastronomy, mountain biking and safaris/wildlife viewing, according to ATTA’s Adventure Travel Industry Snapshot published in June 2023.
Health and wellness tourism continues meteoric rise
With wellness tourism now worth $651 Billion globally, according to the Global Wellness Institute’s Wellness Tourism Research published in April 2024, a major opportunity for adventure brands is family wellness experiences including wellness for both kids and adults, as well as experiences for specific sports recovery and managing burnout.
Sustainable travel on path to be business as usual
68% of adventure travel brands now have or are working toward a sustainability certification, according to the Adventure Travel Trade Association so developing environmental and social impact credentials are key for travel brands.
Adventure Travel Ecommerce Marketing Strategies
The traditional travel marketing mix for adventure companies has traditionally included SEO, PPC, email, social media, PR, press advertising, direct mail and TV. Adventure travel ecommerce marketing strategies that we recommend as the top priorities this year based on what has been proven to consistently deliver the highest return on investment for travel brands includes:
Ecommerce analytics
Since the forced migration from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) in 2023 and the removal of pre-GA4 historic analytics data in July 2024, adventure travel brands may not have accurate ecommerce analytics. Ideally, GA4 needs to be set up to report on ecommerce bookings and revenue so that marketing teams can analyse the data-driven customer journey of which marketing channels customers interacted with to deliver the bookings.
When ecommerce may not be 100% of the booking revenue, GA4 can be integrated with offline technologies such as CRM systems like Zoho and call analytics tracking software like Infinity Call Tracking to pull through offline sales value data back into GA4 so senior management teams can see the total return on investment value from the total marketing budget invested in.
Critically, without all online and offline sales revenue reported back in to Google Analytics, brands are unable to tie their largest and most profitable sales orders back to the exact channel, campaign, landing page and search query that contributed to that result, therefore making it impossible to pinpoint and expand further the reach of exactly what ecommerce marketing strategy is working hardest to deliver ROI.
Ecommerce website
With more than two thirds (68%) of adventure travel brands surveyed by the Adventure Travel Trade Association already having an online reservation system that takes credit cards in 2023, a travel ecommerce website is key for travel brands in 2024.
If the travel ecommerce website is built in the web’s most popular content management system, WordPress, a number of specialist plugins may be relied upon to deliver functionality such as ecommerce payment options, customer account login, partner account login and booking administration system, not to mention integrations with social media, review platforms, Google reviews, email marketing software, CRM software, analytics software, call analytics software and live chat which can quickly add up to dramatically reduce the speed and load times of a website.
Overall a slow and frustrating user experience, ultimately leads to ecommerce checkout drop off – not only losing ecommerce travel bookings but potentially harming your brand as customers will actively choose to find a similar experience through a competitor travel provider when your website, team and marketing budget did all the hard work of convincing the customer to book that specific adventure travel experience.
Making sure your digital analytics is set up to measure every step in the ecommerce checkout and automatically integrates with your customer database is key so you can identify any ecommerce issues quickly, measure continuous improvements constantly and effectively measure total customer lifetime value.
Email marketing
An adventure travel brand’s first party opt-in email data is more essential than ever. The value of every customer who has opted in to hear about your latest adventure destinations, activities and tours is one of your brand’s most valuable assets.
Email marketing can often be overlooked due to poor analytics measurement where the true returns of email campaigns are not accurately attributed to the email channel due to Google Analytics set up, email software tracking set up (such as through Omnisend or Mailchimp), email tracking campaign set up and of course cookie policies where around 50% of users that may be declining cookies mean that even though the customer has opted in to receive email they may have opted out of website analytics tracking.
SEO
Adventure travel SEO presents a wealth of exciting opportunities for advanced content optimisation strategies for destination pages, activity type pages, itinerary experience pages and blog pages.
Although expert travel writers may inadvertently be creating SEO cannibalisation issues such as creating multiple pages optimised for the same destination keyword so that multiple pages then rank in the organic search results - ultimately diluting the travel brand’s authority and lowering visibility, website traffic, email signups, bookings and new customer acquisition.
