How Much Did Big Travel Companies Spend on TV Ads in 2019?
Skift Take
Airlines, hotels, and booking sites have divergent reasons for leaning into or out of TV advertising. Attracting more direct bookers is always a goal, but sometimes competitive reasons, or the emergence of new platforms, skew the TV budgets.
There were few common threads in the way the hotel, airlines, and online travel sectors approached U.S. TV advertising in 2019, as their spending trends diverged widely.
Among the three sectors, hotels was the only one to significantly hike U.S. national TV spend, according to estimates from television analytics firm iSpot.tv, while airlines cut their spend in half, and online travel agency and metasearch sites as a whole maintained their TV budgets at almost exactly the same level as in 2018.
Hotel, Online Travel and Airline U.S. TV Spend 2019
Sector
Total Spend
Percentage Change
Hotels
$403.5 million
31.94 percent
Booking Sites
$657 million
.01 percent
Airlines
$57.7 million
- (47.06) percent
Source: iSpot.tv
Hotels increased U.S. national TV spend nearly 32 percent to $403.5 million in 2019 compared with the previous year. The bump amounted to almost $100 million, and Marriott International, after finishing the integration of the Marriott and Starwood loyalty programs, increased its spend by some $56 million.
The Hilton Hotels brand, though, edged out Marriott with an estimated $103.7 million in U.S. national TV spend, anchored by at least a ha
