Global travel growth is accelerating, but conversion and loyalty are won locally

Global travel is booming, but growth is getting harder to win

We may be entering a golden age of travel. International visitor spending is forecast to reach an all-time high of $2.1 trillion this year, surpassing the previous peak set in 2019. The travel and tourism sector as a whole is projected to account for more than 10% of global GDP in 2025, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Demand is resilient despite ongoing geopolitical and economic uncertainty. A survey published by Ipsos last year found that 79% of European residents planned to travel during the summer, alongside 71% of respondents in North America. For many consumers, travel remains a priority even as other discretionary spending comes under pressure.

The performance of leading travel brands reflects this momentum. Booking Holdings, whose portfolio includes Booking.com, Agoda, and Kayak, reported nearly 8% year-on-year growth in room nights in Q2 and raised its full-year guidance.

The group has benefited from a continued shift toward direct bookings, with more customers engaging through loyalty programmes and owned channels rather than paid acquisition. It also reported a 30% increase in customers booking across multiple travel verticals, such as combining accommodation with flights.

Airbnb, while no longer posting the double-digit growth of earlier years, continues to exceed expectations in key regions. Strong performance across APAC and LATAM has supported its broader international ambitions, and the company announced plans in its Q2 earnings to expand further into the European hotel market.

Elsewhere, outbound travel from India is fuelling the international expansion of MakeMyTrip, which recently partnered with Premier Inn to offer access to more than 900 hotels across the UK, Ireland, and Germany. In China, Trip.com has renewed its focus on cross-border travel since restrictions were lifted, with Q1 2025 earnings showing inbound bookings doubling year on year.

Across these examples, several common threads emerge. Growth is increasingly driven by platforms that prioritise user experience, deepen direct customer relationships, and offer integrated journeys rather than isolated transactions. Booking Holdings’ Connected Trip strategy is a clear illustration of this shift toward end-to-end experiences designed to keep travellers engaged across the full lifecycle of a trip.

At the same time, traveller expectations have evolved. Much of what was predicted in the immediate post-pandemic period is now playing out at scale.

As Tripadvisor CEO Steve Kaufer observed in 2022, travellers want to explore destinations in more immersive and experiential ways, and to feel more connected to local culture and context. This appetite is visible in Airbnb’s relaunch of Experiences, which foregrounds activities hosted by locals, as well as in the way agile platforms are responding to social and cultural microtrends.

In South Korea, for example, Klook has capitalised on the rise of privately organised tours led by local students, often promoted via social media and booked through the platform. Airbnb has similarly worked with local creators to promote stays and experiences aligned with major cultural moments, from concert tours to sporting events.

All of this points to a clear reality for travel brands. Global demand may be accelerating, but customer preference is increasingly shaped by how familiar, relevant, and trustworthy an experience feels at the point of decision. Travellers may be eager to discover something new once they arrive, but when they are choosing where to book, small signals of relevance and ease still make a decisive difference.

Turning global presence into local preference

While “local” has become a marker of quality in travel, particularly when it comes to authentic, immersive, and sustainable experiences, the bigger opportunity for international travel brands lies earlier in the journey. Long before a traveller arrives at a destination, trust is being built or lost through the way a brand presents itself across markets.

Travel companies serving both outbound and inbound audiences face a complex reality. Language, cultural expectations, technology ecosystems, regulatory requirements, and customer behaviour vary significantly from one market to the next. Digital experiences that perform well in one region can quickly feel unfamiliar or unreliable in another if they are not adapted accordingly.

This matters most at the point of booking. While many travellers are motivated by the desire to discover new cultures, the Ipsos survey cited earlier found that 40% actively seek cultural novelty once they arrive.

That instinct rarely extends to the purchasing phase. When committing to a high-value, high-consideration purchase such as a flight or accommodation, travellers overwhelmingly favour experiences that feel familiar, clear, and trustworthy.

