Travel surged across the Middle East in December 2024, and travel marketers had incredible opportunities to capitalise on that demand. The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix returned to the UAE from December 6-8th; flight bookings in December were up 9 per cent overall, with regional bookings to the UAE up 13 per cent, compared with 2023.
What’s more, as Saudi Arabia entered its peak travel season, regional and international travel to the country showed increased demand. International flight bookings were up 15 per cent in 2024, compared with 2023, but regional travel to Saudi Arabia was the shining star with a 38 per cent increase.
Meanwhile, Qatar continued to woo travelers after the World Cup sparked newfound travel interest, launching its Qatar, Based on Your Heart’s Desire campaign to attract winter visitors.
So what does this all mean for travel marketers?
With spikes in travel demand, like we saw during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, comes increased competition, making it more important than ever for travel brands to learn what travellers really want.
In fact, their revenue depends on it. With curation, travel marketers can deliver personalised ads that resonate–and help them capture holiday travel revenue.
Is curation all it’s cracked up to be?
As travel marketers sought solutions for a soon-to-be cookieless world, curation rose to the top as a viable, personalised solution that didn’t rely on third-party cookies.
But when Google ultimately decided to change its stance on deprecating third-party cookies, the rush to adopt cookieless solutions slowed. While it seems easier to continue to rely on third-party cookies to reach audiences, the reality is that cookies are still on the decline, and they’re not the most effective or personalised way to reach potential travellers. And this is where curation shines.
Unlike third-party cookies, curation takes advantage of the latest developments in signal processing to target specific audiences more accurately and at a greater scale than ever before. While that sounds simple, the reality is that curation–and its capabilities–go far deeper.
Creating bespoke audiences during a holiday season
Curation is more than just a data-matching game. Great curation involves creating bespoke, custom audiences that allow travel marketers to hyper-target potential travellers. Traditionally, data transactions occurred on the buy side where ad networks collect data about user behaviour.
Advertisers then accessed that data through a demand-side platform to target audiences during real-time programmatic auctions. It was a complex process. Instead, curation shifts the data process to the sell side, allowing marketing partners to combine a brand’s first-party data, web event data, and partner data and use a supply-side platform to select and refine hyper-targeted audiences before the auction.
Advertisers then access these audiences using a private marketplace, or PMP, which allows them to align audiences with inventory before the auction, allowing for more efficient and effective targeting while enhancing privacy and data protection.
So what does this all mean? Think about it this way: marketers can uniquely curate data around luxury travellers, those planning family vacations, or even looking at point-to-point travel habits. These data sets can show where travellers are spending time on websites to help marketers carve out an intelligent path to purchase. The best part about bespoke audiences is that they are limitless–in part because of AI technology.
AI can invest massive amounts of data and move quickly, churning out bespoke audiences for travel marketers to target. Partners can overly AI on top of models to iterate around an outcome and optimise against a goal and goal rate, allowing them to be really deliberate about honing specific audiences.
Continuing to rely on third-party cookies may sound like a good idea, but there’s a better way. With curation, travel brands can tell their story to relevant audiences, without sacrificing privacy.
By showing travellers inspiring content, they can use curation to start the process of building long-term relationships that capture holiday bookings–and generate repeat and referral business.
By Stewart Smith, Managing Director – MEA, Sojern
