As travel continues to rebound, some brands are using the Super Bowl to capture their piece of what is expected to be a growing pie in 2022. Last week, Booking.com and Expedia announced plans to air 30-second spots in the Feb. 13 game.

The entry of travel brands into the Super Bowl is notable because the sector has recently avoided shelling out big money for in-game ads. But business dynamics are different this year. Brands are seeking mass-market ad opportunities as they battle for market share as the category rebounds from pandemic lows. More consumers are taking leisure vacations and even business trips are trickling back.

“I don’t think we need to create demand for travel—everyone is dying to get back to a normal life,” said Jon Gieselman, who joined Expedia Brands as president last year and immediately decided in August to work on the Super Bowl spot, created with Anomaly. “But we need to communicate clear reasons why people should travel with us.”

Expedia is planning an experience-focused ad, set to run in the fourth quarter. Vrbo, the vacation rental brand owned by Expedia, will also run a 60-second pre-game spot. Booking.com will run a commercial, also in the fourth quarter, its first-ever Big Game spot.

See which brands are buying ads in Super Bowl 2022.

Last week, Tripadvisor published a survey with Ipsos MORI around what to expect from the category in 2022. The report found that, already, planned travel in 2022 surpasses actual travel in 2019; the average spend per trip this year is also exceeding that of 2019, Tripadvisor found. Of course, the rise of the omicron variant, which resulted in the flight cancellations of thousands of holiday trips, could continue to put a crimp in some plans. Delta Air Lines recently reported 8,000 workers infected with COVID-19. The ups and downs are paving the way for more advertising, which could help travel brands communicate to consumers that trips are safe despite new coronavirus variants.

The industry engaged in stark advertising pullbacks during the early part of the pandemic—2020 ad spending and revenue in travel fell by more than 20%, according to Ad Age’s Datacenter. But many brands resumed advertising last year with several boosting their budgets by a hefty percentage. Marriott International and Expedia both produced large brand campaigns in the spring, for example.

From January through October of last year, the total advertising spend from travel companies jumped 38% compared with the year-earlier period to $2.3 billion, according to MediaRadar, an advertising intelligence platform. The bulk of such spending, or $1 billion, was dedicated to digital ads, MediaRadar found; just $583 million was spent on TV.

Why now?

In 2019, travel advertisers made up 4% of total Super Bowl spending, according to MediaRadar, which found that figure fell to 3% in 2020. Last year, no travel brands advertised in the game, according to the Ad Age archives. “Most independent travel brands don’t have the budget or can’t justify the expense of one spot in the Super Bowl,” said Clayton Reid, CEO of travel marketing firm MMGY Global. 

But for bigger travel conglomerates like Expedia and Booking.com, which is owned by Booking Holdings, the investment makes more sense, especially this year. They must stay top of mind as they battle increased competition from Google, which has ramped up travel offerings in recent years, as well as from suppliers like hotels, which have encouraged customers to book directly. To that end, travel platforms have been looking for revenue beyond commissions and putting less advertising dollars into search.

“The cost and return on search marketing has come way down,” said Reid. “Even before the pandemic, [online travel agencies like Booking and Expedia] said they’d pull money out of search and put into broad awareness tools.” He added that such brands are “not about just grabbing that low-funnel booking—it’s about being an aggregation platform and monetizing traffic in other ways, other types of referral revenue, content models, and loyalty models.”

Reid estimates that travelers use more than 20 websites to research a trip before booking. The stat highlights the need for a broad brand boost that a Super Bowl ad, watched by millions, would provide.

“They can afford it—the appeal to the broad market,” he said. “They can more easily justify the cost and the wide distribution you create with a Super Bowl spot.”

Get the latest Ad Age Super Bowl 2022 news here.

In October, Expedia announced it will be rolling out a new brand loyalty program, merging offers from its namesake brand along with Vrbo, Hotels.com, Orbitz and Travelocity. The program, which will use one common currency of rewards, is an example of one of the strategies Expedia is taking to cement better long-term connections with customers in hopes of getting them to return to the brand for future travel needs, said Gieselman. He noted that the brand’s Super Bowl commercial, which will lean heavily into why travelers should book with Expedia, will provide a creative platform for the brand to use for the next couple of years.

“What we have to create is a more sustainable longer-term relationship with customers,” said Gieselman. “We have to create reasons why they should not just travel with us once but travel with us again and again.”