Skift Take

Travel companies slashed marketing budgets last year as travel in the majority of the world faced an unknown future. Now that the recovery has begun, they need to double down on marketing investment to drive recovery and growth.

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When the pandemic started and travel was immediately put on pause last year, marketing budget was among the first to undergo drastic reduction in travel companies around the world. Skift Research conducted a survey in late April last year to gauge the damage to the marketing team. Out of the 756 companies participating in the survey, 90 percent had already cut marketing spending.

As the year went by, there were patches of recovery across different sectors and regions, determined by virus case numbers, and levels of government lockdowns and restrictions. Marketers were scrambling to find new data sources to capture the fleeting and fluid demand, sending the appropriate messages, all with much tighter budgets and a lack of a playbook to fall back on.

With the unprecedented disruption behind us, what marketing leaders have in front of them are tough jobs of recalibrating still-limited resources and helping steer their companies in the right direction through their knowledge of consumers and actions to reach consum