Embracing the Shift: Why Customers Are Choosing to Book More Online in Travel

You've done the hard part. The enquiry came in, you quoted quickly, the client loved it, the deposit landed and the booking is confirmed. Brilliant. Job done. Except it isn't, really. Because somewhere between that confirmation email and the moment your client gets home from their trip, most travel businesses go quiet. And that silence? It's where repeat bookings go to die. The good news is that fixing this doesn't require a big team or a big budget. It just requires a bit of thought and a few simple habits that most of your competitors haven't bothered to build yet. What Actually Happens After You Take the Deposit Picture your client's experience from their side. They've just handed over a significant amount of money, probably for something they've been looking forward to for months. They're excited. They're also, if they're honest, a little anxious. Did they make the right choice? Is everything going to go smoothly? Will someone be there if something goes wrong? Then they get their confirmation email, and... nothing. A few weeks pass. Maybe a reminder about the balance payment. More silence. Then they're off on their holiday, back two weeks later, and the next time they think about booking a trip, they're starting from scratch — Googling, browsing, maybe even ending up somewhere else entirely. That's not a customer lost to a bad experience. That's a customer lost to no experience. And it happens constantly in this industry. The Numbers Make a Compelling Argument Here's something worth sticking on the wall. Repeat customers spend, on average, 67% more than first-time buyers. And bringing a repeat customer back costs somewhere between five and fifteen times less than finding a new one. Read that again. Five to fifteen times less. For small travel businesses, where more than 61% of revenue typically comes from repeat clients, keeping existing customers happy isn't just a nice idea. It's the engine the whole business runs on. Yet most of the effort, energy and marketing spend goes into chasing new enquiries while existing clients quietly drift away. Every client who books once and never comes back isn't just a missed opportunity. They're a very expensive one. What Your Clients Actually Want to Hear From You The post-booking gap doesn't need to be filled with daily emails or elaborate gestures. Clients don't want to be pestered. What they do want is to feel looked after, and the bar for that is actually pretty low. A message a few weeks before travel reminding them of anything useful — local tips, what to pack, a heads-up on anything happening at their destination — takes ten minutes to write and makes a lasting impression. A quick check-in the week they get back, asking how it went, does two things at once: it tells you something useful about what they loved, and it reminds them that you're a person who cares, not just a business that took their money. Think about the brands you're most loyal to in your own life. The chances are they stay in touch in a way that feels relevant and warm, not pushy. That's all this takes. Turning One Booking Into a Loyal Client The research is clear on this one. A client who buys from you for the first time has roughly a one-in-four chance of coming back. After a second booking, that jumps to nearly one-in-two. By the third booking, it's almost two-thirds. Each time a client chooses you again, the relationship gets stickier. That means the single most valuable thing you can do after a booking is confirmed is to make the experience so warm and so well looked after that coming back feels like the obvious choice. Not because you've locked them in or sent them a loyalty card, but because you made the whole thing feel easy, personal and genuinely enjoyable. The travel industry sells dreams. The actual trip is the headline, but the experience of booking, preparing and being looked after is the story around it. Make that story a good one and your clients will tell it to their friends. Your next booking isn't always waiting in your inbox. Sometimes it's already in your client list, waiting to hear from you. 5 Things You Can Do This Week Set a reminder for every confirmed booking to send a pre-travel message two to three weeks before departure. Keep it short, warm and personal. Local tips, a reminder of what's included, anything that makes them feel looked after. It takes minutes and they'll remember it. Send a welcome-home message. A simple 'hope you had a wonderful trip, we'd love to hear about it' sent a few days after they return opens a conversation, invites a review and reminds them you exist — all in one go. Write down what your clients tell you. If someone mentions they've always wanted to do a safari, or that they'd love to visit Japan one day, note it. When the right opportunity comes up, reach out directly. That kind of personal attention is the thing clients talk about to their friends. Ask happy clients for a review while the holiday glow is still fresh. The best time is within a week of them getting home. One genuine, heartfelt review from a real client is worth more than almost any marketing you could pay for. Do a quick audit of your last twenty confirmed bookings. How many of those clients have you been in touch with since? How many have booked again? That gap, whatever size it is, is your opportunity.

