Travel & Hospitality Media Buying

Why do some travel brands fill seats and rooms — while others just run ads?

At Helping Improve LLC, we run paid media campaigns for hotels, tour operators, airlines, and lifestyle brands that need more bookings — not more impressions. We're a small senior team out of Denver, Colorado, and we care about one thing: measurable revenue attributed to every dollar you spend on advertising.

Talk to Our Team → See How We Work
$14M+
Travel & hospitality ad spend managed
91%
Client retention rate year over year
4.6×
Average return on ad spend, travel vertical
7 yrs
Combined senior media-buying experience
What We Do

Six channels, one focused team

We don't try to be everything to every brand. We run six specific advertising channels, all of them tuned for travel, hospitality, and lifestyle. Every service is handled by a senior operator who has run this category before — not a junior account rep reading from a playbook.

🖥️
Programmatic Display

We buy display inventory across premium travel publisher networks, using first- and third-party audience data to reach travelers at the right moment in their research journey — whether they're browsing destination guides or comparing flight prices. We manage bid strategy, creative rotation, and frequency closely so your brand stays visible without becoming annoying.

📺
Connected TV & Video

Streaming has permanently changed how travelers discover places to go. Our CTV and online video campaigns run across premium OTT environments — placing your hotel, airline, or experience brand in front of viewers actively consuming travel content. We handle creative specs, audience layering, and frequency caps across every major streaming environment.

📰
Native Advertising

When someone is deep in a travel article on a major publisher, a well-placed native ad — one that reads like editorial, not an interruption — is extraordinarily effective. We write and place native units that blend into content feeds while driving real click-throughs and post-click engagement, specifically on travel and lifestyle publisher inventory.

🔊
Audio & DOOH

Podcast and streaming audio advertising reaches travelers during commutes, during packing, during every pre-trip moment that display can't touch. Pair that with digital-out-of-home placements near airports, transit hubs, and destination hotspots, and you get a campaign that surrounds the traveler physically and digitally in the moments that matter most to your brand.

🔍
Paid Search & Social

Travel is a high-intent category on search — people typing "boutique hotels Denver" or "direct flights to Lisbon" are a booking away. Our paid search campaigns are structured around intent signals, not generic keywords. On social, we build prospecting and retargeting funnels on Meta and TikTok that tell the story of your brand across the full consideration window.

📊
Audience Strategy & Reporting

Every campaign we run comes with a clear attribution framework before we spend a dollar. We define the audiences, the measurement approach, and the reporting cadence upfront — then deliver plain-English performance reports that connect ad spend directly to bookings, revenue, and customer lifetime value rather than vanity metrics that don't move your business.

Common Questions

Things clients usually ask us
before we get started

We like honest answers more than clever ones. Here's what you actually need to know about working with a small, focused team like ours.

Do you only work with travel and hospitality brands?
Primarily, yes. We've spent years running campaigns for hotels, tour operators, destination marketing organizations, and travel-adjacent lifestyle brands. That said, if you're in a closely related vertical — wellness retreats, cruise lines, premium gear brands — we're happy to have a conversation. We just won't pretend to be experts in categories we haven't worked in.
What budget do you typically work with?
Our engagements typically start around $15,000/month in combined media spend. That's not a hard floor — we've worked with smaller seasonal budgets for boutique properties — but below that level, the overhead of running multiple channels well tends to eat too much of the margin for clients to see meaningful returns. We'd rather tell you that upfront than take a budget we can't optimize.
How do you measure success — and do you share full reporting?
We define the success metrics before the campaign launches, not after. For travel brands that usually means cost per booking, revenue attributed to paid media, and incremental ROAS measured against your organic baseline. You get a full reporting dashboard and a plain-English monthly summary. We don't hide channel-level data behind aggregated dashboards.
We're a small team ourselves — how hands-on is the relationship?
Very. Because we're a small team at Helping Improve LLC — three to five senior people working on a focused client roster — you actually work with the person running your campaigns. Not an account manager relaying messages to a trader you'll never meet. We do bi-weekly calls, async Slack updates, and monthly strategy reviews. If something's not working, you'll hear it from us before you notice it in the numbers.
Can you handle creative, or do we need an agency for that?
We're a media-buying team, not a creative studio — we're upfront about that. We can write copy, brief concepts, resize assets, and spec out creative for every format we run. But if you need brand-level concepting or video production, you'll want a creative partner working alongside us. We're experienced at collaborating with in-house teams and external creative agencies and can help manage that workflow.
What does the onboarding process actually look like?
After an initial scoping call, we put together a media plan with channel mix, audience rationale, budget allocation, and projected performance ranges — all specific to your brand and goals. Once aligned, we handle platform setup, pixel/tag implementation, and audience builds. Most campaigns are live within two to three weeks of contract signing. We keep the kickoff process tight because we've done it enough times to know where things slow down.
How We Work

