Why Travel Data Matters to Brands That Don’t Sell Travel

By Mack McKelvey, Founder and CEO, SalientMG

Nobody is exclusively a traveler.

The person researching hotels in Paris is also a parent, a pet owner, a car buyer, a beauty customer, a sports fan. Yet advertising still has a habit of treating people according to the website they’re visiting. We have increasingly sophisticated ways to identify and target audiences, but we’re still making some fairly basic assumptions about where those audiences can be found.

Take Tripadvisor. At SalientMG’s Breakthrough Summit during Advertising Week New York, Adam Ochman, Global Head of Marketing at Tripadvisor, pointed to pet care as one of the categories finding an audience on the platform.

Not exactly the first place you’d expect a pet brand to advertise. But perhaps it should be, since more than 70% of Tripadvisor’s global community members own pets.

A platform’s content tells you why people are there. It doesn’t tell you everything about who they are.

Beyond the Booking

Travel data offers another advantage for brands outside the travel industry: It can reveal what people are preparing to do.

On Tripadvisor, people compare hotels, research restaurants, explore activities, and ask other travelers for recommendations. Those interactions provide first-party signals about their interests and plans, often well before a trip takes place.

Someone researching hiking excursions is revealing different interests from someone planning a week at a beach resort. And the trip itself typically creates new purchasing needs. A pet owner might need to arrange care before leaving town. Someone planning an outdoor adventure may start shopping for gear.

Knowing what someone is interested in is useful. Knowing when that interest might turn into a purchase is even more valuable.

Beauty is one category where Tripadvisor has put travel intent to work. In a campaign with L’Oréal, the platform reached travelers with beauty products they could purchase online and collect at the airport. The campaign generated 83,000 visits to a dedicated shopping experience.

L’Oréal reached potential customers through their travel plans rather than waiting for them to enter a traditional beauty-shopping environment.

Rethinking Where We Find Customers

Tripadvisor is one example of a broader opportunity. Publishers, retailers, and other platforms have spent years building direct relationships with consumers, collecting information about their interests, behaviors, and intentions along the way.

Yet media partners are still frequently evaluated by how closely their content or category aligns with an advertiser’s product. That approach can overlook valuable audiences and moments of intent, especially when consumers’ interests extend well beyond the reason they visited a particular platform.

We’ve become remarkably sophisticated at deciding which consumers to target. Maybe it’s time to be a little less predictable about where we look for them.