It's Budget Season. Here's the Question Worth Asking Before You Finalize 2027.

If you’re in the middle of building your 2027 marketing budget, you already know it’s rarely a simple exercise. There are competing priorities, multiple stakeholders and plenty of pressure to prove that every dollar is working as hard as possible. Most teams are being asked to grow, improve efficiency and defend their investments, often without the luxury of significantly larger budgets.

That pressure usually leads to a familiar exercise: evaluating channels, reallocating spend and deciding what deserves more or less investment next year. But there may be another question worth asking before the budget is final: How much value are you already generating that your current marketing mix simply isn’t capturing?

It’s a different way to think about efficiency. Instead of starting with where to spend the next dollar, start by looking at what happens to the demand you’ve already paid to create.

Paid acquisition isn’t getting any cheaper

Whether you’re filling cruise cabins, hotel rooms, timeshare tours or driving visitation to a destination, the economics of paid acquisition continue to get more challenging. Cost per click keeps rising, brand-defense bidding means paying more just to protect searches for your own name, and AI-powered search and booking tools are changing how travelers research, compare and ultimately choose where to spend their money.

None of that means paid media is suddenly ineffective. It does mean marketers should be careful about assuming that the same investment will continue producing the same return. If acquisition costs continue to rise, simply putting more money into the top of the funnel becomes an increasingly expensive growth strategy.

That makes what happens after someone reaches your site much more important.

How much intent disappears when someone leaves your site?

Think about how people actually plan travel. Someone may spend 20 minutes comparing sailings, exploring resorts, checking availability or pricing out a vacation. They may visit more than once. They may get far enough into the process that, from a marketer’s perspective, they are clearly demonstrating intent.

Then they leave.

If they haven’t filled out a form, logged in or otherwise identified themselves, much of that intent becomes difficult to act on. Digital retargeting can extend the conversation, but it still depends on signals that become less reliable over time. The result is a strange disconnect: brands have more behavioral data than ever, yet some of their most valuable prospects can still disappear without ever becoming part of an addressable audience.

That raises an important budget question. If you spend heavily to generate traffic but have limited ways to continue the conversation with the people who don’t immediately convert, how much of your acquisition investment is effectively being left unfinished?

The same principle applies beyond anonymous site traffic. Past guests, lapsed customers and consumers who have opted out of email may still have significant value, even if they are difficult to reach through the channels already doing most of the work in your plan.

Your competition for the traveler starts long before the booking

Travel is rarely a linear buying journey. Consumers compare brands, destinations, itineraries and experiences across multiple sites, often over the course of weeks or months. By the time someone finally lands on your website, they may already have formed opinions about several competitors.

That changes the way we should think about prospecting. If your acquisition strategy is primarily focused on capturing people who are already searching for your brand or visiting your site, you may be fighting over a relatively narrow slice of the market. There may be a much larger opportunity in understanding who is actively shopping the category before they have decided where to book.

This becomes especially important during peak booking periods, when demand increases but so does competition for attention. Digital CPMs rise because every brand is chasing many of the same consumers through many of the same auctions. At some point, adding another dollar to the same channel may create diminishing returns simply because everyone else is adding another dollar too.

The challenge, then, is not just finding more prospects. It is finding additional ways to reach the right prospects without relying entirely on the same increasingly crowded channels.

Maybe the opportunity is in the gaps

This is where identity resolution, direct mail retargeting and audience expansion become interesting, not because they are replacements for digital marketing, but because they address parts of the customer journey traditional channels don’t always cover well.

An anonymous visitor who demonstrates meaningful intent may be identifiable beyond the browser session itself. A high-value past guest may still be reachable even after opting out of email. A traveler researching a competitive brand may signal interest in the category long before they ever visit your site. Those are all audiences that can fall into the gaps between acquisition, CRM and retention strategies.

Direct mail gives marketers one way to act on those gaps because it is tied to a physical identity rather than relying entirely on an email address, login or persistent browser signal. For a traveler who shows meaningful intent and leaves, that can mean continuing the conversation through a relevant piece of mail shortly after the visit rather than simply hoping they come back.

The opportunity can also extend beyond retargeting. Lookalike and competitive-intent audiences can help marketers identify potential customers outside the pool they already know, creating an incremental source of reach instead of repeatedly marketing to the same known audience

Across NaviStone travel programs, we’ve seen response rates around 5.5% and blended ROAS around 8.5x, with lookalike prospecting expanding addressable audiences by 20% to 70% in some programs. Those results matter, but the more interesting point may be what they reveal: there is measurable value in audiences that many marketing plans still treat as unreachable.

The question worth asking for 2027

Most budget conversations eventually come down to the same questions: Where should we spend more? Where should we pull back? Which channels are driving the strongest return?

Those are important questions, but they may not tell the whole story.

As acquisition gets more expensive and consumer behavior gets more fragmented, the bigger opportunity may be in understanding where valuable intent is already being created but never fully captured. How many high-intent visitors leave without becoming addressable? How many past customers sit outside your active CRM channels? How much prospecting is focused on people already familiar with your brand rather than consumers still deciding among competitors?

The smartest 2027 budget may not be the one that simply spends more efficiently.

It may be the one that wastes less of the demand it already creates.

Kara Lange leads Enterprise Sales for the travel vertical at NaviStone. If this resonates with what you're wrestling with in your 2027 plan, I'd welcome the chance to talk strategy. Book a session with me here.