I think it is effective, but I am not sure if it will be effective for your travel site, because it depends of many other things like:
- where are your destinations. For example if people prefer to travel to France and China (or Brazil and Australia) and you offer them to travel to Afghanistan and Somalia (or Iraq and Syria), then probably you can't get enough costumers and it'll be not Google Adwords fault.
- how good are you prices. If someone offers, for example, $500 for a travel to Japan and you offer $1500, then probably your competitor with the lower price will get the costumers.
- what is the quality of your website (design, user friendly,...)
You can try to spend only 50% of these $1000, i.e. $500 for Google Adwords and if you're satisfied, then to spend the rest 50% ($500) too. Or you can pay for Google Adwords $900 and pay us $100 for some good white hat and green hat SEO. The money is yours, so you have to decide how to spend it. Good luck to you and to your travel business! I'm living in a famous travel place, so I know how important it is.