Real Campaigns.
Real Results.

Olivia Dean built Summit Adventures into a respected name in New Zealand adventure travel.

Her flagship offering — an Everest Base Camp Premium Trek with helicopter return — depended entirely on word-of-mouth and Facebook groups to fill seats.

She believed the business could support four departures a year.

Before this campaign, she was running one.

Before the campaign: 1 of 8 seats booked. Zero paid marketing history.

Olivia brought in WaveX Media to find out whether Meta Ads could do what years of organic reach hadn’t: fill departures predictably.

We built a post-Andromeda update Meta campaign designed to let strong creative do the work of finding the right travellers — testing angles aggressively rather than guessing at a narrow audience from day one.

• Real, human-scale imagery consistently outperformed polished “epic mountain” shots.
• The insight that changed everything: bucket-list trips like Everest Base Camp book close to 12 months out. Most agencies pull the plug the moment they don’t see quick wins. We understand the travel sales cycle — so we held the course, and the result was a sold-out departure.
• Lead follow-up focused on the specific details that mattered most to genuinely interested travellers.

Once that approach was in place, bookings followed quickly.

Over 89 days:

• $2,725 spent → $39,342 in confirmed bookings
• ROAS: 14.4x
• 53 leads generated, 7 confirmed bookings
• The departure sold out completely

Olivia went from running one self-organised departure a year to a fully sold-out trek — and is now exploring two more departures for next year, on track for four annually.

Nicolas Roos runs Ocean Earth Travels, a Bali-based scuba diving and adventure travel agency.

His existing paid channel, Google Search, is built for planners — people already deep into researching a trip, often months before they travel.

His brand-new coral conservation-themed dive expedition couldn’t wait that long. The departure was just six weeks out.

A brand-new trip needed a channel that could create interest, not just respond to people who were already searching.

Nicolas wanted to know whether Meta could do what Google couldn’t: reach the right people fast, before they’d ever think to search.

We built two distinct audiences rather than one broad campaign — UK and Europe-based travellers for general reach, and, more specifically, expats and digital nomads already living in Southeast Asia, who didn’t need months of advance planning to say yes.

• A traveller scrolling Instagram in Bangkok or Hanoi could see the ad and realistically book a departure weeks away — exactly the buyer Google Search was never going to find.
• Creative used Ocean Earth Travels’ own real photography — manta rays, shipwrecks, coral restoration work — genuinely awe-inspiring rather than generic stock imagery, with real community and cultural moments woven in too.
• The campaign surfaced 35 highly engaged, qualified leads — people personally spoken with and confirmed as genuinely interested, not just form fills.

In 31 days, real demand was found — through a channel Nicolas had never used before, reaching people Google never could.

Over 31 days:

• 395 total leads generated
• 35 real sales conversations started
• ~$650 in ad spend
• +395 new mailing list contacts

Every one of the 395 total leads — screened for real diving experience and interest — became a lasting contact in Ocean Earth Travels’ own mailing list, alongside the 35 most highly engaged.

Nicolas now has clear, validated proof of real demand for an entirely new product — reached fast, before a single search ever happened, exactly the kind of result paid social delivers before search demand even exists.

We ran Meta Ads for a Philippines-based adventure travel operator, generating a steady stream of leads.

Generating leads is only half the job — converting them into conversations is equally important.

Leads were receiving an initial email, but it often takes several contact attempts to actually get a conversation started.

The starting point: an 11% contact rate — meaning most leads hadn’t yet had the chance to become a real conversation.

We took over lead activation and follow-up directly, with a structured, fast, and multi-step follow-up process, reaching out across multiple channels rather than relying on email only (which often goes to spam).

• WhatsApp became the primary channel for first contact, far outperforming email with this audience.
• Every lead received multiple follow-up attempts across different channels.
• Leads that had gone quiet for weeks started replying within days.

Nothing about the ads changed. What changed was the follow-up process itself — structured, multi-step, and built to keep trying until someone replied.

• Lead contact rate started climbing immediately, rising from 11% to 38% within the first two weeks
• 240% increase in leads contacted (3.41x as many conversations started)
• 78.6% of successful contacts came through WhatsApp, just 21.4% through email
• Real conversations started with people who’d already shown genuine interest but were previously never reached

The leads were never the problem. The follow-up was — and fixing it more than tripled the number of real conversations, from the exact same advertising.