From whitespace to growth: why most travel brands struggle to hold their position

In our recent article, Where to play: Finding whitespace in travel, we looked at why so many travel brands end up competing inside the same narrow space — the same offers, the same price-led messaging, all reinforcing the same consumer behaviour. The argument was that challenger brands cannot win by competing with incumbents on the incumbents’ terms. They need a positioning that the market is not already saturated with.

But identifying whitespace and successfully building a brand around it are two very different challenges.

Finding whitespace is only the beginning

One of the less discussed truths in travel marketing is that brands rarely lose because they failed to identify a credible whitespace. More often, they lose because they fail to maintain it long enough for it to become commercially meaningful.

“Finding the position is just the first step. Holding it, and building everything else around it, is where most brands come unstuck,” says Dan Jenkins, Head of Client Services at Platform 195.

The category pulls brands back towards rational marketing

The pressure to drift back toward rational, price-led marketing is constant in travel because the category itself has been conditioned that way for years. Travellers compare tabs, sort by lowest price, screenshot hotels, cross-check reviews, and move between multiple retailers selling effectively the same inventory. Every OTA and tour operator in the market is responding to the same behaviours.

Which means the moment results soften, most brands instinctively retreat toward the same territory they were trying to escape in the first place.

The pattern is usually predictable. The positioning work gets signed off, the launch campaign lands well, and the creative feels distinctive. Then conversion becomes the dominant conversation internally, and tactical messaging starts creeping back in. A percentage discount here, a limited time offer there, more emphasis on urgency, less emphasis on brand.

By the following planning cycle, the positioning still exists in the strategy deck, but much less of it survives in the actual marketing.

There's always pressure to revert to deals when the numbers wobble. And that pressure isn't always wrong — tactical messaging has a legitimate role in the mix, and sometimes the short-term need is real. The problem isn't price-led campaigns. It's what happens when they start to contradict the positioning you've worked hard to establish.

"The brands that win stay true to what they stand for. They weave in tactical messaging intelligently, when the opportunity's there — but they never stop building brand alongside it. The moment deal messaging starts to undermine the position rather than sit within it, you're not just running a promotion. You're eroding something that took time to build," says Dan.

Positioning only matters if customers can feel it

This is why positioning in travel cannot just exist as a proposition statement or a campaign line. It only becomes meaningful when customers experience it consistently enough, across enough touchpoints, that they begin to associate the brand with something beyond price and functionality.

That consistency must carry through everything: the identity, the experience, the creative, the customer journey itself. Customers are remarkably good at spotting the gap between what a brand says it stands for and what the actual experience feels like.

“The audience always trusts the experience. You can say whatever you want in a campaign, but if the experience doesn’t reinforce it, people stop believing it very quickly,” adds Dan.

This is often where otherwise strong positioning starts to weaken. The brand identity suggests one thing, but the customer journey behaves like every other OTA in the category. The social content talks about inspiration and discovery, but the paid media still defaults to generic discounting. The result is that over time, the distinction erodes.

Consistency is what makes positioning compound

The travel retailers that manage to avoid this tend to share one characteristic: consistency over long periods of time.

Not consistency in the sense of repeating the exact same campaign endlessly. The distinction worth making here is between a positioning and a campaign: a positioning should guide a brand for years, shaping every touchpoint from how staff communicate to how product is presented. A campaign might last a season. The best positioning is flexible enough that endless campaigns can be built against it — each one fresh, each one still recognisably the same brand.

TUI's 'Live Happy' is a clear example in the category. It has guided the brand for years, influencing not just advertising but how retail staff, cabin crew and in-resort teams engage with customers. The campaigns built against it have changed. The underlying idea hasn't.

The strongest travel brands are usually not the ones constantly reinventing themselves every season. They are the ones willing to reinforce the same positioning repeatedly, across years, while competitors continually shift direction in search of short-term gains.

A traveller might see a campaign one month, encounter creator content six months later, browse the website after that, then finally book much further down the line. Individually, none of those moments builds a brand. Over time, those moments accumulate into a recognisable impression of what the company stands for and why it feels different from the alternatives.

“That recognition is what eventually makes a brand easier to remember, easier to return to, and easier to choose again. And over time, that is what makes future performance activity more efficient,” notes Dan.

Airbnb shows how easily distinctiveness can erode

Airbnb is an interesting example of how easily positioning can shift over time. In its early years, the brand owned something genuinely emotional within travel: the feeling of staying in someone’s home rather than simply booking accommodation. The experience itself reinforced that positioning. You interacted with hosts directly, waited to be accepted, exchanged messages, and felt part of something more personal than a standard booking flow.

As the platform scaled, much of that friction was understandably removed. Instant booking became more common, communication became less central, and the experience became operationally cleaner. Over time, some of the emotional distinctiveness that once separated Airbnb from traditional booking platforms inevitably softened.

The lesson is not that operational improvement is a mistake. It is that travel brands are constantly pulled toward rationalisation unless they deliberately protect the things that made them distinctive in the first place.

The brands that win are usually the most patient

That protection requires patience, which is precisely what many challenger brands struggle to maintain. Most expect positioning to justify itself far too quickly. When the effect is slower than hoped, the temptation is to abandon the long-term territory in favour of short-term performance tactics that feel easier to justify internally.

But the brands that ultimately build meaningful equity are usually the ones willing to tolerate that discomfort for longer than everyone else.

Over time, whitespace defended consistently becomes territory. Territory becomes brand equity. Brand equity becomes stronger direct demand, lower acquisition costs, greater pricing resilience, and a customer relationship that is less dependent on being the cheapest option in the market.

None of it arrives quickly, which is precisely why so many brands abandon the work before the advantage starts compounding.