Online giants ramp up marketing spend

As travel recovery continued in the summer, the online travel giants scrutinized their marketing investment to take advantage of, and drive, momentum in Q2 and beyond.

Booking Holdings, Expedia Group and Airbnb looked to what they already had in terms of their existing customer bases and continued to put marketing dollars elsewhere, hopefully to bring in new travelers.

This led to a mix of careful performance-marketing investment for Booking.com and Expedia, as well as some experimentation via new channels and campaigns.

Airbnb, which traditionally relies more on PR and word of mouth than performance marketing and commands a healthy volume of direct traffic, was still seeing the results from its first marketing campaign in five years, which launched in February this year.

While Airbnb had talked about its brand earlier in the year, Booking.com and Expedia seemed to take over come the second quarter.