Over several months we looked at 538 tourism businesses across 44 countries. We checked how well each one could actually measure its own marketing. The short version: almost none could.

This is not a story about who runs the prettiest website or the biggest ad budget. It is about something far more basic, and far more expensive to get wrong. Most tourism operators cannot tell you where their bookings come from. And if you cannot measure it, you cannot grow it, and you cannot protect it.

Why we ran the research

Last year Google forced every business off the old Analytics onto GA4. For a lot of operators that was a quiet data Armageddon. Some left it to automation, some had a web developer handle it who did not really understand analytics, and plenty simply lost the insights they used to have without noticing.

We do in-depth digital audits all the time, from a quick call through to thirty or forty hours inside a bigger business, and we kept seeing the same patterns over and over. We wanted to know whether what we see every day is true across the wider industry. So we checked.

The sample was 538 tourism businesses across 44 countries, and well over 250 hours of work as a team. It took us from vineyard tours in Italy to motels in Sydney, off-road adventures in Costa Rica, shark tours in Scotland and luxury lodges in New Zealand. Multimillion dollar operations down to one-person businesses. There is almost certainly a business like yours in there.

We only looked at what is publicly visible: the tracking code on the site, the analytics and pixel setup, the page speed, the basic SEO. We did not need access to anyone's accounts. When you have audited hundreds of businesses, what is on the surface is a very reliable indicator of what sits behind it. If a site is not sending the right data, it is almost never doing the rest of its marketing well either.

Finding 1: most sites make it hard to get in touch, and impossible to measure

Fewer than four in ten businesses, about 37%, had a phone number and email that were both clickable, and of those, only about a quarter were tracking the clicks. Put those together and just 8.7% of the tourism businesses we looked at could actually see their phone and email leads, while about 89% were tracking no key action at all.

Clickable matters for the human on the other end. You have all been on a site where you tap the phone number and nothing happens, so you copy and paste it, a small friction at the exact moment someone is ready to book. We spoke to a boutique accommodation charging several hundred dollars a night who swore the number on their site was correct. It was the right number, but with a zero in the wrong place for the international format, so an overseas guest tapping to call hit a dead line. High-value customers do not stop to work out your dialling code. They move on.

Then there is the marketing cost. If a contact is not clickable, it cannot be tracked. We took over the ads for a luxury resort who told us roughly half their bookings came in by phone, at an average well over $1,200 each, and not one of those calls was showing up in their Google Ads results. Turning that tracking on made us look like heroes overnight, but really it was just measuring what was already happening.

Finding 2: the industry is flying blind on analytics

  • Over a third of sites (36.6%) had no GA4 at all. No current analytics, on a business that almost certainly runs no other measurement platform.
  • Of the sites that did have GA4, around 83% were not tracking basic events like phone clicks, email clicks or contact form submissions.
  • Put those together and only about 11% of all 538 sites were tracking any key action at all. Nine in ten were measuring nothing that matters.
  • Only around one in ten sites had cross-domain tracking, so for most, the journey from the website into the booking system was broken.

This is what it costs you. If you are not tracking the actions that lead to a booking, you cannot report on what your marketing produced. You cannot justify a budget. You end up stopping campaigns too early because they look like they failed, when really they were working and you just could not see it. We hear "we tried Google Ads and it did not work" constantly. Most of the time the ads were fine. The tracking was not.

And it is not only about paid. The moment your data is set up properly it works for every channel at once, organic, referral, social and email. You get the full story, not a fragment of it.

Finding 3: Facebook is mostly noise

The boost button did a lot of damage. It made people feel like they were doing digital marketing when they were mostly just handing money to the platform.

  • Roughly two thirds of businesses (65.1%) had no Meta pixel at all. If you run any Facebook or Instagram ads without a pixel, you cannot measure a single result beyond vanity metrics like reach and likes.
  • Of the sites that did have a pixel, 92.6% were not tracking basic conversions. Only around 2.6% of all sites could actually measure a lead or a sale from Meta.

Without that data the algorithm is guessing. It is a bit like sending an ad to a hundred people where Jane buys and Jimmy does nothing, and never telling Facebook that Jane was the buyer. It cannot go and find more people like Jane. You cannot build remarketing audiences of the people who nearly booked. You are spraying and praying, and paying for the privilege.

Finding 4: your booking engine is not built for your marketing

In tourism the holy grail is direct bookings, the ones that save you the OTA commission and keep the customer as yours. Yet most operators cannot see where their direct bookings actually come from.

Here is the distinction that trips people up, and it is the one to be clear on. Your booking engine will always tell you your booking revenue, whether each booking was direct or came from an OTA, and which OTA it was. That is genuinely useful, and it is why a lot of operators think their numbers are already covered. But it will rarely tell you whether a direct booking came from Google Ads, from Meta, from a specific email, from organic search or from a referral. That is not what it is built for, and the booking usually happens on a different domain, so unless it has been deliberately configured the hand-off starts a fresh session and the original source is lost. The booking itself is usually still recorded, so the money is not the problem. What disappears is knowing which ad, email or search produced it, alongside the calls and enquiries that build the rest of the picture. We have seen accounts where half a million dollars of value is dumped into "direct" with almost nothing credited to referral, organic or email. The data has not gone missing, it is quietly lying to you, and decisions made on it are wrong.

