Survey Data and Search Intent Are Costing Travel Brands Millions. Here’s Why.

Survey data tells you what people say they’ll do. Browsing data shows what they searched for. Neither tells you where they actually spend, or who they’re spending with instead of you. That’s the gap—and it’s where most travel marketing budgets go to die.

For years, travel marketing has been built on proxies.

• Intent surveys
• Search behavior
• Website visits
• Modeled lookalikes

All useful signals—but none of them answer the most important question: where are travelers actually spending money right now?

And just as importantly, who are they spending with instead of you?

If you can’t answer those two questions, you’re not really finding travelers. You’re guessing.

The Problem With “Intent” in Travel Marketing

Travel is one of the most over-researched categories. People browse endlessly. They compare prices. They dream. They abandon carts. They change their minds.

• Searching for a flight doesn’t mean booking one.
• Reading hotel reviews doesn’t mean choosing a brand.
• Saying “I plan to travel this year” doesn’t mean spending with you.

Intent is fragile. It’s easily misunderstood and often wildly overvalued.

That’s why so many travel campaigns look strong on paper—high reach, decent CTRs—but fail to deliver real revenue impact. The signal is weak, the targeting is broad, and budgets get spread thin across people who may never convert. Brands struggle to find the right travelers, let alone keep or grow them.

What Actually Predicts Future Travel Behavior?

Spending.

Spending is the signal that matters most. Where people actually spend their money, how often they do it, and which brands they choose—or consistently don’t—tells a far more reliable story than intent ever could. Transaction data doesn’t speculate about what might happen; it confirms what already has.

That distinction isn’t minor. It’s the whole ballgame.

When you can identify who is actively spending on airfare, hotels, cruises, car rentals, vacation rentals, or experiences, you stop chasing “maybe travelers” and start finding real travelers—the ones most likely to convert, return, and spend more.

The Real Opportunity: The Movable Middle

Most travel brands tend to focus their attention on two extremes: the customers they already have—where retention and loyalty efforts are concentrated—and net-new prospects who don’t yet show meaningful signs of travel behavior.

In doing so, they often overlook the much larger and more valuable group in between.

That’s where the biggest growth opportunity sits. We call it the movable middle.

These are consumers who:

• Are actively spending in travel categories
• Travel frequently or seasonally
• Are choosing competitors—not because they dislike your brand, but because you weren’t in the consideration set

They’re not cold prospects.
They’re not loyal customers.

They’re already spending—just not with you.

This is the audience that allows travel brands to find new high-value customers, keep them through smarter engagement, and grow share-of-wallet over time.

Traditional data struggles to identify this group because surveys don’t reveal brand-level spend, and browsing data doesn’t show who ultimately wins the transaction.

Transaction data does.

Why “Who They’re Spending With” Matters as Much as “If They’re Spending”

Knowing someone plans to travel is helpful.

But knowing they:

• Booked with a competing airline
• Prefer a specific hotel chain
• Frequently rent cars instead of using ride-share
• Choose vacation rentals over resorts

…is transformational.

That level of insight changes how travel marketers compete. It makes it possible to target switchers instead of generic lookalikes, conquest competitors with precision instead of broad awareness, and craft offers designed to disrupt real, existing behavior.

Without this visibility, brands over-invest in awareness and under-invest in the intelligence required to keep and grow high-value travelers.

Static Snapshots Don’t Work in a Dynamic Category

Travel behavior is constantly in motion. Seasonality shifts. Economic conditions evolve. Routes change. Preferences change. Loyalty breaks.

What worked yesterday doesn’t always work tomorrow.

Yet many audience solutions still rely on static snapshots—models built once, refreshed infrequently, and applied long after traveler behavior has already changed. In a category as dynamic as travel, that approach is a recipe for wasted spend.

Modern travel marketing requires continuously refreshed intelligence that reflects what travelers are doing now—not what they did six months ago—so brands can consistently find, keep, and grow the right audiences.

Turning Real Spend Into Predictive Intelligence

This is where TravelSignals™, a Wiland™ MarketSignals™ product, changes the equation.

TravelSignals is built on verified travel transaction data, transformed through Wiland’s predictive analytics and data science to identify:

• Who is actively spending on travel
• Where they’re spending
• How frequently they book
• Which travelers are most likely to convert next

It’s not about having more data. It’s about applying the right signals, modeled intelligently, to predict what comes next.
The result is targeting that aligns with reality—not assumptions—and supports growth at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

What This Looks Like in the Real World

When brands shift from inferred intent to transaction-based, predictive audiences, performance changes fast.

• Wiland audiences delivered a 3000% ROI with Meta / Facebook ads, driving five figures in incremental revenue from a small two-week campaign.
• In another campaign, Wiland’s audiences generated more than 2x the response rate and over 2.3x dollars per booking compared to another leading provider.

There’s no long ramp-up period and no massive operational lift required—just better signals driving better outcomes.

Stop Guessing. Start Competing Where It Counts.

If your marketing data can’t tell you:

• Who is actively spending on travel
• Which brands are winning those dollars
• And who is most likely to switch

When you don’t have that level of visibility, you’re leaving growth on the table—and likely funding your competitors in the process. Survey data tells you what people say, and browsing data shows what they consider, but transaction data reveals what they actually do. In travel marketing, that distinction is the difference between reach and real results.

TravelSignals by Wiland helps travel brands find the movable middle, keep high-value travelers, and grow revenue with predictive intelligence rooted in real spending behavior.