Nobody wakes up having dreamt about booking a flight. They dream about standing on a Hawaiian beach at sunset, feeling the warm sand between their toes. They imagine people watching in Times Square or hiking through the misty Scottish highlands (incidently, both places where Obvlo has customers).

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The flight? It's just a logistical component required to make the dream a reality.

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This fundamental truth about travel is reshaping how successful hotel and travel brands engage with their audiences, particularly the occasional leisure traveler who represents 53% of total travel spend industry-wide. Yet these travelers are notoriously difficult to engage, having just 1.1 interactions with travel players each year.

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The Product You're Really Selling

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When someone books a trip, they're not purchasing a tangible product. They're investing in an experience, memories, and a version of themselves exploring the world. The hotel room, the rental car, the flight - these are necessities that enable the real product: the destination experience itself.

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Leisure travelers typically want to enjoy an experience during a journey, and this is what leads to the selection of the destination. The implication is clear: if you want to win their business, you need to sell them on the experience first, during and even after.

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This is where traditional travel marketing often falls short. Product pages filled with amenities lists and booking flows optimized for conversion miss the crucial truth that most visitors aren't ready to book yet. 

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This is why we see site visitors who are exposed to destination content from Obvlo spend on average 95% more time on-site than the average visitor. They're dreaming, planning, and imagining what their trip could be.

Destination Content as the New Loyalty Currency

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Traditional loyalty programs have focused on "earn-and-burn" schemes, rewarding frequent interactions with points and miles. But when your target audience only takes two to three trips per year, frequency isn't a game you can win.

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The answer lies in engaging travelers during the initial planning phase with local, detailed destination content. This is when travelers are most receptive, most engaged, and actively seeking information that helps them visualize their upcoming experience.

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Think about it: a traveler doesn't need to know about your check-in process when they're still deciding between Bali and Barcelona. They need to know what it feels like to explore the Gothic Quarter at dawn, where locals go for the best tapas, and what hidden beaches lie just outside the city center.

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By providing this experiential content, you're not just informing, you're positioning your brand as the guide to their dream destination. 

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You're building trust and demonstrating that you understand what they're really seeking: not a hotel room, but an authentic experience in a place they're excited to discover.

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The Two-Month Window

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The planning phase represents a massive opportunity. While travelers are researching, reading guides, watching videos, and building Pinterest boards, they're highly engaged and actively looking for brands that can help them realize their vision.

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During these two months, destination content serves multiple purposes:

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Inspiration: Rich, experiential content helps travelers visualize what their trip could be, moving them from "someday" to "let's book this."

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Practical Planning: Detailed local information—from transport tips to cultural insights—positions you as the expert authority they can trust.

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Sustained Engagement: Multiple touch points with valuable content keep your brand top-of-mind throughout the decision-making process.

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Conversion Foundation: When they're finally ready to book, you've already established yourself as the brand that understands their destination.

In trip, you can enhance the experience through personalized local recommendations, and post trip you can market future experiences in a more segmented way.

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Making Experiences Tangible

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The challenge for travel marketers is making the intangible tangible. How do you sell an experience before someone has experienced it? Through content that:

• Tells stories rather than lists features
• Shows what's possible rather than what's included
• Focuses on the traveler's perspective, not the property's amenities
• Provides genuine local knowledge that helps visitors "live like a local"
• Addresses different travel personas and their specific interests

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A luxury traveler researching Paris doesn't need the same content as a family planning their first European adventure or a solo traveler seeking authentic cultural experiences. Personalized, relevant destination content acknowledges these different needs and speaks directly to each traveler's specific aspirations.

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Beyond the Booking

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Here's where many travel brands miss another opportunity: the opportunities for destination content don’t stop once someone books. In fact, the period between booking and arrival is when travelers are most excited and engaged with planning their experience.

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Pre-arrival destination content enhances the guest experience before they even arrive. It builds anticipation, helps them plan their days, and ensures they arrive feeling prepared and excited rather than anxious and uncertain. It also keeps momentum up and thus reduces the chances of cancellation.

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Post-trip content maintains the relationship, encouraging sharing, reviews, and, crucially, inspiring the next booking. The occasional leisure traveler may only travel two to three times per year, but they're planning those trips year-round.

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Based on their engagement on their last trip, you will have gained an understanding of their interests and what they enjoyed most about the place. You can use these attributes to match similar destinations, segment and market to them in a more effective way for the next trip.

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The Competitive Advantage

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As customer acquisition costs continue to rise, particularly with the decline of third-party cookies, brands that master experiential destination content have a significant advantage. They're not just competing on price or points; they're competing on inspiration, guidance, and understanding what travelers actually want.

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With occasional leisure travelers now the largest segment of the market, the ability to engage them effectively through destination content has become essential for building loyalty and reducing acquisition costs.

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The travel brands winning in this new landscape recognize that they're not in the business of selling flights, rooms, or tours. They're in the business of selling experiences, dreams, and the confidence that travelers can turn their destination aspirations into reality.

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The Product Travellers Are Actually Buying

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The flight to Hawaii is a necessity, one that might even cause stress rather than enjoyment in the travellers mind.

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The experience of being in Hawaii is the product travellers actually crave.

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This is a historical challenge for travel companies. How do you sell something intangible? If everybody has unique interests and requirements from a trip, curating a unique product for them is an impossible manual task.

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The answer lies in agentic AI and destination content - content created and personalized at scale with humans in the loop to fine tune.

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Obvlo takes an agentic approach to this process, following all the steps an army of content creators would take to produce guides and then showing the right content to the right person at the right time. Not using AI to 'give recommendations' but using AI as an eneabler to research the destination, produce multi-lingual guides, add attributes and personalise what's shown to the unique individual.

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Curate a journey that inspires those dreams and helps them envision their experience, and the bookings will follow.