Emerging strategies for Google AIOs in Travel Marketing

Google's AI Overviews (AIOs) are driving big changes in marketing by the travel, tourism and hospitality industries.

Because AIOs frequently result in "zero click searches" for travel services: Google responds directly to users' queries, bypassing any clickthroughs to vendor websites. And this drying-up of organic search traffic in turn increases competition raises the cost of paid search advertising campaigns. That plus aggressive bidding by OTAs has increased the marketing spend of travel companies by 20%-30% vs a year ago.

Right now in the heat of the holiday season, savvy travel marketers are reporting some successes resulting from:

• Authoritative content that supports EEAT
• More images and videos in content
• Focusing on mid- and bottom-funnel marketing while forgoing riskier top-of-funnel spend
• High-converting creative aimed at high-intent queries
• Staying constantly on top of negative organic keywords
• Strict bidding discipline to control return on ad spend in the face of rising costs per click
• More effective SEO, to maximize share of "free" clicks
• Targeted remarketing in support of customer retention

Comment: If you're wondering why, with AI driving travel sales, do we need Google at all? Keep in mind that all those AI tools are getting their data from Google's search index.