Flipping the Playbook - Travel Marketing in the AI Era
Host: Reza Myambin | Guest: Matthew Gardner — Fractional Marketing Leader & Growth Partner to Travel Brands Produced by Salt Agency
About Matthew Gardner
Matthew's career spans luxury tour operations, hotel and leisure brands, travel recruitment, and six years inside International Airlines Group (owner of British Airways and Iberia), where he led global marketing and communications for the cargo division — including through COVID, during which the business achieved record cargo revenues despite near-total passenger aviation collapse.
He now works in an advisory capacity with travel brands, tourist boards, and travel technology companies on growth, brand positioning, and go-to-market strategy. He also runs Travel Massive London (part of a global community of 80,000+), serves on the Education and Training Committee of the Institute of Travel and Tourism, and has spent two years as content advisor to World Travel Market, hosting the WTM Marketing Summit in 2024 and 2025.
The Recurring Conversation in Travel Marketing Right Now
Through Travel Massive and the WTM Marketing Summit, Matthew observes that marketers are most hungry for peer-to-peer learning — not reports or conference keynotes, but other marketers saying "we tried this, here's how it played out."
The reason: the industry is navigating simultaneous disruption from AI-driven discovery shifts, geopolitical uncertainty, and rapidly evolving consumer behavior. Communities have become powerful precisely because the most useful insights often come from people living the same challenges in real time.
Leading Teams Through Constant Change
Matthew's framework: clarity of purpose + psychological safety for experimentation
During COVID, the marketing playbook changed daily. What kept teams functional wasn't false certainty — it was being honest about what wasn't known while staying clear on the mission.
"Great teams don't need perfect certainty. They need a leader who says: this is where we're going, this is where we are, and this is how we're going to keep moving forward and learning together."
On psychological safety and AI specifically:
The risk when technology shifts quickly is teams feeling their skills are becoming obsolete. The reframe that matters:
- AI is not replacing marketers
- The fundamentals — understanding human motivation, telling compelling stories, building trusted brands — still matter enormously
- What's changing is the toolkit
The practical approach: create a culture of experimentation. Encourage people to play with tools, run small tests, share what they learn, and celebrate curiosity. Organizations that adapt fastest won't have the best technology — they'll have the most curious teams.
How Travel Discovery Has Changed
The shift: discovery is becoming conversational
Historically, travel planning followed a linear path — inspiration, research, comparison, book. AI is compressing and reordering that journey dramatically.
The biggest friction point is confidence, not inspiration
There is no shortage of inspiration — social media, creators, film and TV all generate abundant travel dreaming. The problem is what happens next. When a traveler moves from dreaming to booking, they face an overwhelming number of options: which airline, hotel, platform, itinerary.
"The role of travel marketing today isn't just about inspiration — it's about reducing the uncertainty of that choice. A booking happens at the moment inspiration turns into confidence."
AI and Travel Discovery — What It Means Practically
AI was the dominant topic at the WTM Marketing Summit — best-attended sessions without exception.
The fundamental shift: AI isn't just changing search — it's rewriting rules around trust, booking, and brand visibility. The traditional funnel is collapsing into a conversation with AI, and whoever owns that conversation owns the traveler.
The new competitive battle: For years, the fight was OTAs vs. direct booking. Increasingly, the question is: can you even get surfaced in AI?
How search queries are changing: Travelers aren't asking "flights to Rome." They're asking: "What's the best place for a four-day trip with kids in October that's warm and not too crowded?" Brands and destinations need to be answering at that level of specificity.
What Travel Brands Need to Do to Win in AI-Led Journeys
Three requirements:
1. Clarity AI systems answer specific questions. Brands need to know exactly what they stand for and who they serve. Vague positioning means you're unlikely to be the best answer to any specific query.
2. Credibility AI models draw on signals from across the web — reviews, media coverage, editorial content. The more trusted your references and the stronger your brand reputation, the more likely you are to be recommended. This is a concrete argument for increased investment in PR, particularly given the relevance and recency of sources being weighted by AI systems.
3. Structured content Product data and content must be organized in a way that machines can easily understand and synthesize.
Will AI Create Winner-Takes-All or Open Doors for Specialists?
Matthew's view: probably both, but the dynamic is more nuanced than it appears.
