With no Olympic Games, World Cup or other major event of global interest to spur tourist traffic, travel marketers are looking at 2025 as a normalized year for travel. This means more brand building work and loyalty-based efforts, with a stronger focus on finding and targeting new demographics and interests.
“I suspect next year’s travel will look a lot like this year’s travel,” said Jennifer Bridie, vice president of marketing at Southwest Airlines. She noted that booking patterns have shifted and returned to a pre-pandemic booking curve.
“The economy is still strong, but now we have to work harder,” said Laurel Greatrix, vice president of brand & communications at Viator, an online travel marketplace owned by TripAdvisor. The years since the end of the pandemic lockdown saw triple-digit increases in travel volume, but “you never know what is you and what is the world” she said. Now marketing has to use data more effectively to drive traffic: “We can’t be just a warm body,” she said.
The pandemic was tough on the airlines, which saw a “commoditization” of airline travel, as carriers became more flexible about cancellations and rebookings, Bridie explained. Now, a lot of those airlines are going back to their past practices, she noted. For Southwest, that is good news, because it can lean on the flexibility that’s always been part of its brand identity.
“You have to be able to drive that loyalty back to the brand,” she said. Southwest has announced new products such as enhancements of its companion pass, vacation bundles and interline partnerships and will continue rolling out new features in 2025 to keep its core leisure travelers loyal.
“We’re really excited for what lies ahead,” Bridie said.
“I think the bigger thing is connecting all the dots,” said Nicolette Harper, vice president of global marketing and media at Marriott International. The hotel chain is focusing on retargeting travelers across their journeys, using mobility data to connect messaging from airport out of home to inflight entertainment through to buying ads in ride-share services to “tell the next chapter of our story.”
Travel marketers will focus some of their data power and media spend on loyalty programs in 2025, fine tuning their offerings with technology to fight off commoditization. Every brand now has a loyalty program and “it doesn’t feel so rewarding anymore,” said Marissa Yoss, vice president of media and brand marketing at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. The programs are complicated and redeeming rewards is usually difficult, she said. Voss noted Wynham has created a social media-based effort called “what’s the points?” to highlight the ease of use of its loyalty program and promote it to younger users.
Green travel and movie-inspired destinations
Technology—specifically artificial intelligence—will provide an assist for both marketers looking to target consumers, and for consumers navigating the wide range of choices available. Harper noted that Marriott is “building a massive infrastructure on the adtech side” to support all its brands worldwide with the ability to create and target ads that are brand-appropriate.
Travel brands are playing up their big selling points to target a consumer base that came back from the pandemic lockdown with new appetites, and to focus on the rising clout of Generation Z, the consumers born since 1996. Travel marketers acknowledge the attitudes and media consumption habits of this demographic will shape a lot of work next year and beyond.
“We’re seeing our demographic continue to skew increasingly young, which is exciting,” said Eliot Hamlisch, chief commercial officer of Amtrak. The railway is leaning heavily on its lower carbon footprint to attract Gen Z travelers concerned about the effects of air travel on climate change, he said. It launched a new “Retrain Travel” campaign on Oct. 1 premised on reintroducing rail travel as a less stressful, more sustainable transportation mode than cars or airplanes.
Travel has come to be an expectation for consumers, said Voss. She noted Wyndham is seeing a proliferation of “set travel”—consumers who, after binge watching streaming content, want to check out the location of their favorite shows. Expedia identified “jet setting as a trend for 2025, with travelers heading to Cape Town to see the locations of Netflix’s “One Piece” or to Wyoming and Montana for the Paramount+ show “Yellowstone.” Yoss also noted that sports travel is on the rise, thanks to the afterglow of this summer’s Olympics and the anticipation for the 2026 World Cup, which will be played in the U.S. and Canada.
After a couple of banner years, “It is grit and ingenuity that is going to get us through the next couple,” said Greatrix, “It was revenge travel, and now it’s a lot of intent-based marketing. Now we have to work harder.”