+0%
search impressions YoY
+1056% paid growth ahead of peak season
Driving record ski booking growth for Neilson using Demand Gen and AI-powered paid strategy
- Case Studies
- +1056% paid growth ahead of peak season
Neilson is the UK’s leading holiday provider, offering expertly curated ski, beach club and activity holidays across Europe. With two new resorts launching in Val d’Isère, Neilson partnered with IDHL to increase brand awareness and generate demand ahead of the peak season.
- Client
- Neilson
- Website
- Visit Site
- Category
- Travel
- Services
- Digital Marketing
- Partners
The challenge
Following the launch of its new Val d’Isère destinations, Neilson wanted to grow awareness around its ski holiday offering and increase bookings ahead of the peak September booking season. With rising competition and rapidly evolving booking behaviours, achieving the brand’s ambitious growth targets was challenging.
Neilson needed to engage potential travellers before they actively began searching. The challenge was to build inspiration and demand early, using compelling storytelling and data-driven audience insights to keep the brand front of mind when the booking season arrived.
Our approach
Upper-funnel proactivity
Ski bookings are shaped by early-stage inspiration, so we developed a strategy to reach prospective skiers before they entered active research mode. Rather than relying on lower-funnel search, we built an upper-funnel creative approach showcasing Neilson’s destinations, resort benefits, and on-the-ground moments to generate demand that would later be captured through performance channels.
Connecting across multiple touchpoints
Google Demand Gen enabled a more intelligence-led audience strategy. By delivering creative messaging across YouTube, Google Discover, and Gmail, Neilson was present across different stages of the customer journey and tailored to specific traveller motivations.
Supercharging campaign delivery
We adopted a data-driven acquisition strategy, building AI-powered lookalike audiences from Neilson’s CRM seed lists to identify prospects most likely to engage and convert using Google’s machine learning. First-party insights, advanced audience intelligence, and AI placement optimisations made targeting precision more effective, improving both the efficiency and impact of awareness activity.
The results
Our creative strategy exceeded Neilson's ski booking targets and played a defining role in generating demand ahead of the peak September booking season. We delivered impressive incremental demand and paid growth at a time when ski activity is not prioritised.
+0%
growth in ski bookings
0%
reduction in CPA
+0%
increase in investments
Alexander Cox, Head of Digital Marketing, Neilson"IDHL helped us rethink how we generate demand for our ski holidays. By combining AI-powered audience targeting with compelling creative across key discovery channels, we delivered exceptional growth ahead of peak season. The campaign not only drove a 171% increase in booking but also significantly improved efficiency, helping us achieve record ski sales and exceed our commercial targets."