Online tourism heavyweights spend $14 billion on marketing in 2022

03-04-23

When the world fully reopened to travel in 2022, the four online travel giants - Expedia Group, Booking Holdings, Airbnb and Trip.com Group - shelled out a record amount of money to capture consumers' attention.

Between the four brands, marketing spending (reported by Airbnb and Expedia Group as sales and marketing) was just over $14 billion for the year, surpassing the amount the four companies spent in 2019, which was about $500 million.

Most of that spending came from Expedia Group and Booking Holdings, with the two companies shelling out $6.1 billion and $6 billion, respectively, in 2022.

That's a notable increase for both compared to 2021. That year, Expedia Group spent $4.1 billion and Booking Holdings $3.8 billion, both a big jump from the pandemic-induced drop in spending in 2020, but still well behind 2019 and current levels.

And both online travel giants saw an increase in marketing cost as a percentage of revenue. For Expedia Group, marketing accounted for 52% of revenue in 2022, up from 49% the year before, while Booking Holdings accounted for 35% of revenue, up from 34.7% in 2021.

Airbnb, meanwhile, which slashed marketing spend in 2020, has increased it again as its revenues have grown. But the company's marketing strategy still leans towards earned media over performance marketing. 

Airbnb spent $1.5bn in 2022, up from $1.2bn the year before. But as a percentage of revenue, marketing fell from 20% to 18%, the lowest among the four OTAs analysed.

Trip.com Group, meanwhile, is the only one of the four OTAs analysed to reduce its marketing spend in 2022, from $772 million in 2021 to $616 million last year. Those figures are well below Trip.com Group's 2019 outlay of $1.3 billion.

As a percentage of revenue, the China-based company's marketing spend fell from 25% in 2021 to 21% in 2022.