Most tourism operators are marketing blind. We have the proof.
We audited 538 tourism businesses across 44 countries and found that most cannot see where a single booking comes from. Nearly four in ten had no analytics at all, and of those that did, around 83% were not tracking a single basic event. 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. In 2025 we re-reviewed 274 of them to see what had changed. Almost nothing had improved, and the share with no analytics at all rose from 36.6% to 39.1%.
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 audited 538 tourism businesses. 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. In 2025 we went back and re-reviewed 274 of them to see how much had changed. The verdict: almost nothing improved, and several measures got worse.
The headline numbers speak for themselves:
- 36.6% had no analytics installed at all in 2024. By 2025 that had risen to 39.1%. Nearly four in ten operators cannot see anything.
- Of the sites that did have GA4, around 83% were not tracking a single basic event. Not a phone click, not an email click, not a form submission.
- 66.4% had no Meta pixel. Of those that had one, 92.6% tracked no conversions with it.
- Only 13.1% of sites with a clickable phone number fired a tracking event when someone clicked it. For most operators, phone and email leads are invisible.
- Only 33.2% had Google Tag Manager installed, and only 2.9% tracked newsletter signups.
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.
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. Only 9.5% of the sites we audited had cross-domain tracking set up, which means the other 90% 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 15% of the businesses in our research had switched booking platform in the prior 12 months, 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.
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.
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 across 538 tourism businesses found that around 83% of sites with GA4 were not tracking a single basic event, 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, ibis, PrenoHQ, RMS Cloud, Bookeo, BookDirect, SynXis, FareHarbor, 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 research, roughly 83% of tourism sites with GA4 were not tracking a single basic event: no phone clicks, no email clicks, no form submissions. And only 9.5% of all sites had cross-domain tracking, 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. Only 41.6% of the tourism sites we audited had both a clickable phone number and email address, and only around 11% tracked those as events. Put plainly, about 89% of 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.