In 2025, many travel marketers flipped their growth mix: remarketing (paid re-engagement plus push/email) now outperforms classic user acquisition (UA) on ROAS and booking volume. Rising CPIs, long decisions, and privacy changes made activating existing demand more capital-efficient than chasing new installs.

If retargeting can beat UA in one of the hardest funnels, travel with 80%+ abandonment and lengthy consideration, it can beat it anywhere you can recreate context fast.

Why retargeting won travel

Travel funnels leak by design: travelers search, compare, and return later — often across devices. That creates massive “near-buyers” who only need the right nudge: the same itinerary or room, with updated price, scarcity, and frictionless deep linking. Meanwhile CPIs climbed, so each incremental booking from known users beats the unit economics of prospecting. Privacy didn’t kill remarketing; it modernized it: Apple AdAttributionKit (AAK) and Android’s Protected Audience API enable privacy-safe re-engagement and aggregated measurement without device IDs.

Turn the travel Playbook into a Framework

1. Events that mirror intent: search → view (SKU/itinerary) → save → checkout start → payment attempt → purchase. Enrich with price-drops, date changes, loyalty tier.
   
2. Identity & deep linking: hashed email/phone for owned channels, consented ad identifiers where allowed, and robust (deferred) deep links that land users on the exact item they last viewed.
   
3. Audiences by recency & value: hot (checkout starters, recent searchers), warm (repeat browsers/wishlisters), cold (dormant). Layer predicted order value and flexibility (date shifters) to prioritize budget.
   
4. Dynamic creative: auto-pull price/availability; add urgency (“2 left”), timeboxing (“fare dropped—24h”), and social proof.
   
5. Measurement for truth: holdouts (geo or PSA/ghost-ads) first; then align to AAK (iOS re-engagement windows) and Protected Audience (on-device custom audiences) for lift and guardrails.
   

Vertical Recipes in 60 Seconds

Ecommerce & Marketplaces. Swap “itinerary” for SKU. Triggers: product view, add-to-cart, checkout start, price-drop, back-in-stock. Dynamic product ads + cart-abandon flows; KPIs: recovered revenue, checkout completion, ROAS.
Subscriptions (OTT/health/edu). Triggers: trial started → not paid, paywall views, streak breaks, churn-risk. Creative: “continue watching/learning, time-boxed incentives. KPIs: trial-to-paid, churn save, D30 re-engagement ROAS.
Fintech (banking/investing/lending). Triggers: KYC/start not finished, funding incomplete, repeated product visits. Creative: concierge KYC help, safety and clarity; strict compliance. KPIs: KYC completion, funded accounts, cost per activated user.
Gaming. Triggers: D3–D7 churners, payer lapsers, event lapsers. Creative: limited-time passes, comeback streaks, seasonal events. KPIs: return-to-play, ARPDAU lift, payback vs prospecting CPI.
On-Demand & Mobility. Triggers: first-order not placed, cadence gaps, weather/price surge. Creative: fee-free first order, surge-smart prompts. Caps are tight to avoid fatigue.

90-Day pivot (without breaking roadmaps)

Days 1–14: Finalize event schema tied to value (CLV proxies, order bands). Stand up product/feed for dynamic ads. Test deep links from every surface (ad → app, web → app).
Days 15–30: Ship three audience tiers (hot/warm/cold) and 4–6 creative concepts: price drop, scarcity, social proof, value props. Sequence owned → paid (push/email within hours; paid for 3–7 days if no action).
Days 31–60: Implement holdouts (geo or PSA). Map iOS flows to AAK re-engagement windows; use Android Protected Audience custom audiences. Add automatic suppression after engagement.
Days 61–90: Reallocate 15–30% of prospecting budget into the top two re-engagement cohorts by CPE/CPO-to-ROAS. Enforce 3–5 impressions/day/user. Expand to lifecycle moments (loyalty milestones, seasonality).

Metrics That Matter

• Incrementality (incremental conversions per incremental dollar) as the north star.
  
• Stable cost metrics: CPE/CPO, not just eCPI.
  
• Leading indicators by vertical: D7/D30 return-to-action (travel/gaming), checkout completion & recovered revenue (ecommerce), trial-to-paid & churn save (subscriptions), KYC/funding completion (fintech).
  
• Creative health: frequency, fatigue, and dynamic feed freshness.
  

Common pitfalls (and fixes)

• Counting natural return as paid lift. Always keep a holdout.
  
• Static creative vs dynamic intent. If price/availability change daily, your ads must too.
  
• Privacy workarounds instead of platform rails. Prefer AAK, Protected Audience, SKAN, contextual signals, and aggregated reporting over brittle ID hacks.
  
• Weak deep linking. Every click should land exactly where intent began.
  

Bottom Line

Travel proved a structural truth: when funnels leak and CPIs rise, retargeting converts existing demand more efficiently than prospecting especially with modern privacy rails. Standardize events, wire up dynamic feeds and deep links, test incrementality, and align with AdAttributionKit and the Privacy Sandbox. Do that, and you can replicate travel’s win across ecommerce, subscriptions, fintech, gaming, and on-demand with lower risk, faster learning, and higher ROAS.