In 2026, travelling fueled by food and not just by destinations is no longer a trend. In fact, research from Agoda revealed that apart from driving tourism, food has become a core element in enticing tourists. Indonesia, for instance, was regarded as a Destination Champion from the annual La Liste awards, indicating that the country is one of the fastest-growing culinary destinations in the world.
For marketers, this is a pivotal opportunity to leverage high-intent sensory signals. This meant that there is a shift in how marketing strategies and advertising techniques can be curated to adapt to these emerging preferences.
In this latest MARKETECH APAC What’s NEXT interview, Putri Luciana Kuswara, Yango Ads’ Agency Partnership Development Manager for Asia, based in Indonesia, details how AI-driven adtech is dismantling the “ROI-gate” through precision localisation and how travelling has met a new destination.
Navigating shifting corridors
When asked how brands could adapt to travel demand shifts, Luciana highlighted vital numbers: according to recent UN Tourism Data, the first nine months of 2025 saw growth in arrivals to the region by 8%, reaching about 90% of pre-pandemic numbers.
This data, according to Luciana, entails a stern fact: international travel across APAC is recovering strongly, but unevenly.
“While overall outbound travel from countries like China remain[s] a major engine of demand across APAC, patterns are shifting with some traditional tourism routes softening due to geopolitical dynamics,” she explained.
These are all occurring alongside what she called ’emerging corridors and segments’.
“For brands, this matters because culinary travel creates high-intent, highly contextual moments: travellers researching where to eat, what to book, where to go next, and how to share the experience. These moments are rich in signals and evolve quickly across platforms, formats, and markets.”
She added that this entails how brands could utilise adtech not to push messages, but rather to stay in step with these behaviours by identifying emerging corridors early.
Adding to this, Luciana noted the importance of adapting creatives to local cultures to reach travellers, calling this ‘turning inspiration into action’. This matters especially in 2026, as Southeast Asian marketers prioritising international expansion view local relevance not just as a creative choice, but as a cost-control mechanism.
She added, “We know that cost constraint is often cited as a primary barrier to market expansion, but this budget pressure doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s often compounded with several factors, including localisation complexity.”
Hence, to build efficient localisation and high-consideration journeys. Luciana underscored the power of messaging.
“One thing we are discovering is that messaging that emphasises experience, convenience and reliability consistently is outperforming price-led propositions in cross-border campaigns,” she explained.
This elaborates on the fact that, as travel decisions are growing to be more emotionally-inclined and made with high consideration, ‘advertisers need to deliver credible and native messaging through contextual targeting and culturally relevant placements’.
Looking deeper, she explained that this stems from what Yango Ads saw as a clear shift, a zooming in scale vs. the traditional looking-at-the-bigger-picture practice.
“As we work with travel brands to reach wider customers, we’ve seen a clear shift away from broader, always-on awareness campaigns and towards targeted, performance-based execution. When we work with marketers in the region, we see that ad format strategy is shifting from experimentation to discipline, concentrating on a small set of proven formats.”
Adding to this, Luciana shared, “For example, we can see in the tourism sector that awareness-driving formats such as Connected TV (CTV) and Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) have lower full AI implementation compared to e-commerce sectors. This difference comes down to how fast the sectors can demonstrate impact – e-commerce has a mature measurement framework with [a] clear indication of ROI, whereas tourism takes a much longer time for its impact to show up.”
Consequently, this places the tourism sector, according to Luciana, as one of the most ROI-gated sectors, given that budget unlock is explicitly tied to incremental uplift proof.
She emphasised, “As budget decisions are increasingly being shaped by performance indicators, the strategies that can translate experiment to result are the ones that scale quickly.”
How AI scales performance in tourism
While this “ROI-gate” has traditionally slowed momentum, Luciana shared that data and AI are now rewriting the rules of when and where demand exists.
By identifying untapped opportunities in off-peak and cross-border travel, AI provides the precise incremental uplift that she also noted is required to unlock budgets. This shift allows the tourism sector to move past measurement lags, turning long-term awareness into immediate, scalable results that modern performance indicators demand.
“We know that marketers across Southeast Asia are reporting that AI is either fully implemented or in active pilot phases. This matters not because of automation alone, but because AI gives brands greater confidence to invest beyond traditional peak seasons and core source markets, where demand signals were previously harder to read and riskier to act on,” she continued.
Citing Indonesia as an example, she elaborated on Yango Ads’ own market data, which has shown that only 14.5% of marketers there cite difficulty measuring ROI right now. This means that AI-driven optimisation is easier to justify internally, particularly when exploring new audiences, off-peak travel, and emerging corridors.
In Thailand, meanwhile, AI is being used in campaign collaborations with the tourism board to drive tourism during off-peak seasons.
She elaborated, “Through our recent partnership with the Tourism Authority of Thailand, AI-powered advertising technology was used to dynamically optimise targeting, creative, and timing to inspire travel outside the traditional high season in Thailand. The result was not just efficiency, but reach into new audiences and travel moments that would otherwise have been missed.”
According to her, this means that in practice, AI allows travel campaigns to respond to real behaviour rather than fixed assumptions about seasonality or traveller origin.
“The outcome speaks to the opportunity: Thailand ranked as one of the most-booked destinations among traditionally hard-to-reach Russian-speaking travellers in October 2025, based on data from Yango Ads’ OTA partner.”
Additionally, this demonstrates how performance-driven, data-led advertising can redistribute travel demand across seasons. In return, this also supports more sustainable tourism growth while unlocking value for local businesses year-round.
Relatively, this should place a top-of-mind question for marketers, she remarked.
“How do we stand out, and how do we reach our audiences? This is where adtech steps in and to share data-backed insights on best-performing formats, audience behaviours, and localisation tactics.”
Additionally, she stated, “We know that limited resources and unclear performance signals are what hold budgets back for most travel brands. Embedding insight and optimisation into workflows reduces friction and speeds action. Brands that can move earlier and with confidence capture emerging demand before others react will win.”
As a company, she shared, they address this by combining reach with actionable insight, enabling travel brands and agencies to plan, optimise, and justify investment more efficiently, even with limited internal resources.
By anchoring strategies in AI-driven insights, brands can finally bypass the traditional “ROI-gate” that has long stifled tourism budgets, allowing them to capture high-intent travel experiences and off-peak demand with newfound confidence.
As Luciana highlights, the winners in this evolving landscape will be those who use adtech not merely for automation, but as a bridge to cultural relevance and measurable incremental uplift, turning complex global shifts into clear, scalable growth.
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