For leading travel brands, this is why adapting experiences market by market has become a growth lever rather than a background task. Successful platforms do not treat adaptation as a final step in delivery.

They invest in making new markets feel intuitive from day one, recognising that small signals of relevance can have an outsized impact on conversion and loyalty.

Airbnb’s expansion strategy offers a clear example. In Japan, the company launched its first dedicated domestic brand campaign last year, designed specifically to resonate with local travellers.

More broadly, Airbnb has been ahead of much of the market in adapting user-generated content such as reviews, using machine translation to make listings and feedback accessible across languages at scale. In 2021, it developed its own in-house translation engine to better support hosts and guests across more than 60 languages, reducing friction in one of the most trust-sensitive parts of the booking experience.

Klook’s growth in South Korea highlights a different but equally important dimension. When the OTA expanded in the region in 2017, customer service quickly emerged as a critical differentiator.

James Lee, Klook’s first employee in Korea, noted at the WiT Seoul conference last year that the inquiry-to-booking ratio in the market is roughly double the global average. Price sensitivity and a strong preference for detailed information meant that responsive, high-quality customer support was essential to conversion.

Beyond service, Klook also adapted to local discovery platforms such as Naver and invested in creator-led marketing to align with regional content consumption habits.

Trip.com describes its international approach as “global vision, local focus,” a framing that underscores how operational decisions can directly shape customer trust.

In Korea, this has included the integration of local payment methods such as KakaoPay and Naver Pay, alongside access to a Korean-language call centre within the app. According to Managing Director Boon Sian Chai, these adaptations have made “a big difference in building trust and enhancing user satisfaction.”

Similar patterns can be seen in India, where both Agoda and MakeMyTrip have tailored their platforms to local expectations. Agoda has prioritised reducing overbooking, a persistent issue in the market, in order to minimise customer disappointment and protect brand credibility.

MakeMyTrip, meanwhile, is using custom language models to improve the consistency of customer-facing communications and to summarise customer care interactions more effectively, supporting both experience quality and operational efficiency.

Across these examples, the outcome is consistent. As Phrase CEO Georg Ell explains in his writing on unlocking global growth, adapting experiences to local expectations helps brands make customers feel “comfortable, understood, and respected.” When travellers feel that a product or service is genuinely “for” them, trust increases, and with it the likelihood of repeat bookings and recommendations.

Ell also points out that while this approach can fuel rapid adoption in the short term, its greater value lies in what it enables over time: stronger loyalty, higher lifetime value, and more sustainable growth as brands expand into new markets.

The question for travel leaders is not whether this kind of market adaptation matters. It is how to deliver it consistently and at scale, without slowing expansion or inflating costs. That is where the real challenges begin.

Where global travel growth breaks down

Adapting experiences across markets is rarely straightforward. For many travel brands, the biggest obstacles are not technological, but organisational and strategic. The complexity lies in aligning teams, priorities, and metrics around experiences that need to work differently in different regions, while still scaling efficiently.

One of the most persistent challenges is measurement. When market adaptation touches product, marketing, customer service, and operations simultaneously, it often inherits the same difficulties associated with customer experience initiatives more broadly. The impact is real, but not always easy to attribute.

Improving trust, reducing friction, and supporting expansion into new markets are outcomes that unfold over time. As a result, investment decisions are frequently made without a clear line of sight into return. Without the right metrics in place, efforts that directly influence conversion and loyalty risk being seen as discretionary rather than strategic.

This lack of visibility can also reinforce a narrower view of adaptation as a language problem to be solved, rather than a business capability to be developed.

Beyond translation: where trust is really won or lost

Translation remains a foundational element of scaling internationally, but it is rarely sufficient on its own. Brands that stop at language risk missing the factors that shape trust and preference in each market, from tone and imagery to product expectations and service norms.

As Phrase CEO Georg Ell has argued, responding effectively to regional differences means acknowledging a broader set of variables. These can include changes to product features to meet local needs, the use of visuals that resonate culturally, pricing models aligned with consumer budgets, and the choice of marketing and customer service channels that customers already trust.

