As the global travel industry moves toward a projected US$1063.00bn market by 2028, competition for traveller demand has never been more intense. Airlines, OTAs, hotels, and travel apps are investing aggressively across digital channels to capture attention early, shape intent, and convert inspiration into bookings.
To achieve this, travel industry typically run a mix of awareness campaigns to spark destination interest and performance campaigns to drive booking intent and improve the look-to-book ratio. Today, more than 78% of travel advertising budgets are allocated to digital ads, representing $7.73 billion in spend this year alone.
However, there is a catch. Campaigns may appear healthy on the surface, a significant portion of this spend never reaches a real traveller or influences a genuine booking decision. What often goes unnoticed is what happens after a campaign goes live.
Performance seems to perform well, but beneath the dashboards, early warning signals begin to emerge, signals that quietly erode efficiency, inflate results, and dilute real demand. By the time the impact is visible in bookings and revenue, the damage is already done.
This raises critical questions for travel marketers:
- What hidden signals are affecting both awareness and performance campaigns?
- How do these issues distort demand and ROI?
- And most importantly, how can travel industry brands safeguard their campaigns before budget leakage turns into lost revenue?
Signs Travel Industry Brands Must Not Overlook in Their Campaigns
Travel brands run multiple campaigns without paying much heed to the signs that cause devastating impacts, directly hampering brand’s ROI. Sneak into these signs before they sneak in your campaigns –
Sudden spikes in clicks
Exorbitantly high clicks in your campaigns causing click fraud without any significant conversions.
- Impact – Your budget drains faster, performance looks better than it actually is, and attribution hijacking shifts credit to the wrong channels, leading to decisions based on false data, ads being pulled away from real travellers, and a direct drop in your search-to-book ratio.
Read in detail about click fraud
Artificially increased engagement
High engagement from low-quality users who later uninstall the app.
- Impact – Campaigns show high clicks, installs, or interactions driven by low-quality or non-genuine users who uninstall the app shortly after, delivering no real retention, revenue, or long-term value, contributing to invalid traffic and hampering the lifetime value of travellers
Read in detail about incent fraud
Impressions generating from unexpected geographies
Ads getting viewed from locations that were never your target on the first place.
- Impact – Impressions from unintended geographies lead to geotargeting fraud, causing wasted spend, diluted audience relevance, and misleading performance metrics that don’t translate into real demand or conversions.
Abnormal promo code or loyalty point redemptions
Unusual spikes or repeated redemptions indicate misuse of discounts or rewards, often through unauthorized sharing, automation, or expired codes.
- Impact – It leads to unearned discounts, direct revenue loss, distorted campaign results, and reduced value for genuine customers.
Know more about how referral and coupon fraud exploit campaign performance
Keyword bid price rising alarmingly
Constant bidding on branded keywords by competitors or affiliates.
- Impact – When competitors repeatedly bid on your brand keywords, bid prices rise and their ads appear above your official site, diverting high-intent traffic, inflating acquisition costs, and quietly eroding the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Read more about how brand bidding violations impact PPC campaigns
Ads appearing on irrelevant or unsafe content
Ads getting misplaced by fraudsters who manipulate systems using bots, spoofed domains, hidden ads, or fake apps.
- Impact – It causes wasted ad spend on non-human or low-intent traffic, inflated reach and engagement metrics, misleading attribution and ROAS.
How Travel Industry Brands Can Safeguard Their Ad Campaigns
For travel brands, protecting both brand reputation and campaign performance is critical. Awareness and performance campaigns rely on accurate signals, safe placements, and genuine user actions. While in-house monitoring can address some risks, it often falls short against sophisticated fraud tactics and scale-related challenges. This is why travel brands need a trusted and holistic ad fraud solution that validates traffic, ensure safe brand asset placements, and secures brands at all levels.
mFilterIt brings a unified solution to safeguard travel campaigns end to end. Here’s what the comprehensive solutions includes –
Fraud prevention across all stages (From viewing to purchasing)
Maintains source-level transparency and validates traffic at every stage of the funnel, not just at the impression level, ensuring genuine engagement and conversions.
Identifying safer, high-quality inventory
Detects suspicious, inappropriate, and Made-for-Advertising (MFA) sites and delivers placement-level visibility. This enables brands to proactively block unsafe environments and focus spend on premium, brand-safe, and contextually relevant inventory, ensuring ads appear only in suitable settings that protect brand reputation and drive meaningful engagement.
Clean and accurate attribution
Clearly identifies which channels and partners are driving real outcomes, enabling fair attribution and informed optimization decisions.
Detection of brand bidding violations
Actively identifies competitors or affiliates misusing brand keywords and bidding on branded terms, helping protect paid search performance.
Real-time, customizable infringement alerts
Provides instant alerts for potential violations or unauthorized brand usage, allowing teams to act quickly before issues escalate.
Conclusion
While your focus should be on scaling future campaigns and capturing the next wave of traveller demand, many brands are quietly losing efficiency in their current campaigns where they shouldn’t be. These leaks are rarely dramatic at first, but left unchecked, they compound over time.
Hence, protecting your campaigns demands more than basic checks or surface-level metrics. With mFilterIt ad fraud solution – Valid8, travel industry brands gain a unified solution that goes deeper validating traffic quality, uncovering hidden risks, and ensuring media investments drive real traveller engagement and measurable business outcomes. So, your campaigns don’t just scale, they scale cleanly, safely, and sustainably.
Want to know how? Contact us now
FAQs
What is click fraud in travel industry campaigns?
Click fraud occurs when automated bots or low-intent users generate clicks that appear genuine but don’t lead to real conversions, inflating metrics and wasting ad spend.
What is invalid traffic (IVT) and why does it matter?
Invalid traffic refers to non-human or low-quality interactions that distort campaign performance, mislead optimization, and reduce ROI.
What is programmatic fraud?
Programmatic fraud manipulates automated ad buying to place ads in low-quality or non-human traffic sources, inflating costs without delivering real audience engagement.
