Most tourism operators are marketing blind. We have the proof.
We have audited the same tourism businesses three years running, 545 of them in 2026, and most still cannot see where a single booking comes from. A third have no analytics at all, and of those that do, 77.8% record no phone click, no email click and no link through to their booking system. What you do not measure you cannot improve, so we will not start marketing your business until accurate conversion tracking is set up across every channel, including organic.
This is not a hunch. In 2024 we spent over 250 hours reviewing 538 tourism and hospitality websites across 44 countries: accommodation providers, activity operators and tour companies. We went back in 2025, and again in 2026, when we re-audited 545 of the same businesses. Almost nothing has improved. The share that can trace a booking back to its source has sat at roughly one in ten for all three years.
The operators in that data are spending real money on ads, email and SEO with no idea what any of it produces. Booking engines credit revenue to the wrong channel, phone and email leads go uncounted, and budget decisions get made on numbers that are simply wrong. Getting the tracking right first is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between marketing and guessing.
We have audited the same tourism businesses three years running. Most are marketing blind.
In 2024 we spent over 250 hours auditing the websites of 538 tourism businesses across 44 countries: accommodation, activities and tours. We went back in 2025, and again in 2026, when we re-audited 545 of the same businesses. The verdict has not changed: almost nothing improved, and several measures got worse.
The 2026 numbers:
- Only 9.8% can trace a booking back to what caused it. In 2024 it was around 10%. Three years, no movement on the measure that matters most.
- A third have no analytics installed at all. Google Analytics 4 is free and takes minutes to install.
- Of those that do have it, 77.8% record no phone click, no email click and no link between their website and their booking system.
- Two thirds now have a tappable phone number, a real improvement, but only 11.3% record the taps. For email it is 8.5%.
- The Meta pixel is installed on 30.5%, down from 34.9% in 2024. Measurement there went backwards.
- 96.9% fail Google's own mobile speed standard. The median site takes 9.8 seconds to show its main content.
Every one of those gaps is money spent without knowing what it produced. If you are running ads, sending emails or paying for SEO without this in place, you are guessing. That is the problem this page, and our whole tourism and hospitality marketing approach, exists to fix. The full write-up is in The State of Tourism Digital Marketing 2026.
Your booking system is probably breaking your attribution
Here is the pattern we see constantly. A customer clicks your ad, browses your site, then gets handed off to your booking engine, usually on a different domain. Somewhere in that handoff the trail goes cold. The booking still happens, but it gets credited to "direct" or organic. You read the report, conclude the ads are not working, and cut budget on the exact channel that produced the booking. Of the operators where we could test that handover in 2026, only 9.8% had it working, which means nine in ten are mis-attributing their booking revenue in exactly this way.
We have implemented tracking across the booking systems tourism operators actually run on: Rezdy, ibis, PrenoHQ, RMS Cloud, Bookeo, BookDirect, SynXis, FareHarbor and Operator Hub among them. Each behaves differently. Some make tracking straightforward to implement yourself. Others require you to go through the vendor, which takes patience. Credit where it is due: ibis is excellent for tracking, and our research backs that up. 88.6% of ibis sites had GA4 and 72.7% had a Meta pixel, well above every other system we measured.
Sometimes the problem sits inside the platform itself. On one occasion we pinpointed the exact date and time a tracking issue started in a client's booking software. The platform's account managers and support team kept us from reaching their developers, so we persevered for four months until it was fixed. Most agencies would have moved on after the first support ticket. That persistence matters, because 21% of the businesses in our research are on a different booking platform than they were in 2024, and every switch is a fresh chance for the data to quietly break. Real analytics work means questioning the story behind the numbers, not accepting them at face value. Get it right and the payoff is direct: you can finally see what your direct channel earns compared with the OTAs.
Booking engine conversion tracking, whatever you run on
Every booking engine handles tracking differently, and the difference is not small. Some let you implement it yourself in an afternoon. Some require a request to the vendor and a wait. A few will tell you it falls outside their scope. Knowing which is which before you start is most of the job.
These are the systems we have implemented or repaired conversion tracking on:
- Rezdy conversion tracking, including the cross-domain handover from the operator's own site
- FareHarbor tracking
- Checkfront tracking
- ibis, which is the strongest of the group for tracking. 88.6% of ibis sites in our research had GA4 and 72.7% had a Meta pixel, well above every other system we measured
- PrenoHQ
- RMS Cloud
- Bookeo
- BookDirect
- SiteMinder
- SynXis
- IBEXRES
- Operator Hub
Others come up regularly in the sector that we have audited without doing the implementation, Bókun, TrekkSoft, Peek Pro and Ventrata among them. If you are on one of those, the questions to ask your vendor are the same, and we can tell you what good looks like.
