Where to play: Finding whitespace in travel

Open any ten travel websites in a row and the pattern becomes obvious. The hero shots are interchangeable, the same beach, the same drone angle, the same smiling family.

The propositions are interchangeable too. Best deals, lowest prices, ‘from £X’, limited-time savings, the same hooks, just wrapped in different branding. The colour palettes shift, the logos swap, but the underlying offer rarely changes.

Travel marketing has a sea-of-sameness problem, that part is well understood. What gets discussed less is why travel ended up here — and the answer is uncomfortable for the industry. Travel is an emotional purchase, yet the way it’s sold is anything but. However, it hasn’t become rational because customers wanted it to, it’s because brands have made it that way.

A category that talked itself out of emotion

Booking a holiday should be one of the most emotionally charged purchases a person makes all year. It’s anticipation, escape, reward, it’s the experience that gets pulled forward in the diary and protected through every other compromise. And yet the category that sells it has, almost without exception, made the experience of buying it feel as functional as paying a utility bill.

“We’ve taken something people are genuinely excited about and reduced it to a price comparison exercise. That works for conversion, but it doesn’t give anyone a reason to choose you,” says Dan Jenkins, Head of Client Services at Platform 195.

Travel brands didn’t arrive at deal-led, price-driven marketing because consumers demanded it. They arrived there because rational marketing is easier to measure, easier to optimise, and, for the brands large enough to dominate the auction, consistently effective.

When you have the budget and market share to win on visibility, price-led messaging does its job. It converts demand that already exists. Over time, that approach shaped how the category behaves. Travellers were taught to compare, filter, sort by price, screenshot a hotel, and check multiple sites before booking, because every brand they encountered reinforced that behaviour.

Why brand loyalty is structurally weak in travel

Compare travel to almost any other consumer category and the difference is striking. People are loyal to a clothing brand because it says something about who they are. They’re loyal to a supermarket because of habit and routine. Even airline loyalty is often driven by points and perks as much as brand affinity.

Travel retail doesn’t work like that. For most people, the journey starts somewhere else entirely.

I want to go to Mallorca in June….That hotel looks good…..Who’s got the best price?

By the time a brand enters the decision, it’s often just a way to complete the transaction.

“There’s some brand preference in travel, of course. But by and large people are trying to get to a destination, to a specific hotel, at the best price. The brand becomes secondary unless you’ve given them a reason to care,” explains Dan.

This is down to a structural feature of the category: multiple intermediaries selling the same inventory, using the same imagery, to a customer who has been conditioned to shop around.

Why this is a particular problem for challengers

The largest brands in travel have, over time, earned the right to operate in that rational, deal-led space. Brands like TUI, Jet2, Love Holidays, and lastminute.com have built recognition over decades. In some cases, that recognition came from strong emotional positioning in the first place. In others, it came from launching off the back of an already established airline brand, as with easyJet Holidays. Either way, the awareness work has already been done.

That means deals aren’t the brand. Deals are something those brands can lean on, knowing the audience already trusts and recognises them. Even then, many are still investing heavily in perception and positioning. easyJet Holidays’ move further into premium and luxury travel is a good example of a brand using that existing awareness as a platform to shift how people see it.

Smaller and challenger brands don’t have that advantage. They can’t out-spend, out-bid or out-share-of-voice the incumbents. Every pound put into performance media is competing with brands that can simply spend more. Doing more of the same, just with less budget, rarely changes the outcome.

“If you’re trying to compete with the big players by doing what they do, you’re not going to win. They’ve earned the right to operate that way. If you haven’t, you need a different way in,” says Dan.

Put simply, you can’t out-spend the big players so you have to out-position them.

Three lenses, one sweet spot

Whitespace isn’t a creative idea. It’s a strategic position — and, as Dan puts it, it tends to emerge from three things coming together. First, the category. What does the competitive set actually look like? Where is everyone clustered, what are they all saying, and — just as importantly — what is no one saying? Then the consumer. What kind of holiday are they really buying — control or surrender, discovery or familiarity, something carefully planned or something taken care of for them? The audience truth is rarely about age brackets and almost always about mindset. And finally, the brand. What can you credibly own? Not what you’d like to be true, but what you can actually deliver against, consistently, with the product and experience you have.

“It’s about finding the overlap — category truth, audience truth, and your brand in the middle of it. Most brands look at one or two of those in isolation, but the opportunity only really appears when you bring all three together,” says Dan.

The brands that claim their whitespace stand apart

Look at the travel brands that punch above their weight and a pattern starts to emerge.

Kuoni doesn’t compete on price, it competes on craftsmanship and expertise. Trailfinders has built its position around advice and human consultation in a category that has largely industrialised the opposite. Airbnb, in its early years, created something entirely different, the emotional experience of staying in someone’s home, with all the anticipation and personal connection that came with it. None of these brands had the scale of the incumbents when they started. What they had was a position that felt distinct, and a willingness to stay with it.

“The brands that stay distinctive are the ones that hold onto that emotional core. It’s harder to do, but it’s what people actually connect with,” says Dan.

Pick a lane

There isn’t a version of this where a challenger travel brand wins by trying to appeal to everyone. “All travellers” isn’t an audience. “Best price and great experience” isn’t a position. Every brand that has carved out real space in this category has done so by picking a lane, narrower than feels comfortable and more specific than feels safe, and committing to it long enough for the market to notice.

“The uncomfortable part is you have to exclude people to be relevant to anyone. That’s where most brands hesitate,” explains Dan.

That is harder now than it has ever been because the category is more crowded and search is more competitive. Travellers are forming opinions across more surfaces, in less time, with less brand signal getting through. This is exactly why finding whitespace matters.

“Once you’ve found it — and done the work to earn it — it becomes very difficult for anyone else to take it from you. It’s not a campaign idea or a creative angle. It’s a position you’ve built and reinforced over time,” says Dan.

Whitespace isn’t something you decorate your brand with. It’s the strategic decision everything else rests on. The next question is the harder one, what do you do with whitespace once you’ve found it? Because identifying the position is only the start. Building a marketing engine that holds it, defends it, and grows from it is where most brands quietly fall back into the sea of sameness.

We’ll be answering this in an article soon, in the meantime, if you’re thinking seriously about where your brand should play, talk to the Platform 195 team.

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