DUBAI: Snap Inc. has announced the launch of dynamic travel ads, a new ad product for advertisers in the travel industry, in time for the summer travel season.

The new product is specially designed and positioned to attract travel and tourism advertisers including hotels, airlines and online travel agencies.

Dynamic travel ads allow advertisers to automatically create a variety of ads based on their product catalogs, which can contain thousands of products. The most relevant ads are then shown to users based on Snap’s internal system.

“We launched dynamic travel ads to help travel and tourism advertisers drive scalable performance and increase automation by showcasing their unique propositions to the market, cross-selling and upselling their product range,” said Rasha El Ghoussaini, head of Industry — Luxury, Auto, Tech and Travel at Snap Inc.

The new product offers three unique benefits: advanced audience targeting based on a user’s travel intent; locally relevant campaign delivery to serve ads based on popularity, leveraging Snapchat’s visitation data; and a customized catalog setup that is built to meet the needs of travel advertisers, with relevant product feed attributes that are specific to these businesses.

Eighty-two percent of Snapchat users in the Middle East and North Africa region have taken a vacation in the last year, and 20 percent are more likely to say that seeing/hearing an advertisement influences their choice of travel destination, according to a GlobalWebIndex study.

“With travel demand seeing a continued strong recovery in Q1 2022, we were of course keen to capitalize by converting existing customers and, importantly, acquiring new ones. However, the marketplace for air travel remains highly competitive so ensuring relevance is key,” said Phil Dodwell, marketing media lead at Etihad, one of the first brands to use the new product.

He added: “By using Snapchat Dynamic Ads, we were able to maximize relevance by matching customers to specific destinations, dramatically improving performance metrics across the booking funnel in the process. The prospecting solution, in particular, is currently the best-in-class catalog solution for dynamic travel ads on social, and we are extremely pleased with the results we have been able to achieve.”

Since launching the beta version last year, Snap has seen strong adoption and performance from early test partners. Etihad used dynamic travel ads to reduce its cost per flight search by four times and drive a 307 percent increase in return on ad spend with a 76 percent decrease in cost per purchase compared to its non-dynamic campaigns.

Booking.com leveraged dynamic travel ads to pull images directly from its product catalog and serve locally relevant listings based on previously viewed products. The campaign resulted in a 20 percent lower cost per purchase than other US advertisers.

Dynamic travel ads are now available globally to all Snap travel advertisers.