Using the Google search parameter “site:www.yourwebsitedomainhere.com + destination” can quickly reveal if your website has multiple pages for the same destination indexed in the Google search results. You can also check your landing page traffic within Google Search Console’s Landing Pages Report.
Often an adventure travel blog about a destination may outrank or prove to get more traffic than a destination category landing page. Adding an internal link from the destination blog page to the destination category page can deliver an immediate impact of increasing the page authority of the category and driving click through traffic to the destination category page designed to convert browsers to buyers – ultimately growing visibility, keyword rankings, traffic, bookings and new customer acquisition. Systematically analysing every destination and repeating the optimisation process for potentially 100s of pages will typically over time, deliver continuous and sustainable growth in SEO booking revenue.
PPC
With the extreme competition and tireless ongoing work facing teams growing the organic channel, Google Ads is a much quicker way to drive brand awareness, website traffic and ecommerce bookings.
However, due to the Digital Markets Act rolling out in 2024, Google has made considerable changes to the Google Ads platform with ConsentModeV2 now essential to run remarketing campaigns and the Performance Max ads format relying on accurate conversion analytics tracking set up to use Google’s AI to optimise your bookings for you.
Whilst Google Ads has got smarter, measuring adventure travel PPC performance is much harder than ever before. Plus if your site is running a GDPR-compliant cookie banner that excludes users who have opted out of consent to analytics cookies in your reporting, then you may likely only be attributing half the real value of PPC to this channel in 2024.
So if travel PPC returns seem to have reduced this year, in reality it may be your analytics is now reporting less than before. Either way, you need to fill in as much of the lost data as possible using data-driven PPC strategies such as Google Enhanced Conversions.
Social media
Depending on the demographics of the target audience, social media advertising platforms that are proving to be a great source of brand awareness and bookings for travel brands include Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, YouTube Ads, Pinterest Ads and TikTok Ads.
With breathtaking videos of exciting and exhilarating adventure travel experiences capturing the imagination of audiences, whether your targeting Gen Z, Xennials (Gen Y Millenials and Gen Xers) or Boomers, who wouldn’t want to be interrupted with a captivating suggestion of escape?
By ensuring your branding is prominent and you’re able to clearly articulate your adventure expertise specialism, whether you win that particular click or not, the brand visibility gained at the social media stage will reap dividends in search when travellers go to research, browse and book their next adventure.
The Future of Adventure Travel Marketing for Ecommerce
As our team have seen generative AI being tested in the US, UK and European Google markets, it's only a matter of time until AI adventure travel search results are introduced globally.
We can expect this will continue to have an impact on search results, where we're already seeing a shift to zero click organic search visibility where you're ranking on page 1 (the top 10 results out of millions of competing web pages) but now getting a decline in SEO traffic whilst maintaining the same positions as previous years!
With the content being scraped from the best sites and then credited, continuing to invest in content and protecting branded search across all search engines and platforms including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok through distributing your organic content as social content and leveraging user generated content (UGC) such as reviews and adventure travel photos is more essential than ever.
We are now in the “age of content and consent” and your content, ads and digital experience needs to be the best at every touch point in the customer journey to attract, win and retain customers.
The good news is it still costs a fraction to retain an existing customer and invite them to rebook through email marketing and remarketing cross search/social/video/display media channels so if you need to grow your ecommerce revenue, start with the bottom of the funnel where customers are ready to buy now, working backwards to include customers using SEO/PPC at the consideration stage and then launching your top of funnel brand awareness campaigns using the huge choice of digital media including Instagram Ads, Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, Pinterest Ads and now available in the US and UK with a substantial waitlist… Netflix Ads – the perfect opportunity to share your adventure travel experience next to your favourite travel, sports and culinary TV shows.
If you'd like to explore supercharging your adventure travel ecommerce strategy then drop us a message.