New year, new plans? Why travel marketing can’t rely on old habits in 2026

January has a particular energy to it. It’s the time when decks are revised, budgets are revisited, and teams start talking about what this year is going to look like. New goals, fresh plans, maybe even a quiet sense of optimism that this will be the year things finally feel more joined up.

In travel marketing, that New Year energy often fades quietly into familiar territory. Planning starts with good intentions, but before long the same frameworks resurface, the same assumptions guide decisions, and the focus shifts to pushing known channels a little harder rather than stepping back to question whether they still reflect how travellers actually behave.

And yet, if the last year taught us anything, it’s that travel marketing hasn’t just evolved, it has fundamentally shifted.

The uncomfortable truth behind “new year, new me” planning

Most New Year’s resolutions fail not because the intention is wrong, but because the underlying behaviour doesn’t actually change. Gym memberships spike, habits don’t — and marketing plans aren’t all that different.

Teams talk about being more customer-centric, more efficient, more creative but planning still starts with channels instead of journeys, optimisation instead of influence, and performance metrics that only explain a fraction of what’s really going on.

Meanwhile, travellers are moving faster, making decisions earlier, and relying more heavily on platforms, algorithms, and AI-driven recommendations to narrow their choices — often before a

Discovery no longer unfolds neatly, influence doesn’t sit where it used to, and much of what shapes demand never shows up in attribution reports. Yet despite this, many 2026 plans are likely to still be built as if none of that has changed.

When trusted strategies quietly stop working

There’s a reason marketing feels harder now, even when activity levels are high. It leaves teams trying to make sense of a landscape where:

• Inspiration, research, and comparison often happen in the same moment
• Platforms increasingly control what gets surfaced, prioritised, or ignored
• Content parity is the norm, not the exception
• And performance is shaped by signals we can’t always see or track

This creates a strange tension. Brands are producing more content, running more campaigns, and spending more but at the same time feeling less confident about what’s actually driving growth.

That tension is exactly what sits behind The new commerce marketing playbook. The ebook doesn’t argue that travel brands need more channels or louder campaigns, but that they need to rethink how influence, visibility and performance are earned in a platform-led, AI-accelerated world.

A different kind of resolution for 2026

Instead of another “do more with less” resolution that quietly fades by February, 2026 is the year travel brands need to do things differently — starting with the questions they ask at the very beginning of the year. Questions like:

• Are we visible early enough in the journey to shape choice, not just capture intent?
• Does our content genuinely help travellers feel confident, or does it blend into the background?
• Are we investing based on what’s easy to measure, or what actually contributes to demand?

It also means recognising that modern travel marketing only works when strategy, creativity, engagement, and performance are connected — not planned in isolation and stitched together later.

This isn’t about abandoning performance, or chasing the latest trend, rather it’s about building a marketing approach that reflects how travel decisions are really being made today, not how they were made a few years ago.

Starting the year with clarity, not noise

The most valuable thing a team can have at the start of the year isn’t a bigger plan — it’s clearer thinking.

Platform 195’s new commerce marketing playbook exists to help OTAs, tour operators and travel brands step back from day-to-day execution and see the bigger picture: the forces reshaping travel demand, the implications for growth, and what a more resilient marketing engine actually looks like in practice.

If your New Year resolution is to reduce wasted effort, build stronger differentiation, win earlier in the traveller journey, and make better decisions in an increasingly opaque environment then this is a good place to begin.

Download The new commerce marketing playbook now and start 2026 with a clearer, more connected approach to travel marketing.

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