Travel Marketing’s Next KPI Is Economic Impact, Not Impressions

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

When a destination marketing organization (DMO) goes to its board, impressions don’t tell the complete story. Hotel stays do. Visitor spending does. The economic activity tourism generates for local businesses and communities does.

The stakes are substantial. According to the U.S. Travel Association, travelers in the U.S. directly spent $1.4 trillion in 2025, generating $3.0 trillion in economic output. As Skift Research has noted, the challenge is shifting from measuring visits to measuring value: first-time visitors spend about 30% more per trip than repeat visitors, but repeat visitors can deliver more stable, locally distributed, and long-term economic value.

Across the travel industry, marketers are under growing pressure to demonstrate that their campaigns drive business outcomes, not just engagement.

“The challenge isn’t that they lack the data. It’s that they lack these connected insights,” said Betsy Vankula, director of global travel sales at StackAdapt, an AI-powered advertising and marketing technology platform.

Campaign Metrics Are No Longer the Finish Line

Campaign metrics still matter, but travel organizations like DMOs are increasingly judged by business outcomes such as visitation, hotel stays, and economic impact — not just impressions, clicks, and conversions.

“You can’t go to the board and say, ‘We got 20 million impressions. Isn’t that great?’” Vankula said. “Yes, it is great, but how much real impact did you make in the destination?”

The same challenge extends across travel. Whether the goal is bookings, visitation, or revenue, marketers need to understand which audiences, messages, and channels attract their highest-value travelers. Otherwise, it’s easy to optimize for inexpensive engagement instead of meaningful business outcomes.

Finding Travelers Before Competitors Do

AI is also shortening the planning window. Consumers can now move from open-ended questions to specific trip options in minutes, using AI tools to ask for destination ideas, compare flights and hotels, build itineraries, and narrow what is worth considering.

“People are leaning more on AI tools and asking, ‘Where should I go? What should I do?’” Vankula said.

For marketers, that means influence has to happen earlier in the decision process. Waiting until travelers are actively searching for a specific brand or destination often means competing after they’ve already narrowed their options, when demand is more expensive to capture and harder to redirect.

From Capturing Demand to Creating It

“What we’re seeing and thinking about at StackAdapt is how to shift from capturing demand to creating demand,” Vankula said.

StackAdapt’s proprietary Travel AI Audiences tool is built around that shift, using contextual signals, browsing behavior, content engagement, location data, and transactions to identify where someone is in the decision process. The goal is to understand what a traveler may be preparing to do next, before that intent becomes obvious in a search query or booking path.

“Our AI analyzes thousands of travel-related contextual and behavioral indicators to understand where someone is in their travel journey, not simply who they are demographically,” Vankula said.

A traveler reading about national parks, comparing airfare, watching destination videos, and looking at family activities may not yet have made a booking decision. Taken together, those signals can point to emerging intent that a destination, hotel, airline, or vacation provider can influence before a competitor captures it.

AI Moves From Automation to Decision Support

AI has already been used in advertising for bidding, targeting, and optimization. Now, the technology is moving closer to campaign strategy, helping travel marketers decide where to invest, which audiences to prioritize, and which creative is driving meaningful outcomes.

“I think we’re entering a new phase where AI becomes less of an automation tool and more of a strategic partner,” Vankula said. “Instead of simply optimizing bids, marketers will increasingly ask questions like, ‘Which audiences are showing emerging demand? Which markets deserve more investment? Which creative is driving incremental visitation?’”

As travel marketing becomes more complex, AI helps marketers turn campaign signals into decisions while there’s still time to improve results.

Turning Insights Into Action

Travel marketers don’t need more dashboards or reports. They need faster answers. Rather than simply automating campaign execution, AI can help marketers interpret performance, surface meaningful opportunities, and recommend actions that improve business outcomes while campaigns are still in flight.

StackAdapt delivers this through complementary AI experiences across the platform. One of those is Ivy, which is the intelligence layer behind the marketer experience. Among its capabilities is a conversational experience that enables marketers to ask questions in natural language, uncover insights, and quickly understand campaign performance without digging through reports. Beyond conversational insights, the StackAdapt platform helps marketers identify optimization opportunities and take action while campaigns are still in flight.

In one recent example, the platform identified that a booking button in a creative asset was not prominent enough. It generated an alternative version that remained within brand guidelines and recommended testing it. In another case, it suggested additional audiences based on campaign performance.

“The role of AI isn’t to replace the marketer — it’s to help them make better decisions, faster,” Vankula said. “Whether that’s understanding which campaigns are driving the greatest economic impact or identifying the next optimization opportunity, the goal is to shorten the distance between insight and action.”

Marketers remain in control of every decision. AI simply helps them spend less time finding answers and more time improving results.

Measuring Economic Impact While Campaigns Are Still Running

Economic impact measurement is where the shift from reporting to decision-making becomes clearest. For years, many travel organizations have had to wait until after a campaign ended to understand whether marketing drove visitation, spending, or other business outcomes.

“What’s really exciting about what we’re doing is we’re building these reports in-platform,” Vankula said. “Our data gets refreshed every couple of weeks.”

StackAdapt’s Economic Impact Reporting is designed to bring that visibility into the platform while campaigns are still active. For destinations, that can help connect advertising to visitation and spending. For broader travel marketers, it points to a higher standard for accountability: business outcomes should shape campaign decisions while there is still time to act.

Using Economic Signals to Shift Spend

Live economic measurement changes what marketers can do during a campaign. If one origin market is producing stronger economic value, the budget can shift. If one audience is engaging but not visiting, the strategy can change. If a creative message is generating interest but not downstream activity, teams can test a different approach.

“Now you really have a way to capture that high-value customer who might be coming in an off-season, who might even be more valuable to you,” Vankula said.

That is especially important for destinations trying to manage seasonality, fill need periods, or prove the value of marketing to local stakeholders. A campaign that drives lower-volume but higher-value visitation may be more important than one that produces cheaper clicks at scale.

The Decision Destination Marketers Need to Make Now

The board is already asking for the connection between media spend and economic impact. The question for destination marketing leaders is whether to build that capability before the next budget cycle, or explain again why the reporting is not ready yet.

The broader travel industry faces a similar decision. If AI only improves clicks, bids, and delivery, marketers may become more efficient at chasing incomplete signals. 

“I think marketers will expect advertising platforms to become intelligence platforms,” Vankula said. “They’ll expect AI to identify emerging traveler demand, recommend strategy, surface new audiences, explain campaign performance, and connect media investment directly to business outcomes.”

The gap between campaign metrics and economic impact has always existed. What has changed is that closing it no longer has to wait until the campaign is over.

To learn how StackAdapt helps travel marketers identify high-value travelers, optimize campaigns in real time, and measure economic impact, click here.

This sponsored content was created collaboratively by StackAdapt and Skift Studio.