Taken together, these elements determine whether a platform feels intuitive or unfamiliar, reliable or risky.

Recognising friction before it becomes churn

When these factors are overlooked, the consequences are often subtle but cumulative. An experience that feels slightly off can lead to hesitation, abandoned bookings, or increased support queries. Over time, these signals translate into lower conversion rates and higher churn.

Agoda CEO Omri Morgenshtern captured this dynamic when discussing the Indian outbound market. Regardless of destination, he noted, travellers expect to pay using familiar methods, receive content in formats they recognise, and interact with customer support in ways that align with their expectations. When those conditions are not met, trust erodes quickly.

This kind of friction can surface in many forms: awkward or inconsistent phrasing, design elements that break in local scripts, errors in currency or measurement, or service experiences that feel misaligned with local norms. Individually, these issues may seem minor. Collectively, they create enough uncertainty to derail a booking.

While high-profile translation mishaps are often cited as cautionary tales, they are far less common than more systemic failures of product fit. In travel, these failures can extend beyond content into operations, partnerships, and platform design.

Airbnb’s experience in China illustrates how extensive these challenges can be. Despite significant investment, the company struggled to compete in a market where domestic platforms such as Tujia and Meituan offered deeper inventories and benefited from their position within super-app ecosystems, lowering acquisition costs.

Cultural factors also played a role. Concerns around quality control and governance slowed adoption of peer-to-peer accommodation, while the cultural meaning of the home differed markedly from Western markets. Local competitors responded by emphasising affordability and convenience, while actively addressing trust concerns. Xiaozhu, for example, introduced a “worry-free check-in” programme that combined property and identity verification, integration with Alipay, insurance for hosts and guests, and cooperation with public security bureaus.

Airbnb made a wide range of adaptations in response, including rebranding, enabling group bookings, integrating WeChat Pay, and working with local influencers. However, these efforts were ultimately overtaken by competitors that continued to evolve rapidly in line with market expectations. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic was the decisive factor that led to Airbnb’s exit in 2022.

The lesson is not that adaptation guarantees success, but that succeeding in new markets requires far more than surface-level changes. For travel brands operating at scale, the challenge lies in recognising where friction emerges, addressing it early, and doing so consistently across markets without slowing growth.

What high-performing travel brands do differently

For travel brands that succeed internationally, relevance does not happen by accident. It is the result of deliberate decisions about where to automate, where to adapt, and how to connect market-specific effort to commercial outcomes. While every organisation will make different trade-offs, several consistent patterns emerge among those that scale effectively across regions.

Automate global scale without losing cultural relevance

Automation is often the starting point, particularly when cost and speed are under pressure. Translating large volumes of content efficiently can unlock significant savings, but the real advantage comes when automation is guided by business insight rather than applied uniformly.

With access to the right data, travel brands can match different translation engines to the content types they are best suited for, using quality scores and editing time as decision inputs. As Juanita Magro explains in her article on Phrase Data, “When you quantify MT effectiveness by content type and locale, you make smarter decisions on where to automate, where to review, and where to invest.”

In practice, this approach results in a mix of production-ready content that can be automated confidently, such as UI text or help centre articles, alongside other areas that still benefit from post-editing. Crucially, automation does not replace human expertise. Instead, it frees up time for linguists, product teams, and marketers to focus on higher-value cultural adaptation that directly influences conversion.

Adapting campaigns or messaging for regional moments, such as festive periods like Diwali or Onam in India, is one example of where this reclaimed capacity can have a tangible commercial impact.

The efficiency gains are well documented. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study of Phrase’s translation management capabilities found a 30% increase in translation team efficiency and a $0.05 reduction in per-word translation costs by Year 3, alongside benefits such as improved scalability, forecasting, and employee satisfaction.

Use engagement data to prioritise where adaptation matters most

Not every market, channel, or touchpoint carries the same weight. High-performing travel brands use engagement data to decide where market-specific adaptation will have the greatest return, rather than attempting to treat all content equally.

