Your Marketing Guide to the 5 Stages of Travel
By Michelle Ackers on
If you are looking for truly effective ways to attract bookings, then the answer will lie in understanding the process your target customers go through to make a booking. Having insight to this decision process then allows you to plan a marketing strategy that will resonate with travellers to achieve bookings time and time again!
This brings us to "The 5 Stages of Travel".
Foundation for Marketing: A Travel Cycle
Tourism and travel is the second most common reason why people use the internet. It's an incredibly fast and reliable way of sourcing information about travel destinations, and making the necessary bookings.
As the internet is so highly utilised for travel and tourism, Google spent two years researching the travel experience. They found that:
- Almost all of us go through 5 key stages of travel: dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing, and sharing
- It's more of a continuous cycle than having a linear start and finish
- The shift between stages can also be somewhat "back and forth", particularly in the Planning and Booking stages, as new ideas and options are considered before the vital booking decision is made
It's therefore important to understand how you can create attention to your brand and business in each stage of the cycle to influence decisions and behaviour, and continue the cycle with new or repeat travellers.
Your tourism business can leverage the 5 stages of travel to get more out of your marketing communications and campaigns. If you skip any of these stages, you run the risk of limiting your reach, your impact and your results.
To explore all of the 5 Stages and learn how to apply them in your marketing strategy, you can download the eBook guide here. Another great resource is our article "Digital Marketing & The 5 Stages of Travel".
If you need further help with planning and implementing creative marketing initiatives to ensure you are harnessing the opportunities with each of the '5 Stages of Travel', please get in touch with our team to chat more!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Ackers | Brand Marketing Manager
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