Marketing this Year’s Sales Season Promotions? Don’t Forget Travel Tuesday

Dating back to a 2018 New York Times article, Travel Tuesday as a marketing tactic is the travel industry’s attempt to grab a piece of the post-Thanksgiving sales pie specifically for promotions related to travel. Though it started with the airlines, it has slowly expanded to packaged travel and cruises.

So far, Travel Tuesday continues to be an infinitesimal piece of the post-Thanksgiving sales season, but interest in it is growing according to research by McKinsey & Company.

Searches for “Travel Tuesday,” according to Google trends data cited by McKinsey, have increased more than fivefold over a two-year period.

The McKinsey report also cited proprietary data from travel marketing platform Sojern, which is used by hotels, destinations, attractions, and airlines. In 2023, Travel Tuesday saw “notable increases” in hotel, cruise, and airline bookings by U.S. travelers, when compared with the two weeks before and the two weeks after.

Additionally, the Sojern data showed a strong preference for resort bookings on Travel Tuesday.

“Searches across the 15 most popular destinations overall were up 37 percent on Travel Tuesday, compared with the average results for other Tuesdays in November and December 2023,” wrote McKinsey analysts. “But this search traffic spiked higher, on average, for resort destinations such as Nassau, Bahamas, and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.”

The McKinsey authors speculated that travelers are in search of discounted package deals on Travel Tuesday (as they are on Black Friday and Cyber Monday), and that resort offerings are often tied into package deals.

It may also be that resorts and resort packages were the travel entities most pushing promotions and bookings on that day. (TMR’s speculation.)

While interest in Travel Tuesday among consumers is slowly growing, the travel agency industry is not yet making much of it.

Of some 10 agency consortia, hosts, and franchises we reached out to, only two have so far said they will be doing any Travel Tuesday marketing.

TRAVELSAVERS (as well as NEST and The Affluent Traveler Collection) have a social media post planned for this year’s Travel Tuesday, specifically highlighting the advantages of booking travel through advisors.

However, Cruise Planners told TMP that it will engage in a targeted e-marketing program on behalf of its franchisees that includes emails, social media posts, and dynamic website banners, promoting Travel Tuesday offers (in combination with Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotions).  OnTravel Tuesday, the company will specifically be doing social media posts and website banners.