Snap Launches Travel Ad Product Amid Digital Marketing Headwinds

Social media giant Snap is launching a new advertising product for the travel industry as the company navigates an increasingly challenging digital ad market.

On Wednesday, the Santa Monica-based company announced Dynamic Travel Ads, which lets hotels, airlines and travel agencies create ads that Snap can serve to interested Snapchat users. Using location data and other metrics, the new ad product can target users who intend to travel and show them locally-relevant campaigns for destinations or tours. Marketers working with Snap can make a variety of ads based on their product catalogs, which contain information such as flight routes and hotel rates that can auto-update to reflect real-time pricing and availability.

Snap is launching the product just as the summer travel season starts for a tourism industry that was battered by the pandemic and is hoping for a resurgence. Dynamic Travel Ads could also give Snap new business at a time when it faces macroeconomic headwinds and deals with the fallout from Apple’s revised privacy settings—factors which have harmed the digital advertising market. Last week, the company revealed that it will likely miss its quarterly earnings estimates, sinking its share price. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)

The company started beta-testing Dynamic Travel Ads last year and said early adopters have seen success. The online travel agency Booking.com, for instance, has used it to pull images directly from its product catalog and serve users ads with locally-relevant listings based on products they’d already viewed, according to Snap. That resulted in a lower cost per purchase compared to other U.S. advertisers, the company said.

“Dynamic Travel Ads are driving impressive results for our partners and we look forward to unlocking them for more businesses as the travel industry enters its busiest season,” Sharon Silverstein, Snap’s head of U.S. verticals, said in a statement.