The battle between online travel agents (OTAs) for customers remains fierce as online marketing investment continues to edge north and players attempt to navigate the shifting rules of engagement.
The largest online players—Airbnb, Booking Holdings, Expedia Group and Trip.com Group—invested a combined $5.2 billion on marketing in the second quarter of 2025.
Airbnb’s sales and marketing spend increased to $691 million in the quarter, up from $593 million in Q2 2024. It’s worth remembering that this is the company that emphasizes 90% of its business comes direct.
On its Q2 2025 earnings call, the company was asked about the “marketing intensity” needed to grow initiatives such as Airbnb Experiences and Services and how channels might evolve accordingly.
Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO and chair of the board, said that investment going forward will be to market Airbnb as a whole offering, stressing that the company does not see the launches as disparate offerings. Some ads were unveiled at the launch of experiences and services and more will come in the autumn.
“We're going to be launching ads that market home services and experiences, the bundled offering. And we think this is a really, really key principle that only Airbnb offers all of this in one app. And so we don't think that the marketing intensity, per se, has to increase because we think we can get a lot more for our dollar by marketing all of our offerings,” Chesky said on the earnings call.
Getting social
Regarding channel evolution, Chesky said the company sees an increasing shift to social for homes, services and experiences and that he feels Airbnb is in a strong position to take advantage of that shift.
“One of the things we're noticing is that a lot of travel is switching from desktop to mobile and from Google search to social media. And so increasingly, people are spending time on social media, and social media is gradually taking over as the number one place for travel search from Google. And travel is becoming more of an inspiration base than a high intent search based, destination platform,” he said.
Chesky added that the company is shifting from television advertising to social, adding that social is great because it enables Airbnb to be targeted.
Later in the call, Ellie Mertz, Airbnb’s CFO, said the company will continue to use performance marketing “surgically.”
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Booking Holdings also continues to experiment with social channels. It recently announced a partnership with TikTok enabling in-app hotel bookings.
While the company increased marketing spend to $2.1 billion in Q2, up from $1.9 billion during the same period in 2024, CFO Ewout Steenbergen called out that the spend as a percentage of gross bookings “was a source of leverage compared to 2024, driven by lower brand marketing expenses as well as higher direct mix, partially offset by increased spend in social media channels.”
President and CEO Glenn Fogel said that although performance marketing, specifically Google clicks, are “holding up quite well,” the company wants to continue to “diversify its performance marketing channels to other channels like we are doing with social media.”
Marketing efficiency
The discussion was more about generative artificial intelligence (AI) searches and bookings during Expedia Group’s Q2 earnings. Ariane Gorin, CEO, said that although traffic from generative AI searches is small, it’s growing rapidly and “converting into bookings at higher rates than other traffic.”
She also said that the traffic from generative AI search engines is more qualified.
“Now we're doing a lot of work with these AI companies, whether it's OpenAI, Google or the like. One, to make sure that when travelers are in their worlds that our brands are showing up well. There's tech work, there's marketing work, there's integration work that needs to happen to make that happen.”
The company increased marketing spend to $1.9 billion in the quarter, up from $1.8 billion during the same period last year.
Gorin also said that the company has work to do in its direct marketing spend for the consumer business but that it will see “improved marketing leverage” as its product improves and it drives and retains direct business.
“AI is a key enabler of productivity and effectiveness,” she said.
Trip.com Group increased sales and marketing expenses to $464 million, up about 30% year over year.
The China-based OTA attributed the increase to marketing and promotional investments to support international business expansion initiatives. The company also took its next step in AI evolution in the quarter with the launch of Trip.Planner, an AI-powered travel planning tool.