Reaching Leisure Travelers in Summer 2025 and Beyond

Back to Blog 04/01/2025 - by The Digilant Team

With spring in full swing, the excitement for travel is unmistakable. As consumers gear up for long-awaited summer vacations and beyond, it’s clear that travel is more than just a seasonal priority—it’s a top spending category. According to recent data, 82% of American adults plan to travel during the summer of 2025, with 40% taking one trip and another 41% planning multiple getaways.

Despite ongoing economic concerns, the travel industry continues to show strong growth. Many consumers have spent the past few years dreaming, planning, and saving—and 70% plan to maintain or increase their travel in 2025. Let’s take a closer look at the trends shaping this year’s travel landscape and how travel advertisers can stay ahead.

2025 Travel Trends

Sustainable Travel

Travelers are increasingly conscious of their impact on the environment, from their transportation choices to the accommodations they book. Today, 69% of consumers are actively seeking more sustainable travel options, factoring carbon footprint into their trip planning decisions.

Early & Flexible Booking

With fewer restrictions and more predictable travel conditions, travelers are booking trips further in advance—often up to 6 months ahead—but flexibility remains key. Nearly 40% cite free cancellation and rebooking as a top priority. Shorter trips of 2–3 nights are also gaining popularity again, mirroring pre-pandemic behaviors.

Experience-Driven Vacations

Travelers are seeking memorable, meaningful experiences. In fact, 49% plan to spend more on their next trip to make up for lost time. Among younger travelers, that number climbs even higher—80% of Gen Z and Millennials are willing to pay more to upgrade their travel experience.

10 Tactics for Travel Marketers in 2025

The digital landscape not only opened doors for travelers to book and research their trips but for advertisers to reach audiences at the right moment. Understanding these crucial travel trends and then knowing how to apply them in today’s customer journey ensures you reach your audience as they browse, research, and ultimately book their getaways.

Below, we’ve outlined ten digital strategies that travel marketers should consider implementing before the busy summer ahead.

1. Paid Social

Social media influences travel decisions more than ever. In fact, 88% of Gen Z follow at least one travel influencer on TikTok. Paid social strategies—powered by custom, lookalike, and first-party audiences—are essential to stand out in crowded feeds.

While having a social media presence is great to encourage engagement with active social media users, a paid social strategy helps amplify your reach. Proprietary audiences within social platforms combined with custom audiences, lookalike audiences, first-party data, and more, provide travel brands a great opportunity to reach new prospects while they browse their feeds and drive them to their website or profiles.

2. Paid Search

Although consumers are willing to spend more on travel in 2025, they’ll still spend time searching for the best deals and experiences. Implementing broad and phrase match technology to your paid search tactics ensures you reach the widest audience. As your ads are eligible to appear whenever a user searches any word in your key phrase, in any order.

Broad Match is the default setting that uses any word within your keyword phrase in any order. For example, “goat yoga in Oakland” will match “goat yoga” or “yoga Oakland.”
Phrase Match will match with queries that include your keyword phrase in the exact order but may include additional words before or after it. For example, “goat yoga” can yield “spotted goat yoga” or “goat yoga with puppies.”

3. Location-Based Targeting

Create custom location-based audiences by setting a specific radius that can be targeted on display or mobile devices. This gives marketers the ability to target consumer based on a variety of factors including:

people currently traveling in a destination
people who have previously traveled to a destination
people within driving distance to a destination
people living in a region that regularly travel to a particular destination

4. Behavioral Targeting

When looking at your target audience, which stage in the travel planning process are they currently in? Are they making broad searches about beach vacations or have they already visited your site, clicked your ad, and narrowed down their options?

With behavioral targeting, you can leverage web search, purchase history, mobile app ownership, and web visit data to create and deliver brand messaging to consumers who have shown the most interest in your travel brand.

5. CRM Targeting

Brands can onboard first-party CRM data to target and personalize ads to lapse or loyal customers. This data can be used for campaigns like email marketing to deliver data-driven targeting promotions, booking updates, and tailored industry information.

6. Dynamic Segmentation

Develop custom segments based on observed behaviors to reach the most qualified travelers. For example, if a consumer visits a travel booking site but does not complete their booking, a particular ad is served to drive traffic back to the site to complete the booking.

7. Transactional Data

More than half of travelers (51% to be exact) prefer using credit cards when booking leisure trips or vacations. By leveraging custom 3rd party data segments based on transaction history and credit card purchases, you can target potential customers with relevant travel offerings. These segments can be tailored to include travel-related purchases, such as flight bookings, hotel stays, rental car reservations, and more, to ensure that your advertising efforts reach those most likely to be interested in your travel products and services.

8. Automatic Content Recognition

More than three-fourths of consumers planning to travel domestically or abroad within the next 12 months watch ad-supported advanced TV. As consumers stream TV across different devices and platforms, ACR technology ensures you capture audiences that have been exposed to your or your competitors’ TV ads, regardless of the device they’re using.

9. Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO)

DCO technology creates personalized ads based on data about the viewer at the moment when ads are served. This gives brands the ability to quickly iterate on which ad creative they are displaying based on the user’s intent, showcasing the different ways you are meeting their expectations.

10. Site Retargeting

Use pixel-based retargeting to reach consumers who have previously visited or engaged with our website, researched booking, and/or requested information as they continue their travel planning. This allows you to deliver personalized ads based on previous actions made by the consumers to guide them further down the funnel.

Digilant’s Expertise in Travel Marketing

At Digilant, we specialize in helping brands reach modern travelers with smart data, omnichannel strategies, and impactful creative. Our partnerships with travel data leaders like Adara, Expedia, and TripAdvisor give you access to exclusive audience insights, combined with real-time performance reporting to ensure your campaigns are always optimized.

Get the Complete 2025 Summer Travel Package

Want deeper insights and a ready-to-launch media strategy built for 2025 travel trends? Download our Summer Travel 2025 Package to explore must-know audience stats, top destinations, and tactical media recommendations to guide your campaign planning from start to finish.

Download the Package Now →