The tourism industry is booming, despite some geopolitical uncertainty and the economic effects of tariffs and inflation. Nearly half (44%) of respondents to a NerdWallet survey said they would take a summer 2025 vacation that involved a flight or hotel stay.
In addition, business travel is also on the rise. The Global Business Travel Association predicted that worldwide business travel expenditures would grow to almost $1.5 trillion, surpassing the pre-pandemic high of 2019. Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions (MICE) bookings are expected to increase significantly as well.
As travel advertising budgets surge, marketers face a paradox: travelers research trips across more channels than ever before, yet legacy tracking methods are disappearing. Supply-side curation has emerged as a solution, allowing travel brands to reach high-intent audiences across CTV, mobile, and web without relying on third-party cookies.
Travel is still a big-ticket item. That same NerdWallet survey found the average traveler expected to spend $3,861 on their trips.
Travel marketers need to tie campaign success directly to business outcomes, which means reaching existing and potential customers. Curated supply delivers exactly this: pre-vetted, high-quality travel publisher inventory with built-in viewability and brand safety standards.
Supply curators like 33Across’ Glossary, apply brand safety filters upstream, ensuring travel ads don’t appear next to negative destination news, travel scams, or low-quality made-for-advertising sites. When travel brands invest in solutions that reach the right audiences, campaign performance and efficiency increase.
Here are major travel trends reshaping how travel advertisers reach their audiences and why supply-side curation is becoming essential for competitive travel marketing.
The Return of “Bleisure” Travel
Bleisure (business + leisure) travel has returned as a major trend. Flexible work schedules and the rising freelance class means more professionals can combine a business trip with a family vacation or vice versa. Forbes claims that bleisure travel has increased by 25% in the last year.
Travel advertisers can demonstrate their destinations’ “best of both worlds”, encouraging business travelers to come for meetings and stay for leisure activities. These bleisure organizers do their searches on different devices, such as work laptops and personal phones.
This is where supply-side curation solves a critical problem: curated deals can unify cross-device reach using privacy-first identifiers, allowing travel brands to follow the customer journey from work research to personal booking without cookie-based tracking. Publishers can package business travel content alongside leisure destinations, creating cohesive audience segments that advertisers can activate with a single deal ID.
Higher lifetime value per traveler means brands want more robust audience segmentation than just “in-market for flights.” Curated PMPs deliver exactly that: “bleisure travelers,” “MICE attendees,” or “business travelers with household income $150K+” using contextual and first-party data signals.
Finding the Balance Between Resonance and Privacy
The privacy concerns that have led to many changes in the advertising ecosystem also factor into the travel marketplace. However, that doesn’t mean travelers don’t prioritize relevance, especially for those who know exactly where they want to go.
This is where supply-side curation becomes critical for travel advertisers:
Curated deals use contextual signals (articles about “best European river cruises”), publisher first-party data (users who regularly visit travel content), and predictive modeling to reach high-intent travelers without tracking individuals across the web.
Using cross-device orchestration and alternative IDS, curated packages connect CTV inspiration ads to mobile research to desktop booking, all while respecting privacy regulations.
Advertisers should shift budget toward high-intent content environments packaged through curated PMPs. This shortens the path from upper-funnel inspiration on CTV to mid-funnel research on the open web without losing signals.
The “Every Screen Is a Travel Window” Consumer
Those who travel are constantly thinking about potential vacations and can be influenced across channels: CTV, mobile web, apps, inflight portals, digital OOH, and countless other destinations.
An Expedia study found that nearly 60% of travelers did not have a specific destination in mind or considered multiple destinations when they first started exploring. In that same study, 13% of respondents said they considered three different destinations, on average.
Supply-side curation makes omnichannel travel marketing actually work. Instead of running separate campaigns across CTV, mobile, and web, with fragmented targeting, curated marketplace deals bundle premium travel publisher inventory (Conde Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, Lonely Planet) across all these channels. One deal ID reaches travelers throughout their research journey, from CTV inspiration ads to mobile comparison shopping to web booking.
Travel-Specific Curation Use Cases:
- Luxury Resort Packages: Target “luxury travel” and “5-star resort” content across Architectural Digest, Travel + Leisure, and Robb Report, enriched with high-income household data
- Adventure Travel: Contextual targeting on hiking, safari, and outdoor content with “active lifestyle” audience segments across mobile and CTV
- Family Vacation Deals: Bundle family-friendly travel content from parenting and lifestyle publishers with “parents of school-age children” first-party segments
- Cruise Bookings: Package cruise line content, coastal destination articles, and maritime travel guides with “planning a cruise” behavioral signals and “households 55+” demographic data across display and CTV
- Last-Minute Weekend Getaways: Curate “things to do this weekend” and local destination content within 200-mile radius targeting using geo-contextual signals, mobile-first inventory, and “spontaneous traveler” propensity models
- Sustainable/Eco-Tourism: Target environmental travel content, eco-lodge reviews, and “green travel tips” articles enriched with “environmentally conscious consumer” segments across premium outdoor and sustainability publisher networks
The Future of Travel Advertising Runs Through Supply-Side Curation
Potential travelers are everywhere and taking different paths to research, upending traditional planning models. At the same time, privacy expectations are rising, and advertiser budgets are under pressure to prove measurable outcomes.
Supply-side curation solves both challenges. Publishers and SSPs that own travel context can use AI and predictive modeling to package high-intent inventory into curated deals that travel brands can activate programmatically without third-party cookies.
For publishers, curation means treating each travel content exposure as a data-rich asset that, when packaged correctly into curated marketplace deals, commands premium CPMs and drives incremental revenue.
Supply-side curation turns complexity into orchestrated, high-performing campaigns that reach travelers at every decision point without compromising their privacy.
About 33Across
We help travel marketers connect data to media activation, simplifying programmatic targeting across digital channels to drive more efficiency and higher campaign performance.
Why It Matters to Travel Marketers
Marketers need to efficiently reach travelers with competitive messages aligned with their customer journey across multiple channels. Glossary’s intelligence solves this by enriching supply and pre-filtering inventory before reaching the demand-side platform (DSP).
Find out how to apply rich data signals and activate your campaign across digital channels using supply-side curation.
