2025 was the year of introduction, but 2026 will be the year of integration and reckoning. The promise of AI is no longer futuristic; it’s the harsh reality that’s rewriting the rules of online advertising. We’re no longer talking about AI as a tool, but about AI as the new infrastructure of the market.
The most fundamental shift? The click as we know it is losing its value. AI assistants and search overviews are absorbing the informational phase, leaving marketers facing declining website visits and uncertain attribution. The battle is no longer about who creates the best ad, but about who has the best data and the smartest strategy to guide the AI. In this blog post, we present seven inevitable trends, each action-oriented and crucial for the travel and leisure sector. We’re leaving last year’s trends behind.
Our online advertising trends summarized:
- AI Mode absorbs the click;
- First-Party Data: the gold of 2026;
- Branding is becoming essential and more accessible;
- The shift from keyword targeting to AI-driven intent;
- Walled gardens are moving from exposure to direct transactions;
- The Creator & UGC revolution: The new performance channel;
- Is that annoying cookie banner disappearing?
1. AI Mode Absorbs the Click
AI Takes Over the Dream and Plan Phases
The traditional search engine experience has fundamentally changed. With the rise of AI Overviews and Generative AI in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), a significant portion of informative clicks is being absorbed by the search engine itself. Since the arrival of AI Mode, this has increased even further. For the travel and recreation sector, this means that the Dream and the top of the Plan phases, where users search for “fun days out in bad weather” or “most beautiful campsites in Portugal,” are now often answered directly and completely in the SERP. This inevitably leads to a decline in the Click-Through Rate (CTR) and the value of website visits as a primary KPI for early engagement. We see this happening as early as 2025, and it will become much more pronounced. It’s less dramatic for our industries, but the Daily Mail previously reported in this article via Emerce about an 80% drop in traffic due to the arrival of AI Overviews. In general, a 25% decline is expected, according to research firm Gartner.
The marketing mix must serve the data input.
The focus is shifting from traffic quantity to the quality of the data input we provide AI with. Reporting solely on traffic volume will become a thing of the past by 2025. For advertising specifically, this means we’ll have to work with lower CTRs and smaller remarketing lists. To compensate for this loss, we need to look for other engagement signals, such as video views and interaction within YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other channels. Furthermore, adding first-party analytics is inevitable to further train algorithms (you can read more about this in trend 2). This means the marketing mix will change significantly, and we’ll see this reflected in 2026. Search will no longer be the driving force (you can read more about this in trend 4). Especially through AI video creation, obtaining good material will become more accessible (you can read more about this in trend 3). As you can see, many trends go hand in hand, and AI is the common thread.
From traffic to new KPIs and AI ads
The major challenge lies in measuring unmeasured intent and successfully linking it to the lower funnel. The AI must be trained to interpret on-site actions as signals and use them to fuel the Performance campaigns. Consider a day attraction, for example: If a visitor searches for “zoo ticket discount” and the AI Overview immediately shows the price, we need to measure it as soon as that visitor visits the ticketing section on our website or watches a video ad about the zoo in question. These early actions are the new KPIs that keep the AI engine running. Less traffic also means higher conversion rates, so don’t count your chickens before they hatch. In 2026, it will also be possible to run search ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews. This gives users the opportunity to click through when the situation demands it.
2. First-Party Data, the Gold of 2026
The most fundamental trend for 2026 is data ownership.
First-party data is the only reliable fuel for Google’s AI models to perform. Without this direct information, tools like Performance Max and Smart Bidding are simply blind and inefficient. Collecting your own data is no longer a “perk” for the newsletter, but the absolute foundation for determining and improving your returns. This ties in significantly with trend 1, which states that there will be less website traffic.
Direct result: 2% to 5% higher returns
We see with our own clients that adding this unique data makes an immediate difference. By simply linking your own customer and sales data to your advertising channels via Customer Match, we see an increase in results of at least 2%. The AI of Google, META, and TikTok learns who your best customers are and uses that to find new customers. This is the direct link between the quality of your data and your ultimate bottom line.
3 Ways to Activate Your Data
How do you actually get that valuable data from your reservation system or CRM into your advertising channels? There are three common methods:
- Manual import: You export a list of customers yourself and upload it to your advertising account. This is a good first step, but the data quickly becomes outdated.
- Via Google Sheets: You connect your system to a Google Sheet that syncs automatically. This is an easy way to keep your data fresh.
- Wander Connect (Real-time): For maximum results, we developed Wander Connect. This product creates a live connection between reservation systems (such as Booking Experts or Recranet) and your marketing platforms. This instantly translates every booking into a signal for the AI, allowing your campaigns to be adjusted down to the second.
Concrete real-world example: Imagine a holiday park sharing not only the booking itself but also the ‘Lifetime Value’ (how often does someone return) via Wander Connect. The AI then immediately starts actively searching for families who book more than once a year, instead of just focusing on the cheapest click.
