Why “Saving the Budget” in 2026 needs a fresh playbook

Fast forward to 2026, and the landscape has shifted again. AI is changing how travellers search, media has fragmented and competition for attention is fiercer than ever.

Chances are, you’re already thinking about where to put your budget for the year ahead. From global destinations to ambitious travel brands, if you’re looking for sharper strategy or specialist support your current agency can’t offer, we’re here to help. To give you a clear path forward, we’ve updated our original "save the budget” list with the projects that deliver the most impact right now.

These are the tactics that make your budget go further and work smarter to sharpen your visibility, and help you grow sustainably in a fast-moving travel market.

As AI continues to redefine how travellers search, plan and discover destinations, visibility now depends on more than traditional SEO. Brands need to understand how AI interprets their content, which signals it prioritises and why certain recommendations surface over others. This shift is happening fast, and keeping up requires both insight and action which is exactly why we have created the Lemongrass AI Visibility Package.

The package brings together strategic PR, content optimisation and our AI Search Visibility Dashboard, giving brands a clear picture of how they are being represented across search and AI discovery tools. The dashboard sits at the heart of the service, offering real-time visibility into your SEO performance, the strength and structure of your content, the themes AI associates with your brand, and how consistently you appear in AI-generated recommendations. It shows you what AI is highlighting, what it is overlooking and where your biggest opportunities lie.

But insight alone isn’t enough. The AI Visibility Package translates this into an action plan that strengthens the signals AI relies on, from improving content structure and authority to elevating brand credibility through targeted PR and thought leadership. The goal is simple: to ensure AI understands your brand clearly, surfaces it accurately and recommends it more often.

Why This Matters now?

• AI has rewritten the rules of visibility.
• Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and emerging AI travel agents are quickly becoming the first place travellers turn for inspiration and planning, and brands that aren’t visible within these systems risk slipping out of the conversation entirely. Investing in AI visibility now ensures your brand stays discoverable, relevant and competitive as customer behaviour continues to shift. For 2026, this should be high on every travel brand’s priority list.

Read next: Why your travel brand isn’t showing in Google AI Overviews (and how to fix it)

We’re your eyes and ears on the travel landscape, managing media enquiries and keeping you close to what matters through weekly trend reports, sentiment tracking and journalist intelligence that feeds straight into your commercial strategy. Our always-on press office ensures you stay visible between campaign bursts and are primed to respond when the moment is right.

And because our clients increasingly want to reach beyond the UK and Europe, we’ve launched a new US PR service. It gives you direct access to American media, influencers and travellers, while letting you manage all three regions through a single agency. That means one strategy, one team, less time spent coordinating, and better value. It’s a streamlined, future-focused approach that reflects where the market is heading.

Why this matters now

• The US matters now because it’s become one of the strongest outbound travel markets. US travellers spend more and prioritise meaningful, experience-led trips – so this is a smart area to put your budget in 2026.
• The US has a deep, varied media landscape, brimming with regional titles and niche verticals that actively commission travel content. You get far more opportunities for coverage because of this variety.
• Expanding into the US also diversifies your visibility, reducing reliance on a single market and strengthening your brand resilience. US travellers do their research through a blend of search, AI tools, social and long-form editorial – so showing up in trusted US publications delivers credibility and reach at a moment when competition for attention is only intensifying.

With our global network and deep travel expertise, we can help your brand shine on both sides of the Atlantic.

Press trips have always been one of the most effective ways for travel brands to get meaningful, lasting coverage. They allow journalists, creators and broadcasters to experience your property or destination first-hand. When a writer or creator can see, feel and understand your story on the ground, the coverage is richer, more accurate and far more engaging for their audience.

At Lemongrass, we specialise in curating both individual and group press trips. We match your brand with the right journalists and creators, and design tailored itineraries with you so that they experience the moments that will genuinely resonate with their audiences.

And a word on the people behind the stories: we’re lucky to work with truly exceptional storytellers, journalists and creators who have honed their craft, who are curious, thoughtful and committed to communicating your story with care and meaning. Supporting their work with well-planned, well-executed experiences ultimately elevates the coverage your brand receives.