From first conversation
to live, optimized campaign

We keep the process structured but not bureaucratic. Four stages, clear deliverables at each one, and a senior operator accountable throughout.

01
Discovery

We spend real time understanding your brand, your current booking funnel, your competitive set, and what's actually been working (or hasn't) in your previous media efforts. We don't hand you a generic intake form — this is a real strategic conversation that shapes everything that follows.

02
Strategy

We build a media plan specific to your brand and budget — detailing channel mix, audience segments, seasonal timing, creative requirements, and the measurement framework we'll use to report results. You see every assumption we're making before a dollar is committed.

03
Activation

We set up campaigns across agreed platforms, implement tracking, configure audiences, and launch. We run a structured first-week check in the days after launch to confirm pacing, delivery, and early performance signals are where they should be — catching issues before they become expensive.

04
Optimization & Reporting

This is where most agencies go quiet. We don't. Ongoing optimization — bid adjustments, audience pruning, creative rotation, budget reallocation between channels — happens continuously, not quarterly. Monthly reports connect spend to bookings in plain language, and every quarter we revisit the overall strategy to make sure we're still focused on the right objectives.

Platforms & Partners

The tools we use to
run your campaigns

We work across a mix of self-serve platforms and managed channels — all of them relevant to travel and hospitality advertising at scale.

Google Ads
Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
The Trade Desk
TikTok for Business
Amazon DSP
DV360 (Display & Video 360)
Spotify Ad Studio
StackAdapt
Taboola
Outbrain
Microsoft Advertising
Hulu (via Disney Ad Platform)
About Helping Improve LLC

A small team with a specific point of view

Helping Improve LLC was founded in Denver, Colorado, because we kept watching travel and hospitality brands get sold generic media plans by large agencies that didn't understand the category — and certainly didn't understand the seasonality, booking-funnel dynamics, and customer psychology that make advertising in this vertical genuinely different from advertising a SaaS product or a consumer packaged good.

Jacob Calabrese started the business after years working inside the travel advertising ecosystem — running campaigns for properties ranging from independent boutique hotels to regional tour operators. The realization was straightforward: smaller, focused teams with real category expertise routinely outperform large agencies that staff junior people on travel accounts because the billings aren't big enough to warrant attention.

We're based at 7829 E 28th Pl in Denver's Central Park neighborhood — a part of the city that feels a lot like how we think about our work: modern, livable, and built to last rather than to impress. Denver sits at the intersection of urban convenience and outdoor adventure, which has made it a natural home for a team that spends most of its professional life thinking about why people travel and how to reach them when they're in planning mode.

Our transparency philosophy is simple: you own your ad accounts, you see all your data, and you get honest assessments of what's working. We don't inflate performance by cherry-picking attribution windows. If a campaign isn't generating returns that justify the spend, we'll say so — and we'll have a proposal for fixing it ready in the same conversation.

JC
Jacob Calabrese
Principal, Helping Improve LLC — Denver, CO
Get in Touch

Tell us about your brand

We do an initial scoping call with every prospective client — no pitch deck, no hard sell. Just a real conversation about your goals, your current paid media situation, and whether we're the right fit. If we're not, we'll tell you.

✉️
📞
Call or Text
(720) 555-0194
📍
Office Address
7829 E 28th Pl
Denver, CO 80238
🕐
Business Hours
Monday – Friday, 9 AM – 5 PM MT
We typically reply within one business day.

Start a conversation