The Identity Gap Holding Back Travel Marketing Performance

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

Travel and hospitality marketers have more tools than ever to orchestrate journeys, personalize messages, and measure performance. But many are still operating with a limited, fragmented view of the guests they aim to reach. Even with sophisticated email service providers (ESPs), customer relationship management systems (CRMs), and customer data platforms (CDPs) in place, much of their website and app traffic remains anonymous, leaving high-intent travelers invisible across travel discovery and booking. As privacy changes accelerate and acquisition costs rise, that blind spot is becoming increasingly expensive.

Wunderkind’s new guide, “Identity in 2026: Turning Guest Visibility into Performance,” argues that this is no longer just a data challenge. It is a revenue and marketing performance issue. As direct bookings become more valuable and dependence on online travel agencies (OTAs), metasearch, and aggregators becomes more costly, brands need a stronger identity layer to recognize more travelers across devices and sessions and act on that intelligence in real time. 

“Most travel brands have invested heavily in orchestration, but they’re still only seeing a fraction of their actual audience,” said Matt Toland, senior director, business development at Wunderkind. “When 70% or more of your traffic is anonymous, it fundamentally limits how well you can personalize, convert, and allocate spend across channels.”

Drawing on Wunderkind’s perspective and performance marketing research, the guide explores how identity can strengthen existing channels rather than replace them. It positions identity as the underlying layer that allows email, SMS, onsite experiences, and paid media to perform as intended.

The challenge is that much of that activity remains invisible. According to the guide, as much as 70% to 95% of visitors may be anonymous to the systems tasked with engaging them, creating a disconnect between traveler intent and brand response.

“When you can recognize three to six times more visitors than a traditional ESP alone, everything changes,” Toland said. “You’re not just sending more messages — you’re sending better-timed, more relevant communications that reflect real traveler intent, which drives meaningful lifts in conversion and efficiency.” 

The new guide explains how travel and hospitality brands can turn guest recognition into a more durable growth strategy. It shows what it takes to recognize and understand more travelers in 2026, from broader visibility across devices to richer context that improves performance across email, SMS, onsite, in-app, and paid media.

Rather than introducing new channels, the guide emphasizes how identity changes the performance of channels brands already rely on. Email and SMS become more effective when they can reach a larger share of high-intent travelers. On-site experiences become more adaptive when returning visitors can be recognized without requiring a login. Paid media becomes more efficient when brands can suppress audiences already converting through owned channels.

“Identity is the missing layer between orchestration and execution,” Toland said. “It expands what your marketing platforms can actually see and gives AI the context it needs to make smarter, real-time decisions about when to engage, where to engage, and when to hold back.”

In this guide, you’ll find: 

• Why anonymous traffic remains one of the biggest barriers to personalization, direct bookings, and owned-channel growth
• What strong identity looks like in 2026, from greater coverage and confidence to richer guest context and privacy-first design
• How identity can help travel brands improve email, SMS, onsite, in-app, and paid media performance without replacing their ESP or marketing cloud
• Ways to recognize three to six times more visitors than an ESP alone across devices and sessions
• How identity-powered coordination can reduce wasted paid media spend and support more efficient direct conversion strategies
• Why identity and AI decisioning are becoming the backbone of modern guest acquisition, loyalty, and lifecycle marketing

This content was created collaboratively by Wunderkind and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.