The State of Tourism Digital Marketing: 538 Businesses Reviewed

Nobody else in the tourism industry has done this, so we did it ourselves.

Over two years we hand-reviewed hundreds of tourism business websites, one at a time, to answer a question we kept running into with our own clients: how well does the average tourism operator actually track their digital marketing?

The answer is worse than we expected. Over a third of tourism businesses have no analytics installed at all. Of those that do, the vast majority are not tracking a single meaningful action. And when we went back a year later to see what had changed, almost nothing had improved. Several measures got worse.

This is the full write-up of that research. Until now it has only ever been presented in webinars. If you run an accommodation, activity or tour business, the numbers below describe your competitors, and quite possibly you.

How we did it

In 2024 we reviewed 538 tourism businesses across 44 countries, investing more than 250 hours of hands-on analysis. No scraper doing a shallow pass, no survey relying on what operators think they have set up. We inspected each website ourselves: the analytics tags, the pixels, the tag managers, the events firing (or not firing) when you click a phone number, submit a form or move through to a booking engine.

Finding tourism businesses at scale is harder than it sounds, so we used a method nobody else was using. Most operators run their reservations through a third-party booking system, and those systems have identifiable URL patterns. By searching on the booking-system URLs themselves, we could find real, trading tourism businesses in the wild, across accommodation, activities and tours, in every corner of the world. That is also why this study can say something no other research can: how tracking quality varies by booking platform.

Then, in 2025, we went back. We re-reviewed a sample of 274 of those businesses a year later to measure what had changed. It took a long time to compile, and the verdict was blunt: almost nothing improved.

Here is what we found.

The most basic requirement of digital marketing is knowing what happens on your website. Google Analytics 4 is free. It takes minutes to install.

36.6% of tourism businesses had no analytics installed at all in 2024.
A year later that figure had risen to 39.1%.

Read that again. Not only do more than a third of tourism operators have zero visibility of their website traffic, the number went up. Some of that will be sites rebuilt or replatformed without analytics being carried across, which tells its own story: tracking is an afterthought, and nobody notices when it disappears.

Finding 2: having analytics is not the same as using it

Installing GA4 gets you pageviews and not much else. The value comes from tracking the actions that matter: a phone number clicked, an email clicked, a form submitted, a booking started.

Of the sites that did have GA4 installed:

Around 83% were not tracking a single basic event. Not one phone click, email click or form submission. (In the 2024 data, 82.7% of GA4 sites.)

So the true picture is grimmer than the headline. Roughly a third of businesses have nothing, and of the remainder, more than four in five have a tag collecting pageviews while every enquiry, call and booking passes through unmeasured.

Finding 3: booking revenue is being credited to the wrong channels

Most tourism businesses take bookings through a third-party engine on a different domain. Without cross-domain tracking, GA4 treats the hop to the booking engine as the end of the journey, and the booking revenue gets attributed to the wrong place, usually "direct" or the booking engine's own domain.

Only about 10% of all sites had cross-domain tracking set up.

That means over 90% of tourism businesses with a third-party booking engine are looking at attribution data that is quietly wrong. The Google Ads campaign that drove the booking gets no credit. The email that closed it gets no credit. And decisions get made on those broken numbers.

It is worth being clear about what your booking engine does and does not do here, because this is the point most operators trip on. Your engine will always tell you your booking revenue, whether a booking was direct or came from an OTA, and which OTA. That is why so many operators think their numbers are covered. What it will rarely tell you is whether a direct booking came from Google Ads, from Meta, from a specific email or from organic search. Only your own tracking can join that up. Without it the ad platforms are blind, they cannot optimise, and instead of each channel compounding on the last, the whole thing starts to work against you. It is why so many operators conclude that "Google Ads doesn't work", when the real problem was that nothing was ever set up to measure it.

We cover how this should work on our tourism analytics and conversion tracking page.

Finding 4: Meta advertising with no measurement

The Meta pixel is what lets Facebook and Instagram advertising find your best customers and report what it actually produced.

65.1% of businesses had no Meta pixel at all.
Of those that did have one, 92.6% tracked no conversions.

Combine those and the picture is stark: essentially nobody in tourism is feeding Meta the conversion data it needs. Every operator running Facebook or Instagram ads without conversion tracking is paying for traffic the algorithm cannot optimise and results nobody can prove.

Finding 5: the plumbing is missing

Google Tag Manager is the standard way to manage tracking properly. It makes events, pixels and cross-domain setups manageable without touching website code every time.

Only 34% of businesses had Google Tag Manager installed.

Two thirds of the industry is missing the tool that makes everything else in this article fixable.

Finding 6: phone and email leads are invisible

For most tourism operators, especially accommodation and higher-value activities, the phone call and the email enquiry are where real money changes hands. So we checked whether businesses could even see them.

Only 37.4% had both a clickable phone number and a clickable email address on their site.
Of those, only about a quarter were tracking the clicks as events.
Put together, just 8.7% of tourism businesses could actually see their phone and email leads, and about 89% were tracking no key action at all.

Think about what that means in practice. A customer sees your Google ad, clicks through, rings you and books a $3,000 trip. In 89% of cases, that entire chain of events is invisible. The ad that produced it looks like a cost with no return.

