Who Actually Caused the Booking?

The travel and hospitality guide to measuring what really fills rooms and seats. Learn how causal and incremental measurement actually works in a world where booking windows outlive attribution windows, metasearch double-counts, and the OTA-versus-direct credit war quietly distorts your data.

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Why Measurement Breaks in Travel

Travel’s measurement problem is worse than most because structural facts about how people book break standard attribution tools in ways generic advice never addresses.

The Booking Window Lag

A traveler daydreams for six weeks but books during a seven-day attribution window. Last-click models hand the final search the entire booking, punishing the upper-funnel spend that fills your future pipeline.

The OTA-Versus-Direct War

Without causal measurement, you are flying blind on your most important economic question: is your marketing generating incremental direct bookings, or just re-routing bookings that would have happened anyway on an OTA?

The Revenue Management Confounder

Price and available inventory move constantly in response to demand. If price is not in your model, you are measuring marketing and pricing tangled together, often crediting marketing for revenue management’s behavior.

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