Fastest growth in travel advertising to come from India: Zenith report

Mumbai: Travel advertising is poised for rapid growth as brands reset their relationships with consumers after the great rupture of 2020, according to Zenith’s Business Intelligence – Travel report. The report, published on Monday, forecasts that travel advertising in 13 key markets, including India, will expand by 24 per cent in 2021, twice as fast as the advertising market as a whole, before 36 per cent growth in 2022. 

Significantly, Zenith expects the fastest growth in travel advertising to come from India, where travel ad spend will be 31 per cent above the 2019 baseline by 2023. Here, rising disposable incomes mean more people are travelling, and existing travellers are travelling more frequently.

Zenith forecasts digital ad spend by travel brands to grow by six per cent a year between 2019 and 2023. By 2023 travel brands will be spending 70 per cent of their budgets on digital advertising, an increase from 63 per cent in 2020.

Travel advertisers spend more on digital advertising than the average brand – 63 per cent in 2020, compared to 58 per cent on average, as per the report. This is not surprising for a category that has been well ahead of the market in digital transformation, conducting 32 per cent of sales by e-commerce in 2021 compared to 20 per cent for retail as a whole.   

“Travel was one of the earliest sectors to embrace digital as booking went online,” said Zenith global chief strategy officer Ben Lukawski. “Post-Covid, the best-performing brands will complete this transformation by making the total experience digital, from reducing form-filling to contactless entry, removing nearly all possible friction from the experience.”

Digital travel advertising aims to capture consumers in the early stage of research, through search advertising and display and video ads within relevant content. As travel becomes ever more digital, digital advertising will become even more important for both brand building and conversion. Integrating travel apps with vaccine passports, using them to help consumers navigate local Covid-related rules and bureaucracy, and offering digital concierge services will accelerate the transition of travel towards a seamless digital experience, from initial research to enjoying the destination.

Furthermore, travel advertisers spend substantially more of their budgets on newspapers, magazines and out-of-home than average (20 per cent in 2020, compared to 13 per cent for the average brand), and substantially less on television (13 per cent compared to an average of 24 per cent), the report observed. Consumers are looking for choice and value, so media that allow brands to display a range of options and some details of pricing are particularly effective. Travel ad spend in print is falling as circulations continue to shrink, but out-of-home is forecast to recover from its slump in 2020 and grow at an average rate of six per cent a year between 2019 and 2023.

Pent-up demand for travel will drive rapid growth in travel ad spend over the next few years, but it will be a long road back to pre-pandemic spending. Travel ad spend will be still 33 per cent below its 2019 level this year, while the ad market as a whole will be seven per cent ahead, notes the report. It will take until 2023 for travel to exceed 2019 levels of spending when it will reach $19.6 billion.

Travel advertising was one of the categories hardest hit by Covid-19. The travel ad market lost nearly half its value in 2020 (46 per cent), while the ad market as a whole shrank by just four per cent. Zenith estimates that travel ad spend fell from $18.0 billion in 2019 to $9.7 billion in 2020.  

As global travel starts to recover, travel brands must rebuild their relationships with consumers as they adapt to the realities of post-Covid travel. Brands will have to refocus their communications on different audiences as they adapt to the decline of business travel as companies coordinate more international business with remote meetings, and address consumers’ concerns about the sustainability of travel, and adapt to the growing demand for low-carbon journeys.

“As travel begins to recover from the unprecedented drop in demand in 2020, brands are rebuilding their relationships with consumers, using digital technology to guide them at every stage,” said Zenith head of Forecasting Jonathan Barnard. “Online video, in particular, will play a key role in creating emotional connections with consumers, inviting them to take their first step on their digital journey."

The robust US ad market is pushing up media prices, which is the main reason why travel adspend will be 13 per cent higher there in 2023 and in 2019. Other mature markets will range from +9 per cent to -9 per cent growth over this period, depending on consumer demand, media inflation, adoption of digital technology, and a myriad of other reasons. In all markets, though, the recovery of travel advertising from the slump in 2020 will be well behind the growth of the market as a whole.

The thirteen markets included in this report apart from India are Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, UK, and the USA, which between them account for 74 per cent of total global ad spend. The report covers domestic and foreign travel for business and leisure.