Hotels increasingly are leveraging the power of data to market themselves to consumers. According to a new report from Eyeota, there are great varieties in the ways the brands leverage data.
The survey focused on some key data points for the travel industry. First, the survey found that the majority of audience data spend last year came from four travel and leisure sub-sectors: travel agents and booking sites (32 percent of spend), airlines (22 percent), hotels, resorts and casinos (20 percent) and tourism (10 percent).
Spending varies greatly by sector. In 2018, travel agent and booking site brands spent more than $3,000 per audience-targeting campaign, according to survey results. However, the top 10 airline advertisers (by annual data spend) spent more than $10,000 per campaign.
Eyeota’s research also shows that there was a major push in advertising and marketing in the second half of 2018. Travel agent and booking site advertisers peaked in the third quarter, representing 52 percent of the data spend.
The hotels, resorts and casinos category advertiser data spending peaked in the fourth quarter, targeting holiday shoppers and travelers planning for warmer holiday trips.
Another key point of the survey showed the target markets of each sector. For example, Eyeota’s data found that travel agent and booking site advertisers in May of 2019 were focused on female-skewing audiences, typically in business-services occupations, such as marketing, consulting and human resources.
Hotel, resort and casino advertisers spend more on demographic segments compared to travel agents/booking sites and airlines. Given significant competition within the hotels, resorts and casinos space, these brands spend the majority of data budgets on a mix of intent audiences to capture lower-funnel customers and interest audiences to reach mid-funnel travel researchers.
This report focuses on proprietary audience analysis from May 2019 and calendar year 2018 Eyeota Audience Marketplace expenditure data across all global regions, aggregating Eyeota's proprietary audience data expenditure and volume information from 1,500+ advertisers, running 20K+ large scale advertising campaigns and utilizing audience segment data from 30K+ data suppliers.