Why this matters now

• These trips still matter, arguably more than ever. Press teams and freelancers are under increasing pressure, but we are still seeing UK journalists travelling. What’s changed is the value of the coverage they produce: when someone has truly experienced your offering first-hand, the storytelling becomes more emotive, more accurate and far more compelling.
• Further to this, local experts, trusted influencers and on-the-ground storytellers continue to hold strong, loyal audiences. Their content cuts through because it’s rooted in real experience, not automated information.
• With so much AI-generated content online, travellers rely even more on the real people that they trust, to provide an antidote to “AI slop”. This is true social proof – and lived experience is something that AI may never be able replicate.

Read next: Hosting a Press Trip? Make it Inclusive

How does your brand appear online against your competitors? What worked (or didn’t work) in past PR coverage? Which publications or channels still matter to your business? How is your business positioned online today?

These are the questions our Digital Positioning Audit can answer for you.

We pair creative storytelling with solid data to understand where your brand truly stands online. This insight shapes everything: it shows us where your brand should be visible, where to focus your efforts, and how to craft stories journalists actually want to write about and link to. It also gives you clear KPIs, so you can track what matters and make PR genuinely measurable moving forward.

Why this matters now

• A Digital Positioning Audit matters now, because it gives you a clear, honest view of how your brand shows up online compared with competitors. It’ll show you what your past work and budget allocations accomplished, and what you should be focusing on now and in the future. With the landscape shifting fast, this holistic view is the starting point for staying discoverable in Google’s AI Overviews, in LLM-generated answers, and in the next wave of travel discovery.
• This is the hard data you can’t ignore. It does away with assumptions, provides clear KPIs and highlights where you’re slipping or gaining ground – so your messaging lands with the people who matter.

A great way to spend a small amount but yield exceptional results is by auditing your existing content (your websites, blogs, guides, and social content). With modern best-practice and simple tweaks, you can optimise your best work for 2026 – refreshing data for search engines, catering to changing user intent, targeting new keywords, and offering improved user experiences.

Here at Lemongrass, we help you identify what to update, what to repurpose and where new content is needed. We then connect this refreshed content with your PR and press activity, ensuring every piece is working hard and driving real value across search, AI and media.

Why this matters now

• Content and SEO must reflect how people search today.
• Travellers ask longer, more conversational questions, and rely on AI to filter their options. Your content needs to be clear, structured, authoritative, and aligned to how real people (and AI systems) interpret queries. That’s why content and SEO projects in the travel space have become essential foundations rather than “nice-to-haves.”

Our original Media Roadshow was a huge success, and three years on we continue to run our refined format twice a year (once in the Autumn and once in the Spring). The Media Roadshow was created to give small, conscious travel brands an easy, high-impact way to get in front of the UK’s leading travel media. Every year, the Lemongrass team covers the length and breadth of the UK, hosting meetings in eight major cities and connecting with over 100 media contacts.

This event is designed to amplify your brand with these A-list journalists, TV producers and high-calibre influencers, without the extra layers of planning and commitment that are associated with group or individual press trips. It opens real opportunities for meaningful collaborations with regional and niche media across multiple formats – radio, TV, content creators, podcasts and more, at great value. Our Media Roadshow is an effective first step to build visibility and momentum before investing in larger hosted activations. We take care of all travel, pitching and meetings; all we need from you is the insight that helps us tell your story well, which we gather through an immersion workshop prior to taking your brand on the road.

Our next UK Media Roadshow is taking place in Spring 2026, and we’re excited to launch our inaugural US Media Roadshow in 2026.

Why this matters now

• National travel desks have shrunk, while regional and niche titles have grown in influence. On top of this, securing meaningful time with journalists over coffee, lunch, or in a dedicated media mission, has become unbelievably difficult.
• Regional media matters more than ever and so do the journalists behind national outlets who now live and work across the UK. Our Roadshow brings your brand valuable face-time with them, wherever they’re based. You can tap into interested parties, without having to chase them down. It’s a huge win-win for everyone.
• Lemongrass has deep, long-standing strategic media relationships, and our roadshow is a popular and well-established moment in the diary for journalists and creators. This format builds on that foundation, giving media an even more efficient way to discover strong stories while complementing the larger hosted events we continue to run.