Google ROAS
12x+
Across our travel accounts we have driven north of 12x return on ad spend on search and PMax.
Prepared for SeaLink Marine & Tourism
Prepared for SeaLink Marine & Tourism
What we found inside SeaLink's acquisition engine.
You own the boat, the berth and the route. In a category where airlines and booking platforms outspend everyone, that is a rare position: you are the experience, not a reseller of someone else's.
We looked at where the money moves in Australian travel & tourism, and where an operator with physical assets like yours quietly wins on cost per booking.
Wikimedia Commons$126Mspent by OTAs and
booking platforms last year
booking platforms last year
The thing that caught our eye
The platforms taking a cut of your seats are outspending you to do it.
Across the category, OTA and booking platforms poured roughly $126M into media (Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025). Every one of those dollars is spent to intercept a traveller before they reach the operator. When someone books a Kangaroo Island crossing or a harbour cruise through a third party, you deliver the experience and hand over margin on the sale.
You have the one thing they do not: the vessel, the schedule and the moment of the journey itself. That is a direct-booking advantage most tour operators would pay dearly for.
We've solved thisWe shift bookings off third-party rails and onto owned channels where the margin stays yours.
Where the spend sits
Who you're actually bidding against.
SeaLink lives between two big-spending category segments: tour operators and cruise lines. Here is the shape of the auction you enter every time a high-intent traveller starts searching.
The named players spend at national scale; your edge is category and route specificity, not volume. · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Want to see which of these players is actually bidding on your route and destination terms right now?
Let's talkWhere the category still spends
The channel mix is older than the audience.
Travel & tourism still tips more into newspapers than into digital and social. For an operator selling a visual, experiential product to travellers who research and book on a phone, that gap is an opening.
Newspapers and TV still absorb the majority; the intent-driven channels are underweighted. · Source: Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Travel & tourism, by the numbers
The category at a glance.
$677M
Total category media spend, trailing year
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
$90M
Spent by cruise lines alone
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
Jan
Peak spending month; December is the trough
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
$193M
Digital & social spend, second only to newspapers
Nielsen Ad Intel, as at Dec 2025
One honest comparison
What performance looks like when the funnel is tuned.
These are our delivered results across travel & tourism accounts, kept deliberately loose. Directional, not a promise, but real numbers a competitor cannot find on Google.
Cost per booking
Under $20
Purchase costs sitting under $20 on our best-run accounts, single figures at the sharp end.
Meta CPM
Single digit
Single-digit CPMs on Facebook and Instagram, keeping the reach cheap on a visual product.
Sunny first-party benchmark, as at Jun 2026. Anonymised, directional, not spend-weighted.
What you only learn from the inside
Things we know that aren't on any dashboard.
The 6am booking window
Ferry and day-cruise intent spikes the night before and the morning of travel. Weighting budget to those windows lifts conversion in a way a flat daily cap never will.
Weather is a bidding signal
A sunny forecast on the coast is a demand event. Feeding forecast data into bid strategy pulls forward last-minute leisure bookings competitors leave on the table.
Commuter and tourist are two engines
Your scheduled services and your experiences need separate campaigns. Blending them buries a high-frequency commuter audience under a high-margin leisure one, and dilutes both.
OTA parity quietly costs you
When a booking platform can undercut or match your own price on your own route, you are paying to send customers to a channel that clips your margin. Owned-rate advantages need protecting in the auction.
Destination beats brand early
Travellers search "Kangaroo Island" long before they search "SeaLink". Owning the destination term, not just the brand term, is where the cheap, high-intent volume hides.
January is bought in October
The category peaks in January, so the auction heats up months earlier. The accounts that lock in remarketing pools by spring win the summer at a lower cost.
Three things we'd look at first
Where we'd start, specifically.
01
Reclaim the direct booking
Map where third-party platforms intercept your highest-margin routes, then build owned-channel campaigns that win the click before the OTA does. The margin difference on a recovered booking dwarfs the media cost.
Track recordAcross our travel accounts we have driven purchase costs under $20 on owned bookings.
02
Own the destination, not just the brand
Build the search and social footprint around the islands, harbours and experiences people research first. That is the cheap high-intent traffic the airlines and OTAs are not fighting you for.
Track recordNorth of 12x ROAS on tuned search and PMax across travel & tourism accounts.
03
Shift weight into the underbought channels
The category still over-indexes on newspapers. Your product is visual and mobile-booked. Moving spend into intent-driven digital and social at single-digit CPMs buys reach the category is leaving on the table.
Track recordSingle-digit Meta CPMs holding reach cheap on visual travel creative.
This is a snapshot, not the plan
A real plan is built on better data than a quick scan.
Everything above is what we can read from the outside. The real leverage shows up when we plug into your booking data, route economics and margin by channel.
Nielsen Ad IntelCategory & competitor ad-spend tracking
Roy MorganAudience & consumer profiling
Google Premier PartnerTop tier of Google agencies
Meta Business PartnerVerified platform access
This briefing is what we can see from the outside. Imagine what we'd build with the data on the inside.
Proof, not promises
Check out our success stories.
We've done this for travel & tourism brands right across Australia. See the campaigns, and the results, for yourself.
Check out our success storiesWhat this is actually worth
Here's the size of the prize.
$1M+
Margin sitting in bookings you currently share with third-party platforms
The lever is your OTA and reseller mix. Every booking recovered onto an owned channel keeps the commission you currently hand over. Assume even a modest share of your third-party bookings shifts direct at the cost efficiencies we see across travel accounts, and the recovered margin lands north of seven figures a year. It is the first number we would chase, because it needs no new customers, only a change in where the existing ones book.
We'll tighten this against your actuals and your true commission rates. The figure moves; the opportunity does not.
One briefing slot this month
The next step
Let's pressure-test the direct-booking number.
Give us thirty minutes and your channel mix, and we will show you exactly where the recoverable margin sits.
Just hit replyor just reply to the email this came in, I read every one.
This isn't a pitch in disguise. If the numbers do not stack up for SeaLink, we will tell you that plainly and leave you with the analysis anyway.
- ✓
Your real auction
Which competitors and platforms are bidding on your routes and destinations.
- ✓
The direct-booking model
What shifting a share of third-party bookings onto owned channels is worth to your margin.
- ✓
The first 90 days
Where we would start, what we would test, and what good looks like by summer peak.