AI does tend to recommend trusted, well-reviewed, well-referenced brands — which naturally advantages established players. But AI surfaces niche specialists more effectively than traditional search ever did. When someone asks for "best eco-lodges in Costa Rica" or "cycling holidays in Oman," AI isn't defaulting to the biggest brand — it's looking for the most relevant one.
The implication: AI rewards clarity of positioning rather than sheer scale.
- Brands that are too generic are unlikely to be the best answer to any specific question
- Brands that are distinctive, specialized, and trusted may actually be amplified by AI
Reza's observation aligned with this: hyper-specialist operators who know a destination intimately — the corner shop, the best restaurant, the insider detail — can resurface and compete precisely because of that depth.
The likely outcome: Not winner-takes-all, but winner-takes-a-category.
Trust Cues That Drive Conversion
Travel is both one of the most emotional and one of the most expensive purchases people make. Trust isn't built through a single signal — it's built through a stack of signals working together:
- Professional photography
- Creator content
- Brand reputation
- Payment security
- Flexible booking policies
- User-generated content and reviews
Key insight on contextual trust (via Stay22): When travelers encounter bookable accommodation options embedded directly within the content that inspired the trip — a blog post, an itinerary, a creator video — conversion rates increase dramatically. The recommendation is part of the story rather than interrupting it.
How to Improve Conversion Without Touching Price
The first place to look: decision friction.
Travel bookings are complex. Multiple tabs, comparison sites, unclear policies, and hidden fees that only appear at checkout each introduce uncertainty that reduces conversion probability.
Practical actions:
- Make the value proposition clear
- Make the product easy to compare
- Make policies transparent — don't bury them
- Reduce the number of steps between inspiration and action
"The best brands are usually the ones that make the decision feel easiest."
On user-generated content and reviews: particularly powerful when a traveler has already chosen a destination and is deciding where to stay or what to do. Authentic content helps travelers imagine themselves actually taking the trip.
Where it backfires: When brands over-engineer it. The most persuasive travel marketing is what travelers say to each other — not what brands say about themselves.
Brand vs. Performance — Where Teams Get It Wrong
The most common mistake: treating brand and performance as competing strategies rather than two parts of the same growth engine.
What typically happens: Short-term booking pressures push teams toward performance channels — search, retargeting, affiliates. These work well until they don't, because you can only harvest existing demand for so long.
What the research shows: Decades of IPA research indicate marketing effectiveness is maximized at approximately a 60% brand / 40% short-term activation split. Many travel brands are operating at 5–10% brand investment.
The Sandals example: At the WTM CIM Travel Industry Group panel, Sandals was noted as one of the only travel brands operating near the 60/40 split. Their marketing director, Jenny Farrow, framed brand not as an isolated cost but as an ecosystem multiplier — when brand health improves, performance channels become measurably more efficient. Data from the panel suggested performance marketing can return 2.5x more effectively when brand investment is at the right level.
Metrics That Prove Brand Is Driving Commercial Outcomes
The CFO question. Indicators that brand investment is working:
- Share of search — growing branded search volume
- Direct traffic — increasing visits from people looking specifically for your brand
- Brand search volumes — an early signal of growing awareness
- Conversion efficiency improvements across performance channels
Matthew's example from IAG Cargo: rather than standard metrics alone, the team tracked customer perception of their global network's scale and reach — a core part of the logistics value proposition. As brand investment increased, that perception shifted measurably, which translated directly into stronger commercial conversations with customers.
"The clearest sign a brand is working is when the things that make your business special start showing up more strongly in the minds of your customers."
What the Best Travel Marketing Teams Will Do Differently in the Next 12–18 Months
Three differentiators:
1. Understand how to show up in AI discovery Not just traditional search. Ensuring brand, product data, and content are visible inside AI engines.
2. Invest more seriously in owned audiences and communities Email marketing, loyalty programs, creator ecosystems, and customer communities reduce dependency on paid platforms and algorithmic changes.
3. Build cultures of experimentation No one has a perfect playbook right now. The teams that win will run small tests, learn quickly, and share learnings across the organization.
"In the next phase of travel marketing, the competitive advantage isn't budget. It isn't technology. It's going to be adaptability."