One of the questions I get asked fairly often is whether airports should invest in third-party travel marketing platforms that promise access to highly qualified travelers.

It's an appealing proposition.

The audience is already planning a trip, they're often identified through first-party travel data, and the reporting usually provides a clear line between the campaign and the reservation. On paper, it checks a lot of boxes.

I've tested a number of these types of programs over the years, and my biggest takeaway has been fairly simple.

You need to balance precision with scale.

A highly qualified audience is certainly valuable, but that doesn't automatically make it an impactful marketing channel. One of the challenges I've consistently run into is that these audiences are often relatively small when you narrow it down to your airport’s catchment area. The targeting is excellent, but the available impressions can be limited, and it's difficult to generate enough volume to meaningfully influence the overall parking business.

That's not necessarily a criticism of the platforms, it's simply recognizing what they're designed to do.

I've always found they're most effective when viewed as tactical channels rather than foundational ones.

Before investing in highly targeted audiences, I'd make sure the fundamentals are already working. Paid search should be capturing existing demand. Organic search and AI search should be helping travelers discover the airport earlier in the planning process. Email should be building relationships with existing customers. The airport itself should be reinforcing those messages once travelers arrive.

Those channels tend to create the scale that parking programs need. Specialized audiences can certainly contribute incremental reservations, but I've rarely seen them become meaningful growth engines on their own.

One thing I've learned over the years is that marketers naturally gravitate toward channels with clean attribution. They're easier to measure, easier to report on, and easier to explain to leadership. That's understandable, but the challenge is that conversion attribution and business impact aren't always the same thing.

A campaign may generate measurable reservations and still have very little influence on overall parking performance if the audience simply isn't large enough.

That doesn't mean those campaigns shouldn't exist, but it does mean they should be evaluated from a broader lens – Cost Per Acquisition, Cost Per Mille (or cost per 1,000 views), and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) are great indicators of actual performance.

From my perspective, specialized travel audiences work best as part of a balanced media strategy with a sizable budget, not as a substitute for one. They can complement the channels that consistently generate demand, but they rarely replace the need to build awareness, answer traveler questions, and create lasting customer relationships.

I've found that's a much healthier way to evaluate almost any new marketing channel.

Start by asking how much impact it can realistically have on the business.

Not just how precisely it can find the customer.