Balloon Aloft

Hot air balloon operator

About

Who are they?

Balloon Aloft has been taking passengers to the skies since 1980, making it Australia’s original hot air balloon operator. The family-owned business operates across five destinations: the Hunter Valley, Camden Valley, Byron Bay, Mudgee and Burketown, and has earned multiple NSW and national tourism awards.

Balloon Aloft partnered with Fastrack Digital to increase direct website bookings and reduce its reliance on third-party travel platforms.

Key outcomes

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Increase in direct bookings

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Surge in AI referred traffic

$ 0

ROAS on PMax Campaigns

Balloon Aloft Hunter Valley Balloon Fiesta

Our Approach

Before Balloon Aloft could assess the impact of its current SEO & GEO and SEM activity, it needed a reliable view of which website visits were becoming bookings.

Fix missing data visibility

Purchase data was not being passed properly through the website’s custom booking engine to Google Analytics, resulting in unreliable conversion data.

Fastrack's analytics and developer teams worked with the booking engine and the Google Tag Manager team to identify and resolve the missing tracking attribution. Test bookings were conducted to verify the tracking funnel and accurate ecommerce tracking went live.

With dependable measurement in place, Fastrack launched a coordinated strategy across three key channels.

SEM (Paid Search)

To maximise the return on ad spend and campaign investment, the Google Ads account was restructured to focus on Search and Performance Max campaigns for each location and accessible flights, while search terms were culled to retain only high-intent and high-performing searches.

From here, budgets and bidding were continually refined based on conversion performance.

SEO & GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)

Fastrack worked with Balloon Aloft's website developer to improve Core Web Vitals and strengthen the site’s technical SEO foundation. We then developed answer-first content and FAQs, and implemented structured data to optimise AI visibility.

The results

The new measurement framework gave Balloon Aloft a clear view of performance, while the coordinated SEO, SEM and GEO strategy delivered growth across every channel.

14% increase in direct bookings
30% increase in revenue
5.5% conversion rate for Organic Search
11% higher avg. purchase value from GEO (AI) bookings compared to overall conversions

Fastrack continues to manage Balloon Aloft's Paid Search, SEO, and GEO performance to maximise the brand's advertising investment and maintain GEO presence as AI-powered search becomes an increasingly important source of direct bookings.

*Results pertain to YoY performance in May and August 2026.

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Next Project

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