The work is not always the operator's own. Three agencies have brought us in to sort out conversion tracking for their clients. It is a narrow speciality, it goes wrong quietly, and most teams never get the reps to spot it.
We will not start marketing until the tracking is right
This is the guarantee behind everything we do: we will not start working on your marketing until accurate conversion tracking is set up across every channel, including organic. It sounds like a delay. It is the opposite. Every dollar you spend after that point is measurable, so every decision is based on what actually happened.
For a tourism operator, that means tracking the moments that turn into revenue:
- Bookings, tracked through to your booking engine with cross-domain tracking in place
- Phone-call clicks, email clicks and enquiry form submissions, the leads most operators never see
- Native conversion tracking in each ad platform, not just a GA4 import
- Everything feeding GA4 through Google Tag Manager, one clean picture
That last point about native tracking is worth dwelling on. Importing goals from GA4 into Google Ads can under-report your success by up to 50 to 60%. One scenic-flights operator we work with saw the native Google Ads pixel report around $42,000 of bookings while the GA4 import showed about $31,000, a 25% gap on the same account. Read the smaller number and you cut spend on a channel that is working. This is why accurate tracking sits underneath our Google Ads work for tourism operators: the campaigns are only as good as the data steering them.
Want this done properly?
You have two options, and which one you need depends on whether you already know what is broken.
Comprehensive Digital Review
Every channel reviewed end to end: analytics, tracking, your booking or checkout system, the website, search, ads and listings. You get a written review with a prioritised plan and two hours going through it.
Find out what is wrong →Digital Foundation Setup
Conversion tracking, analytics, your booking system and your ad platforms set up correctly and joined together, so you can finally see which marketing brings in money. Every channel, not just the ads.
Get it set up properly →Have the review first and $1,000 of it comes off the setup.
Tourism analytics and tracking, answered
Why won't you start marketing until tracking is set up?
Because what you do not measure you cannot improve. If the tracking is wrong, every report, every budget decision and every "this channel isn't working" conclusion that follows is wrong too. Our own research, now in its third year and covering 545 tourism businesses, found that 77.8% of sites with analytics installed record no phone click, no email click and no booking handover, which means most operators are making marketing decisions on data that tells them almost nothing. Setting up accurate tracking first usually takes days, not months, and it means everything we do afterwards is measurable, including organic. It is the foundation of our whole tourism and hospitality marketing approach.
Will this work with my booking system?
Almost certainly. We have implemented tracking across Rezdy, FareHarbor, Checkfront, ibis, PrenoHQ, RMS Cloud, Bookeo, BookDirect, SiteMinder, SynXis, IBEXRES, Operator Hub and more. Some systems make it straightforward, others require going through the vendor, and we know which is which. When the problem sat inside the platform itself, we have persevered for four months to get a bug fixed rather than accept broken data. Whatever you run on, the job is the same: every booking attributed to the channel that earned it.
I have Google Analytics installed. Is that not enough?
Having GA4 on the site is the start, not the finish. In our 2026 research, 77.8% of tourism sites with analytics installed were recording no phone clicks, no email clicks and no link through to their booking system. And only 9.8% could trace a booking back to its source, so booking-engine revenue was being credited to the wrong channel. An empty GA4 property tells you how many people visited. It cannot tell you which marketing produced your bookings, and that is the question that matters.
Why do my Google Analytics and Google Ads numbers disagree?
Different measurement methods and attribution rules. Importing goals from GA4 into Google Ads can under-report success by up to 50 to 60% compared with native Google Ads conversion tracking. On one scenic-flights operator we work with, the native pixel reported around $42,000 of bookings while the GA4 import showed about $31,000, a 25% gap. That is why we set up native tracking in each platform and read the numbers together, rather than trusting a single report. The story behind the data matters as much as the data itself.
What about phone and email enquiries? Most of our bookings start there.
Exactly the gap our research exposed. Two thirds of the tourism sites we audited in 2026 now have a tappable phone number and three quarters have a clickable email address, which is a genuine improvement. Only 11.3% record the phone taps, and 8.5% the email clicks. Put plainly, roughly nine in ten operators cannot see their phone and email leads at all. We track phone-call clicks, email clicks and form submissions as standard, so the channels producing your enquiries finally get the credit they earn. The easiest way to see where your own setup stands is a Growth Plan Session.
Book a Growth Plan Session and we will look at how your business is tracking today, show you exactly where bookings and enquiries are going uncounted, and tell you straight where the growth is. You get value from it whether or not we work together afterwards.
We work best with owners who want a trusted partner and let the experts they hire do their best work.