Finding 7: email lists nobody is building or measuring

Email is the highest-return channel most tourism businesses own, and repeat visitors are the cheapest bookings you will ever get.

Only 23.4% of businesses had a newsletter signup form on their site.
Only 2.9% tracked newsletter signups as an event.

Three quarters of the industry is not even trying to build a list, and virtually nobody measuring the growth of the one asset that keeps working after the ad budget stops.

Finding 8: booking platforms churn, and tracking dies with them

One more number from the year-on-year comparison surprised us:

15% of businesses had switched booking platform within the prior 12 months.

That is a lot of churn, and every switch is a moment where tracking breaks. Cross-domain setups, purchase events and pixels are all wired to the old platform, and they rarely get rebuilt on the new one. We suspect this churn is one reason the no-analytics figure rose rather than fell.

The booking systems themselves: some help, some don't

Because we found these businesses through their booking-system URLs, we could compare tracking adoption by platform. Across the study we saw businesses running on Rezdy, ibis, PrenoHQ, RMS Cloud, Bookeo, BookDirect, SynXis, FareHarbor and Operator Hub, among others. We have worked hands-on with all of these.

One platform stood out. Among businesses using ibis, 88.6% had GA4 installed and 72.7% had a Meta pixel, far above the rest of the pack. At the other end, the weakest system's users had GA4 on just 6.7% of sites. In our experience ibis is excellent for tracking, and those numbers back it up.

The broader lesson: booking platforms differ enormously in how easy they make proper measurement. On some, you can implement full tracking yourself in an afternoon. On others, every change has to go through the vendor, which is slow and painful, and most operators simply never do it. If you are choosing a booking system, how well it supports tracking should be on your shortlist of criteria, because as the numbers above show, their job is beds and heads and bums and seats, not your digital marketing.

Why this matters: you cannot grow what you cannot see

It would be easy to read these numbers as trivia. They are not. Here is what broken tracking actually costs a tourism business:

You under-report your own revenue. Bookings, calls and enquiries happen, but no channel gets the credit. Your marketing looks worse than it is.
You cut the wrong things. When Google Ads shows no conversions because the tracking was never wired up, the "sensible" decision is to cut the budget. We have watched operators kill their best-performing channel because the data said it did nothing.
The algorithms work blind. Google and Meta optimise towards the conversion data you feed them. Feed them nothing and you pay full price for guesswork.
You cannot compare channels. Without consistent measurement across ads, email, organic and referral, every budget decision is instinct dressed up as strategy.

And sometimes the data is broken in ways only persistence uncovers. One example from our own client work: we noticed a tracking issue in a client's numbers and pinpointed the exact date and time it started. The cause sat inside their booking software. The platform's account managers and support teams kept us away from their developers, so we kept pushing. It took four months of persistence before the bug was finally fixed. Most agencies would have accepted the numbers, or given up after the second support ticket. Real depth in analytics means questioning the story behind the data, not accepting the black-and-white numbers on the screen.

That is the level of attention this stuff needs, and it is exactly what the industry is not getting.

So, is it getting better?

No. That is the uncomfortable conclusion of re-reviewing 274 of the original businesses in 2025.

The share of businesses with no analytics at all rose from 36.6% to 39.1%. Event tracking stayed dire. Cross-domain tracking stayed rare. Meanwhile 15% of businesses had changed booking platform, resetting whatever tracking they did have.

For all the industry noise about digital transformation, AI and data-driven marketing, the foundations underneath tourism marketing went backwards over the year we measured. Almost nothing improved, and several measures got worse.

There is a silver lining, and it belongs to you. If roughly nine out of ten of your competitors cannot see their phone leads, cannot attribute their bookings and cannot feed their ad platforms real conversion data, then getting your own measurement right is one of the biggest competitive advantages available in tourism marketing today. It is not glamorous. It is just where the edge is.

How to fix it

If you recognise your business in these numbers, here is the order we would tackle it in:

Install GA4 properly, via Google Tag Manager. Tag Manager makes everything after this step ten times easier.
Track the basic events. Phone clicks, email clicks, form submissions, newsletter signups. This alone puts you ahead of about 83% of the industry.
Set up cross-domain tracking to your booking engine. This is the step that fixes attribution, and only about 10% of businesses have done it.
Add purchase and revenue tracking, so bookings and their value flow through to GA4 and your ad platforms.
Install the Meta pixel with conversion events, even if you are not advertising on Meta yet. The data builds from day one.
Re-check everything whenever you change booking platform or rebuild your website. This is where good setups quietly die.
Then question the data. Numbers that look wrong usually are, and the story behind them is where the insight lives.

None of this is exotic. It is careful, unfashionable foundation work, and it is the difference between marketing you can steer and marketing you can only hope about. We go deeper on all of it across our tourism marketing hub.

Get your own numbers looked at

We spent 250+ hours reviewing 538 tourism businesses so we could tell you, with evidence, where the industry stands. The short version: the bar is on the floor, and the operators who clear it will out-measure, out-optimise and out-grow everyone around them.

If you want to know where your business sits against these numbers, book a Growth Plan Session. We look at your business, work out which of these pieces actually matter for you, and tell you straight where the growth is. You get value from it whether or not we ever work together afterwards.

The State of Tourism Digital Marketing: We Reviewed 538 Businesses and Almost Nothing Improved