Last week was a watershed moment for the entertainment sector, with the revelation that YouTube has overtaken Netflix in average daily viewing among users around the world.
Of course, anyone working in the travel industry is used to hearing about the growing influence of video platforms like YouTube on the booking journey, but the news, published in Digital i’s latest trends report and heralded as “one of the defining media shifts of the decade” is a stark reminder of just how fast consumer habits are evolving.
YouTube’s jump to the number one spot comes after an almost 10% increase in daily viewing time, rising to 99.1 minutes in 2025 from 87.2 minutes the previous year. Hotels in particular are struggling with the pace of change, according to a digital expert at Radisson Hotel Group.
Speaking a few days earlier at an event, Velit Dundar, Radisson’s vice president of global e-commerce, talked about a “speed problem,” voicing concerns that the technology systems hotels operate cannot keep up with changing consumer habits.
A new reality
During Amadeus’s Advertising Summit, held in Antibes, France, at the end of May, Dundar was quizzed onstage about the challenges he faces. He singled out the customer journey.
“The number of touchpoints is continuing to increase, and also we are seeing now how people are searching, how they consume travel and how they discover has changed completely,” he said. “That requires a different mindset and a different operating model to adapt to this new reality.”
He added that when a hotel has a legacy system in place, it makes it even more challenging.
“We spend a lot of time on integration. Speed, in my opinion, becomes the real differentiator. Our operating model is designed for a much more predictable, more certain environment, and I feel we are moving at a much faster pace. The challenge is that customers are moving faster than us. So how do we keep up with this pace?”
Speaking earlier at Mews’ customer event in Amsterdam, Lou Zameryka, Airbnb’s global head of hotel enterprise and connectivity partnerships, said that how hotels structure information and how they choose what data is most valuable to their businesses or objectives is “where the power is going to come.”
The unstoppable rise of video
Dundar was speaking alongside executives from Google and TikTok, who discussed new search trends among their respective platforms.
“Travelers are expecting more from their booking journeys, they're expecting much richer experiences, and we are seeing this play out across both search and YouTube,” said Anna Sawbridge, travel director at Google.
Some 83% of global consumers now use Google and YouTube on a daily basis. “That is higher than any other online platform,” Sawbridge said.
In terms of travel video views, there had been a 33% yearly increase in France, 28% in Germany and 24% in the United Kingdom.
“Travel searches on YouTube are growing, and they're growing fast,” she continued. “We're also seeing evidence that large language models (LLMs) are leaning into video more and more to influence the answers that they give us, so video is becoming really important.”
Google revealed in May that it plans to integrate its new intelligent shopping cart within YouTube.
Meanwhile, TikTok senior industry manager Marc-Antoine Simon claimed the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform had 3 billion active users, with 5 billion searches happening daily.
“We don't want queries anymore. We want communities,” he told the audience. “When we search for something, we want the answer to come from someone who actually explains it to us in a way that makes sense.”
He argued that with too much information and exposure to 5,000 or 10,000 adverts a day, the most powerful advertising technique and recommendation engine today is word of mouth. “Because your brand guidelines work for 20 years doesn't mean it's going to work for the next 20. Times have changed, you have to change with it,” he said.
He added that research showed 80% of travelers said their purchasing decisions can be directly impacted by user-generated content on TikTok.
OTAs up the pressure
As hotels seek out more direct bookings, online travel agencies (OTAs) continue to adapt and invest in their own marketing strategies. Booking Holdings spent $2.1 billion in marketing in the first quarter of 2026, up 16% year over year. Expedia Group’s direct sales and marketing spend hit $1.9 billion in Q1, an increase of 6% year over year.
Booking.com and Expedia, among other brands, also joined TikTok’s new in-app booking program called TikTok GO in May this year.
Omni-strategy push
As video platforms move beyond inspiration to enable single-click purchases, hotels need to feed in live rates and availability.
“We absolutely need to know whether you have rooms available and at what price they are, and this means that the information that you're putting into those travel feeds [is] incredibly important to get right,” said Google’s Sawbridge, when discussing how the search giant helps create, capture and convert demand across its platforms, including YouTube.
Dundar said there is a need for greater cross-channel and cross-ecosystem coordination. “That means, ultimately, the convergence of marketing, distribution and revenue management, to work as an integrated commercial engine to drive real value,” he said.
For example, rather than carrying out advertising campaigns based on annual budgets, hotels need constant visibility across search, LLM, chatbots, social and other digital interactions, he argued. New KPIs outside the traditional return on advertising spend (ROAS) model are also needed.
The answer involves more partnerships too. Radisson is working with Amadeus, which used the summit to launch its new Advertising Travel Platform, designed to help brands advertise more intelligently across different platforms. It has also partnered with DirectBooker, an aggregator that connects hotels to AI assistants.
“We have to work with partners who can help us tap into this ecosystem, partners who can co-innovate with us, co-create value, to share some risk with us,” Dundar said.
Culture shock
Dundar believes hospitality next needs to change its mindset with the help of technology partners. “Perhaps the most important thing is to help us create a culture change within the organization, help us adapt our operating model. Because let’s be honest, our operating model is not designed to work seamlessly in this new speedy world,” he said.
Hotels also needed to experiment more—despite the risks.
“We live in a time of the emergence of new channels, new platforms, a new ecosystem, so we have to test and that means sometimes we have to lose money,” Dundar said.
“So how do you build a culture and leadership to empower us to take risks?” In short, a partner that can understand the complexities of a hotels’ business model and drive change will be the most critical one, he added.
Also on stage was Kristen Kelly, global head of media for advertising platform Accenture Song, who warned: “If you’re going to continue with the current ways of working, in a fragmented world, you will fail. And that’s what we’re seeing,” she said. “At the end of the day, your travelers will be impacted because the relevance isn’t there.”