3. Branding becomes essential and more accessible
AI is changing travel discovery. Branding determines who is chosen.
In 2026, your brand awareness will determine whether you’re even considered. When an AI assistant makes recommendations, users quickly choose names they already know. This recognition doesn’t arise the moment the AI provides the answer, but in the period beforehand. Brands that are often visible and have a clear position in the market (Share of Voice) simply feel more trustworthy. If a hotel, holiday park, or destination is already in the user’s mind, it feels like a logical and safe choice when the AI suggests it. If you’re not already familiar with a travel agency, simply being mentioned by a chatbot won’t be enough to secure a booking. So, you’ll need to move up in the 5 stages of travel if you’re not already doing so.
Presence in the Entire Ecosystem
Visibility in AI answers isn’t just achieved with a good website, but by being present across the entire internet. The AI learns from the broader ecosystem: from large comparison sites and well-known travel blogs to marketplaces and official data partners. Brands that invest in strong partnerships and distribution have a much greater chance of even appearing as an option in an AI overview. Imagine: A traveler asks for the “top 5 child-friendly hotels in the Veluwe.” The AI not only retrieves this information from your site but also checks whether you’re well-rated on other platforms. By being visible in the right, reliable places, you secure a spot in the algorithm.
Most decisions aren’t made instantly.
Most decisions aren’t made instantly; people think about them or discuss them at home. It’s precisely in that intermediate phase that branding becomes crucial. Where performance marketing stops at the advertisement, branding continues with emotional storytelling. By showing images where guests are practically reliving their holiday, you stay top-of-mind during the decision-making process. For travel, day attractions, hotels, and holiday parks, this isn’t a future scenario; it’s already happening. Brands that continue to optimize purely for clicks are losing ground to brands that invest in recognition, trust, and mental availability (an interesting term you can read more about in this article).
So prepare now for these three steps:
- Build recognition before demand arises: Ensure you’re already in the guest’s mind (brand recognition) before they ask their first question to an AI assistant;
- Claim your place in the entire network: Build strong partnerships with comparison sites and booking platforms. These are the sources where AI systems draw their knowledge to recommend you;
- Turn attention into a lasting memory: Use beautiful videos and smart repeat ads (retargeting) to bring the experience of your holiday park or attraction to life. Performance gets the click, but memory gets the booking.
4. The Shift from Keyword Targeting to AI-Driven Intent
AI Understands Intent Better Than Keywords
The era of hours of manual keyword research and exact-match targeting will definitively come to an end in 2026. The question is no longer which keywords to buy, but how to train the AI to find your target audience. Artificial intelligence now understands a user’s intent better than individual terms ever could. Imagine: A family searches for “fun things to do with kids during the rain in North Holland.” Where you used to have to bid on that exact combination of words, the AI now recognizes that this family is looking for an indoor activity. Your day trip attraction is shown because the AI understands that you are the solution, even if you never entered that exact search term. We will achieve this in 2026 through AI Max.
From Micro to Macro
This requires a fundamental shift: from micro-level control to macro-level trust. The AI becomes the bidder and the targeter, analyzing thousands of signals per second to recognize patterns that we as humans simply don’t see. Where a marketer used to manually manage 200 keywords, the AI now analyzes the complete search behavior of billions of searches. The reality is that the AI is simply better and faster at matching your offer with the right searcher. This forces you to let go of control and give the AI the space to learn and optimize.
The new tasks of the marketer
Because the AI is taking over targeting, your role as an advertiser will change even more. Success in 2026 depends on three things:
- High-quality feeds: Your product or hotel feed is your most important weapon. Ensure perfect descriptions and relevant features so the AI knows exactly what you’re selling;
- Creative variety: Provide the AI with as many assets as possible. Use different texts, images, and videos. The more variety the AI has, the better it can test what works for which specific target group;
- Feeding data: AI can only learn from good data. By linking your own customer data (First-Party Data, see trend 2) and Enhanced Conversions, the AI understands who your best customers are and searches for similar profiles, regardless of their search terms.
Pitfalls to avoid
- Giving up too soon. The first two weeks can be disappointing. The AI is learning. Give it at least 4-6 weeks.
- Insufficient input. If you only give the AI three images and two texts, you severely limit its capabilities. The power lies in variation.
- Measure incorrect conversions. Also measure valuable micro-conversions earlier in the process, such as pricing page visits and video views.
5. Walled Gardens are moving from exposure to direct transactions;
Um, what are Walled Gardens?
‘Walled Gardens’ are the large, closed online platforms like Google, Facebook/Instagram, and TikTok. Originally, they sent potential guests to your website (you can read more about this in trend 3) to book a vacation or buy tickets. But now that’s changing: bookings or ticket purchases can increasingly be made outside of the website. This is because AI assistants, such as those in Gemini or ChatGPT, are becoming increasingly adept at handling purchases.