Booking.com spent over $6 billion on marketing last year. Let that sink in for a second. Six. Billion. Dollars. If you're running an independent travel business, trying to out-spend them is about as sensible as challenging Usain Bolt to a sprint. So let's not do that. Here's the thing though. You don't need to. The travel businesses doing really well right now aren't winning because they've got bigger budgets. They're winning because they're offering something the giants simply can't. Being Big Is Actually a Problem The major online booking giants are extraordinary at one thing: handling enormous volume. Millions of bookings, millions of customers, millions of emails sent by robots. That's impressive, but it's also their biggest weakness. When you're that big, every customer has to get the same experience. Same website, same automated messages, same call centre hold music when something goes wrong. There's no room for 'actually, I know this particular client loves boutique hotels and hates early morning flights.' That level of care just doesn't scale. Your smaller, more personal operation? That's not a limitation. That's the product. According to a 2023 ABTA survey, 44% of UK customers said they specifically chose to book through a specialist because they wanted advice and a trip built around them. Nearly half the booking public is out there looking for exactly what you offer. You Can Be Online and Human at the Same Time There's a bit of a myth floating around that if you're online, you have to be hands-off. That the digital world is cold and transactional. Nonsense. Some of the warmest, most personal travel businesses we work with do most of their business online. They just make sure their personality shines through every page, every email and every conversation. And travellers are catching on. The number of families booking their holidays through a personal travel specialist jumped from 36% in 2019 to 55% in 2024. That's a huge shift. People want the convenience of browsing and booking from the sofa, but they also want to know there's a real person at the end of it who's got their back. You can be both of those things. The giants can only be one. Trust Is Worth More Than Any Budget Picture this. A client has just landed in their destination, the hotel has lost their reservation and there's a thunderstorm outside. They pull out their phone. If they booked through a big platform, they're typing into a chat box and praying. If they booked with you, they're calling someone they know by name. That difference is everything. Post-pandemic, UK travellers became very clear on what real support looks like when a trip goes sideways. ABTA found that people are now 37% more likely to book with a personal travel specialist than they were before 2020. The big platforms gave people a lot of reference numbers during that period. The best independent travel businesses gave them solutions. If you're ATOL or ABTA protected, wear that proudly. Don't just stick the logo in the footer and hope people notice. Tell people what it means. Tell them that if things go wrong, they're protected. That kind of reassurance is genuinely priceless to someone handing over thousands of pounds for their family holiday. The Long Game Is Yours to Win Here's where it gets really interesting. The giants are brilliant at getting new customers. They pour money into it every single day. What they're not brilliant at is keeping them, knowing them or building anything that feels like a relationship. You can do all of that. A client who books with you every year, who tells their friends about you, who comes back for the big trip because they trust you with it, is worth far more than ten strangers clicking through a comparison site. The economics of loyalty are firmly on your side. And you have something no algorithm can replicate. You remember that your client hated the resort they visited three years ago. You know their anniversary is in September. You noticed they mentioned they'd always wanted to go to Japan. That kind of knowledge turns a booking into a relationship and a relationship into a business that grows almost by itself. The giants have the budgets. They have the brand recognition. They have more developers than most travel agencies have customers. But they don't have you, and for a growing number of travellers, you are exactly what they've been looking for. 5 Things You Can Do This Week Let your personality out: Your website, your social posts and your emails should all sound like a human being wrote them — because one did. Tell people who you are, what you love about travel and why you got into this industry. People book with people. Show off your protection badges — and explain them: If you're ATOL or ABTA protected, put it front and centre and tell clients in plain English what that means for them. 'If anything goes wrong, you're covered' is a powerful sentence. Reply fast and reply like a person: A warm, personal response within a few hours will beat an automated acknowledgement every time. You're not a robot. Don't sound like one. Ask your happy clients to leave a review: One genuine, glowing review from a real person is worth more than any paid advertisement. Most happy clients will do it if you just ask. Most businesses never ask. Use what you know: If a client mentioned they've always wanted to visit New Zealand, write that down. When the right opportunity comes up, reach out. That sort of personal touch is the one thing the giants will never be able to do.