Here's What Travel Advertisers Need to Do Before 17 August
If you run significant Google Ads investment for a travel brand, there is a reasonable chance that some of your strongest campaigns are quietly delivering better than the targets you set for them. A campaign capped by budget, given an 8x ROAS target, returning 12x. A booking campaign targeted at £10 cost per booking, actually delivering £6.
From 17 August 2026, that overperformance goes away... unless you act first.
Google is changing how its bidding systems behave for campaigns that are limited by budget and use target-based bid strategies (Target CPA and Target ROAS). After the change, these campaigns will optimise consistently toward the target you set, rather than beating it. Google's own example is stark: a campaign with a £10 Target CPA that has been achieving £5 will drift toward an actual £10 CPA once the update takes effect, with no settings having changed on your side.
For a large travel account, that is not a technical footnote. That is cost of sale moving materially, overnight, on campaigns nobody touched.
What's actually changing
Today, when a target-based campaign hits its budget ceiling, Google's systems often bid more conservatively than your target strictly requires, which is why budget-capped campaigns so frequently overachieve. The side effect has always been volatility: raise the budget on one of these campaigns and performance would often fluctuate or worsen unpredictably, because the "true" efficiency at scale was never what your dashboard showed.
From 17 August, Google removes that behaviour. Budget-limited campaigns will deliver at (or close to) the target you have entered and the supposed upside is they will continue to deliver at that target as you increase budgets. The trade is straightforward: you lose the free overperformance and in exchange you get predictability when scaling.
The change applies to Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen, Travel, Display and Hotel campaigns, across Google Ads, SA360, DV360, Ads Editor and the API. App and video reach/view campaigns are unaffected. For Performance Max and Demand Gen specifically, expect the channel mix to shift as well, where your spend lands across Search, YouTube, Display and Discover may look different after the change.
Two dates matter. A new Bid Target Adjustment Tool appeared in Google Ads from 6 July 2026, letting you review historical performance and apply updated targets in a few clicks. The bidding behaviour itself changes on 17 August 2026. Critically, Google will not adjust your targets or budgets for you. If you do nothing, the system simply starts taking you at your word.
Why travel accounts are disproportionately exposed
Across aviation and travel accounts, budget-capped campaigns overachieving their targets are not the exception. They are close to the default state, for three structural reasons.
First, demand seasonality. Travel demand surges around school holidays, summer peaks and event windows and budgets are rarely re-planned at the same tempo. A campaign that was budget-appropriate in February is capped and overdelivering by July.
Second, capacity-led budget caps. Travel is one of the few digital categories where the constraint is often physical inventory, not marketing appetite. Operators deliberately cap budgets when providers approach capacity, which is precisely the condition under which this change bites hardest.
Third, legacy targets. In large organisations, ROAS and CPA targets are frequently set once, often during a media plan or an agency onboarding years ago and never revisited, because the campaigns kept beating them. Nobody audits a number that keeps being exceeded. From August, those stale targets stop being a harmless artefact and become the number Google actually delivers.
Put those together and the risk profile is clear: the accounts most likely to be hit are mature, high-spend, seasonal accounts with conservative budget caps and old targets. In other words, exactly the profile of a major travel advertiser.
What to do before the deadline
The work here is not complicated, but it is time-sensitive and it needs commercial judgement rather than a blanket rule. Between now and 17 August:
- Audit exposure. Identify every campaign that has been "Limited by budget" at any point in the last 12 months and uses Target CPA or Target ROAS. Flag those where recent actuals are meaningfully better than the stated target - that gap is your exposure.
- Decide campaign-by-campaign. For each flagged campaign, choose deliberately: reset the target to recent actuals to lock in current performance; set a custom target that reflects what the business genuinely needs per booking.
- Use the tool ASAP. The Bid Target Adjustment Tool shows historical performance against targets and lets you apply changes directly. Do this well before mid-August, not the week of.
- Monitor properly afterwards. Allow one to two full conversion cycles before judging results, for parking, remember to account for booking-to-arrival lag in how you read the data.
The one decision I would caution against is passivity dressed up as a decision. "Our targets already reflect our goals, so no action needed" is only true if someone has actually validated those targets against current unit economics. In most large accounts, nobody has.
Our view
Candidly, Google's framing of this change is generous to Google, remember they have shareholders to please! "More consistent and predictable performance" is accurate but it is also true that advertisers have been banking overperformance the system was giving away and from August that stops. This is repricing and it should be treated with the seriousness.
That said, we think it forces a conversation most large advertisers should have been having anyway. Targets should reflect what a booking is actually worth, margin, ancillary revenue, capacity dynamics, not a number inherited from a three-year-old media plan. Across our aviation accounts, we are treating this as a target-hygiene exercise: rebuilding targets from unit economics up, then using the new bidding behaviour to scale into peak demand with far more confidence than the old system allowed. Handled that way, the change is a net positive. Ignored, it is an unforced erosion of efficiency at exactly the scale where small percentages are large sums.
Before 17 August
Project50 is running pre-deadline bid strategy audits for travel and aviation advertisers, a straightforward review of which campaigns are exposed, what the commercial impact would be if left alone and a recommended target position for each. If you would like a second pair of eyes on your account before the change lands, get in touch.
Storm Russell is a Digital Marketing Consultant at Project50, a strategy consultancy with deep roots in aviation and travel.