New touchpoints in the customer journey
A customer no longer has to go to a website. The AI assistant asks: “Would you like to book this trip?” and the customer says “Yes,” after which the booking is processed directly in the chat or in the platform’s app. This is the transactional Walled Garden. In this article, you can read how booking.com is gradually moving towards allowing you to book your next hotel stay directly via ChatGPT. This isn’t happening as quickly as e-commerce, but our advice is to keep a close eye on this, especially with the developments surrounding Booking.com.
The final step in the funnel is being hijacked.
This is becoming a major problem for travel & recreation. Your website is being bypassed, meaning the platform is “hijacking” the final sale. Imagine: A user sees a TikTok video of your day trip attraction. Previously, they would click through to the website. Now, the user can use a “shop now” button to buy a ticket or claim a discount code directly in TikTok, without leaving the app. We previously wrote about a similar trend for airline tickets in our blog about agentic checkout.
Anticipate!
There are two options:
- Collaborate: Ensure you advertise where guests are buying. This means sharing data with these platforms to make the campaigns there as smart as possible.
- Enhance: Make your own app (for tickets, loyalty, navigation) the ultimate, secure environment. The guest using the app is loyal, and their data is safe there. This is the best way to protect the sales funnel.
6. The Creator & UGC Revolution: The New Performance Channel
From ‘Soft Branding’ to Hard Conversions
By 2026, User-Generated Content (UGC)—content created by real people instead of professional film crews—will no longer be a “nice bonus” for your social media. It will become part of your best-performing ads on channels like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. The “Creator” (or influencer) is the new distribution engine of the early funnel. Google is cleverly capitalizing on this with the new Creator Partnerships Hub. This allows advertisers to instantly discover and manage partnerships, and measure results based on hard performance metrics like bookings and ROAS.
Authenticity trumps the polished commercial
Why does this work so well for advertising? Because by 2026, consumers will immediately recognize “too perfect” videos as ads and filter them out. Content that feels like a personal recommendation from a friend simply performs better in paid campaigns than a video that adheres to brand guidelines to the letter. We regularly test this and see significant differences emerge here and there. Imagine: A video of a family filming their first reaction upon entering their safari tent with a wobbly smartphone camera works far better as an ad than a polished drone video of the same park. This unpolished edge creates a more direct connection with the viewer and a higher conversion rate in your ad sets. We previously wrote in this blog about the enormous rise of influencer marketing and its indispensable role in leisure and travel.
In summary: What should you do with UGC?
- Focus on authenticity: Let go of control a bit; content doesn’t have to be perfect to sell.
- Measure everything: Use tools like the Creator Partnerships Hub to see which creator actually delivers the lowest cost per booking.
- Combine: Don’t just use UGC organically, but use it as the main creative in your Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns.
- Test, test, test!
You can find our influencer marketing trends for 2026 here.
7. Will that annoying cookie banner disappear?
Privacy legislation relaxation in the works
The European Union is currently working on a major overhaul of online privacy rules through the new ePrivacy Regulation. The main goal of this proposal from the European Council is to put an end to “cookie fatigue.” Instead of those annoying, recurring banners on every website, control shifts to the internet browser (such as Chrome or Safari). You then set once, centrally, in your browser, whether or not you want to be tracked. Websites are then required to automatically respect this universal setting. This ensures a much smoother and faster user experience.
More bookings thanks to a “clean” booking process
This change has a direct, positive impact on the ROI of your ads. Currently, you pay for a click from Google Ads, but the visitor immediately encounters an annoying cookie banner that interrupts the flow. This causes unnecessary drop-offs before the guest has even fully viewed your offer. In the new situation, this barrier disappears. For advertisers in the recreational sector, this means that the traffic you pay for ends up directly and without distractions in the booking funnel. Fewer hurdles between the first click and payment result in a higher conversion rate and therefore a lower cost per booking.
New strategy: Manage with AI instead of pixels
While the booking process becomes smoother, the technology behind your ads is fundamentally changing. If a user clicks “don’t track” in their browser, your traditional tracking pixel is blocked. You can no longer “pursue” this person with a standard retargeting ad. This forces advertisers to switch to Contextual Advertising (advertising based on the content of a page) and Conversion Modeling. In this process, Google’s AI uses the available data to predict the results of the rest of your traffic. Your measurement plan for 2026 will no longer revolve around simple cookies, but around a smart data structure that helps the AI recognize patterns without direct tracking.
Why is this a trend for 2026 now?
We’ve been hearing about the disappearance of cookies for years (we first wrote about it in this article in 2019), but 2026 marks the point of no return. With the final rollout of Google’s Privacy Sandbox and the new European regulations for browser settings, we’re moving out of the testing phase. 2026 is the year in which “cookie-less advertising” is no longer a choice, but the only way for a company to remain measurable online.