The only thing that can attribute a direct booking back to the channel that earned it is your own digital foundations: analytics, event tracking and native platform conversion tracking, all configured properly. Without them the ad platforms are blind. They cannot measure what they produced, so they cannot optimise. And this is where it flips from opportunity to damage. Done right, each channel is scaffolding, every layer building on the one below it and compounding. Done without the foundations underneath, the same effort starts to work against you. Campaigns look like they failed, budgets get cut, and you reach the conclusion we hear constantly, that "Google Ads doesn't work". Almost always it was not the channel. It was how it was set up.

Booking engines are not villains here. Their job is beds, seats and bums on seats, and they are good at it. Marketing tracking is simply not their priority, and it rarely improves unless customers push for it. We once spent months chasing missing purchase data with a major booking system, both sides convinced the other was at fault. A single call with their developers fixed it within hours. In the meantime a client had months of untracked revenue, bookings they still received but could no longer attribute.

Some systems are genuinely good at this. ibis NZ, for example, supports marketing tracking well, though it is a more technical implementation and worth having a partner set up. Others will send purchase data to Facebook but not the equivalent to Google, or support one platform and not the other for no obvious reason. The practical move is to ask your provider directly: do you support Google Analytics event tracking, Google Ads native conversion tracking, enhanced e-commerce, cross-domain tracking, and tracking through an embedded iframe. By the third question you will know exactly how much they can help you.

Finding 5: speed is quietly costing you

We added page speed late, almost as an afterthought, and it turned out to matter as much as the rest. Google wants your site to load in under three seconds. Across the survey only about a third of sites were average or good, and the rest needed real work.

Speed touches everything. It affects your search position, it affects what you pay for ads because the platforms reward a good experience, and it affects your conversion rate because people will not wait, especially on a phone in a foreign country on patchy signal. We took one site from 24 out of 100, loading in nearly 30 seconds, to fast, by changing the hosting and optimising one homepage image. No content changed at all. If you are commissioning any web work, put performance figures in the brief the way a bank would. No serious project ships without them.

Finding 6: the SEO basics are still missing

One quick check you can do today. Search site: followed by your domain in Google and read your page titles as if they were search results. Do they tell Google, in three seconds, what your business actually is and where it is. Most do not.

You will read that title tags no longer matter and it is all about content. Good content matters, but most sites do not have enough of it, and the fundamentals still count in ways people underestimate. We have taken a restaurant from page four to page one on title tags and speed alone, no other changes, and a wellness provider from nowhere to the top of page two for their target term within two days of fixing the basics and asking Google to re-index.

The bigger picture: this is a moat, not just a boost

Good digital marketing grows your business. It also protects it. A well-established operator who has spent twenty years building a reputation is surprisingly easy to pick off if the digital foundations are weak. The newcomer taking your customers might not even be a rival operator. It might be an OTA bidding on your own brand name.

Years ago I gave a talk showing that 12 of the top 20 restaurants on TripAdvisor in one town were less than two years old, sitting above businesses that had been there for decades. Reputation online is not the same as reputation on the street, and your data, your pixels, your accounts and your website are assets you cannot simply replace. People protect the truck in the yard and ignore the assets that actually compound.

This is also where marketing stops being a cost and becomes an investment. We worked with a business whose total cost of doing business, ad spend and agency fees included, came to under 4% of revenue, against the 20% or more an OTA would take. Get the foundations right and the same spend simply returns more, with the confidence to invest behind it. A welcome email sequence we rebuilt for one operator lifted revenue by over 4,000% within thirty days, and it runs on autopilot every month since. Another sent two emails at the end of an offer that brought in $27,500 each in a single week. None of that is visible, or repeatable, without the data underneath it.

The encouraging part is how low the bar is. When only about one in ten businesses is measuring properly, getting into the top 10% of tourism digital marketing is far more achievable than it sounds.

Where to start

You will not fix all of this in a week, and you should not try. Pick the highest-value, lowest-effort wins first:

  1. Make your phone and email clickable, correct, and tracked.
  2. Read your own page titles in a site: search and rewrite the weak ones.
  3. Check your page speed and put it right if it is slow.
  4. Get GA4 tracking your real key events, then your Meta pixel, then your Google Ads.
  5. Ask your booking engine the tracking questions above, and keep asking.

If you would like a hand, this is exactly the kind of thing we do. We set up digital foundations so your analytics, pixel and ad tracking are all in place and correctly configured, and we run half-day Growth Plan Sessions to map the fastest wins for your specific business. Even a quick call will leave you with a clearer picture than most of your competitors have.

Book a Growth Plan Session, or see how we run each channel over on the tourism marketing hub. Get your foundations right, and you are already ahead of nine out of ten.