This is familiar territory for teams experienced in optimisation or growth strategy. Product usage data, market research, and business priorities help determine where effort should be concentrated first.

For an OTA, this might mean starting with high-performing landing pages that drive the majority of bookings. For a hotel group focused on increasing direct bookings, service channels and post-booking communications in new markets may take precedence.

The underlying principle is simple. Adaptation should support clear business goals, whether that is increasing conversion, reducing support load, or accelerating time to market. When prioritisation is guided by data, investment becomes easier to justify and outcomes easier to measure.

Adapt the full experience, not just the words

“The main result of localization is an improved customer experience: you make local target audiences feel comfortable, understood, and respected.”
– Georg Ell, CEO, Phrase

Delivering on this promise requires more than translating text. Even within a single channel such as a mobile app, creating a consistent and trustworthy experience often involves multiple layers of adaptation.

These can include translation of interface elements, help documentation, and marketing content; cultural adaptation through visuals, references, and interaction patterns; legal compliance with local regulations and data protection requirements; pre-launch testing with local users; and ensuring that features and functionality behave consistently across languages and regions.

Each layer contributes incrementally to trust. A translated website or app is an important first step, but gaps quickly become visible if customer support is unavailable in a user’s native language, if local holidays are not reflected in availability or pricing, or if imagery and onboarding flows feel disconnected from regional expectations.

Over time, these inconsistencies erode confidence. Conversely, when the full experience aligns with what customers recognise and expect, brands benefit from higher engagement, stronger loyalty, and greater advocacy.

Connect market adaptation to growth metrics

Operational metrics remain essential for managing complexity at scale. In a recent article, Phrase’s senior content manager Matt Owen outlined six key indicators that localisation teams should share internally:

• Turnaround time
• Quality metrics such as first-time quality and error rate
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
• Spend by language or market
• Percentage of translation milestones completed on time

These measures provide valuable visibility into output and efficiency. Their real strategic value, however, emerges when they are viewed alongside broader growth metrics.

Understanding how adaptation efforts influence booking rates, net promoter score, and time to market allows travel leaders to move beyond cost control and toward value creation. Analytics capabilities within translation management platforms can help quantify savings, but extending that analysis to include commercial performance offers a more complete picture of impact.

For international travel brands, this connection between operational execution and business results is what turns adaptation from a necessary expense into a repeatable growth driver.

From global reach to local trust

Being present in a market is no longer enough. For travel brands competing at scale, growth increasingly depends on whether customers feel confident, comfortable, and understood at the moment of decision. That is where preference is formed.

Customer experience plays a central role in this shift. Experiences that feel intuitive and familiar reduce hesitation and build confidence, particularly when travellers are making high-value, high-consideration purchases. When done well, experience is not a layer added on top of a product. In many cases, it becomes indistinguishable from the product itself.

This is especially true in an ecommerce-driven sector such as travel. As far back as 2018, Salesforce found that 80% of customers said the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services, and the rate has accelerated since.

Trust, in turn, drives commercial outcomes. Customers are more likely to convert when they recognise and trust a brand, and they are more likely to recommend experiences that feel reliable and consistent across touchpoints. Much of Airbnb’s early growth in emerging markets was fuelled by this dynamic, as positive experiences translated into strong word of mouth and repeat usage.

At a strategic level, this places market relevance closer to the centre of global decision-making. While globalisation may be slowing in some respects, fragmentation is increasing. Regulations differ, platforms diverge, and customer expectations continue to vary by region. For travel brands, this raises the bar for how deeply each market must be understood.

Balancing global scale with local relevance is an operational challenge, but from a customer perspective the expectation is simple. Travellers want experiences that work seamlessly, regardless of where they are booking from or travelling to. Brands that can deliver that consistency without sacrificing speed or efficiency are better positioned to earn loyalty and sustain growth as competition intensifies.