Intrepid Shifts Spend to 70% Performance as Middle East Conflict Hits Bookings

Intrepid Travel shifted its marketing split to roughly 70% performance and 30% brand spend in the second quarter, a tactical response to the Middle East conflict that stalled what its global chief marketing officer calls a potential record year. Hazel McGuire, appointed CMO in 2025 after joining the operator in 2022, told Travel Weekly the company normally runs at 50–50 brand and performance globally.

January and February were tracking as the best year ever. March changed the plan.

"It doesn't change our strategy. We still believe in building brand value behind Intrepid rather than being seen as a commodity touring product," McGuire said. "But do we need to change our channel split, our focus or our timing? Yes, absolutely."

The company kept its partnerships, PR and media efforts rather than switching brand off entirely, to protect 2025 results.

Which markets took the hardest hit?

Australia and New Zealand were disproportionately affected, McGuire said, because of the number of customers flying through Middle East hubs. The first month brought rerouted flights and comparatively fewer services, followed by customer nervousness about flying through a conflict zone. Intrepid may let those markets slow and shift spend to the northern hemisphere, where travel proved more resilient because many destinations did not require Middle East connections.

Domestic economics compound the pressure. Australia's interest rate rise last week squeezes mortgage holders already seeing everyday spending eroded. McGuire's read across every market she sells in: customers ring-fence holiday money rather than cancel, trading down instead — shorter trips, closer destinations with lower airfares, or destinations with favourable exchange rates and lower ground costs.

"Strategy bends; it doesn't break, in times of turbulence, whether that's geopolitics or the economy," she said.

How does Intrepid handle acquired brands?

The company is rebranding its French acquisition Altai and Atalante, bought at the start of this year, under Intrepid — the fastest rebrand in its portfolio. Pre-COVID Intrepid ran some 17 separate brands, including Peregrine for premium and Geckos for youth, and consolidating into one house made coherent brand strategy affordable. "Trying to be cohesive across 17 brands with the budgets we have was almost impossible," McGuire said.

Not every acquisition follows. Sawadee, the Netherlands tour operator acquired in January 2025, will stay as Sawadee by Intrepid because of strong Dutch brand awareness. Wildland, the US hardcore backcountry hiking operator, also keeps its name for now, though McGuire suspects it will move into the portfolio in time.

Acquisitions serve two commercial routes: buying a presence in a market where building one would take longer, or capturing opportunity. Sawadee ran on third-party operators, or DMCs (destination management companies), and Intrepid moved that product into its own DMC network — what McGuire calls a double commercial benefit. Values alignment is non-negotiable; Altai and Atalante is a B Corp, as Intrepid is.

What is Intrepid doing about AI search?

Intrepid ranks highly for paid placement in LLMs (large language models) and is trialling ads in ChatGPT, but McGuire is blunt about the current output: "The ads look like Google Ads circa 1997 — really basic in look and feel." She is surprised the LLMs have not monetised faster, given Google search budgets and multi-billion-dollar valuations for players like Anthropic, and notes Google ad spend is falling globally — likely LLM-driven — while that money is not yet flowing into LLM paid channels because results do not justify it.

The customer journey still uses LLMs to condense the choice set before users return to Google to verify hotels and experiences exist, then book on brand pages. McGuire expects that to change by the end of next year, moving closer to agentic bookings: "Here's my itinerary, go book it."

Her structural answer is OneSearch, a project launched 16 or 17 months ago that links the social, SEO, website and PR teams under one discoverability mandate — reviews, earned media citations and a crawlable, readable site. Tools suggest Intrepid's discoverability is decent against sector peers, she said, in an opaque measurement environment.

On rival Contiki's micro-dramas on YouTube, McGuire is complimentary and watchful: digging into the numbers revealed how many over-50s and over-60s watch longer-form travel content on the platform. Something similar is under discussion at Intrepid for next year.