Hello, everyone, and welcome to Explore. Two years ago, I had the privilege of standing here before you in our first post-COVID Explore, and while much has changed in our industry since then, I still remember it like it was yesterday. Explore '22 was a moment to celebrate the reopening of travel, but for me, many of the folks you're going to see today, and thousands of our employees across the globe, it was just the beginning of a journey to reimagine Expedia Group. This was a massive undertaking, which most companies never even have the courage to try. But we realized if we wanted to once again lead the industry in technology and traveler experience, we needed to disrupt ourselves. It was certainly challenging at times. It definitely took longer than I hoped, and it took incredible commitment from our teams all over the world.
But as you will see today, as we are beginning to see the potential of that work, we know it was worth it. During Explore 2022, we talked about our coming tech transformation, our investments that would allow us to create better products for our travelers and our partners, our reimagining of our family of brands and loyalty, and of course, moving from a marketplace that was obsessed with price to one that was focused on overall customer experience. Back here today, I'm immensely proud of everything we accomplished, from rationalizing 20 brands down to three, consolidating all our front-end stacks into one, merging and unifying hundreds of millions of traveler accounts, 17 CRM systems, going from more than 10 machine learning platforms to one, launching One Key, of course, and so much more.
We stand before you a reimagined Expedia Group, capable of new things, able to move at a pace we never could, and innovate faster than anyone in the space, all so that we can truly accelerate your growth in meaningful and creative ways. I sometimes equate our journey to launching a rocket. You expend a huge amount of energy just getting the rocket to launch off the pad, but inevitably, inexorably, the rocket begins to accelerate. We are now leaving the launchpad, and I am incredibly excited to watch Ariane and a team I've had the good fortune to help build, take us to escape velocity. Let me just add that I've worked closely with Ariane, and I have tremendous faith in her at the helm. She is someone I know many of you are already very familiar with, given her role leading our incredibly successful B2B business.
Four years ago, prior to my appointment as CEO, I remember having a conversation with Ariane, where we discussed the potential of her someday running Expedia Group. As I now go back to my Vice Chairman seat, I find myself in a full circle moment, seeing Ariane step into her role and take our great company and all of you into the next exciting phase of our journey. With that, I just want to thank you all for your partnership, your friendship, your insights, and for welcoming me into the wild world of travel for the last four years. It's been an honor and a privilege to get to know you all better and to lead this great company, which is once again poised to define the future of the travel industry. I wish you all great success, and may all your best days be ahead.
Please join me in welcoming Ariane to the stage. Thank you.
Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Peter, and thank you to all of you in the audience who are here with us today. Hello, also to our teams, our employees around the world who are joining via live stream. What a way to start my first week as CEO of Expedia Group, being here with all of you, our partners. It's an honor to build on the foundation set by Peter and our whole company, and it's a joy to continue working alongside all of you, our partners, who I've gotten to know so well over the last few years. This year is special as it's our 25th year of Explore. 25 years of bringing together the leaders in travel to take on our industry's challenges and opportunities, and to have some fun. We've forged new relationships, brokered groundbreaking deals, and come together all amidst a constantly changing travel landscape.
Now, I've been on the main stage at Explore for a number of years and have some great memories. There are also some things that I look back on and say to myself: "What was I thinking?" I think Greg Schulze convinced me to do that one with the helmet. Our industry has had its ups and downs. The past few years, we've seen fantastic growth, and while there might be some questions about the state of the economy and the growth in the short term, what I want to talk about today is the bright future we all have ahead. Now, it won't surprise you, but we're gonna talk a lot about AI. It's everywhere, and yes, at times it feels like the only thing anyone is talking about, but that's for good reason. Over time, as technology has advanced, travel has taken big leaps forward.
Some of you may remember that Expedia started on a CD-ROM back in 1996. Then came a huge change, the mobile phone. Mobile forced us to rethink how people searched for, planned, and booked travel.... It changed how we issue boarding passes, check into hotels, find local recommendations, and so much more, and that was great for travelers. That's what we're all here to do, right? Constantly find ways for travelers to have better experiences. Right now, with AI, we're on the precipice of an even bigger moment than mobile. I'm so inspired by what's ahead of us, and especially by what's going to be possible for travelers. seven years ago, Andrew Ng, an artificial intelligence expert, compared AI to electricity.
He said that just as electricity changed how the world operated, upending transportation, manufacturing, and so much more, that AI would have an immeasurable impact on the world, and that's how we think of AI at Expedia. It's like electricity. It's changing the world, and it will be used everywhere in travel. In fact, it's already having profound impacts for you and our travelers. AI is both the hero in the story and the hero powering the story. And I've been in the tech industry for over 20 years and have never seen something moving so fast. Our teams are discovering something new literally every day. We're testing new things and finding new ways to create value for travelers and for all of you, our partners. Like with all experiments, we'll find winners, and we'll learn from the rest.
The great thing about where we are now is that we can just move so fast. Now, to that end, let's look at some of the recent progress we've made. We're building personalization into all of our products using adaptive modeling and customer personas based on the huge amount of traveler data that we have. For example, we can personalize our homepages and even change the content, images, messaging, and page layout based on what we know about a traveler. Our recommendations then get even more curated based on the traveler themselves. A parent shopping for a spring break trip, who booked for their family in the past, might start to see family-friendly options that make sense for their needs. This results in less time searching and a faster match for exactly what the traveler is looking for. Some people talk about personalization. We're actually making it happen.
For our supply partners, we're using AI to better show off your inventory in our marketplace, like enhancing your content and highlighting amenities. We're making your advertising dollars work harder without you having to work harder through our new AI-enabled features, like automated goal-based campaigns. We're also improving customer service. We're a huge industry, and the amount of manual customer service work that still happens in our teams, your teams, and between our teams is massive. With AI and the creation of better self-service tools, our NPS has gone up, meaning travelers are having better experiences, and we're all saving money, money that we can reinvest in traveler experience and in growing our collective business. Now, let's zoom out for a minute. Our tech transformation created the environment and opportunities to take Expedia Group to the next level. But our platform enables more than just AI.
It's an enabler unto itself. Our brands are now on a single front-end stack with a unified testing platform that allows us to launch new features faster. We can also accomplish things like opening new lines of business for our brands, just like we recently did when we launched car rentals on Hotels.com. That would have taken us months to do in the past, but we were able to complete it in just one week. And this year, we're going to increase our testing impact eightfold, and all of these things translate into more travelers and more business for all of you. At our last two Explores, we talked about our excitement for creating one loyalty program across all our major brands. It was a big technical undertaking that culminated in last summer's U.S. launch of One Key.
We've seen great results, and many of you here today are tapping into our Gold and Platinum One Key members, people who spend over 20% more per lodging booking and travel 7 times more frequently than other members. Now, every Explore I've been to, we've talked about bringing you more business, giving you more access to our technology, and leveling up our partnerships. That's as true as ever, but this year is different. It's different because we're coming out of three years where so many of our resources were focused on tech transformation. We now have more capacity to deliver for you and for travelers, to help you grow and to help our industry grow. We're moving with greater speed and agility and better awareness of the end-to-end traveler experience, and the timing couldn't be better. This moment in travel is enormous.
AI will light up our industry like electricity did for the world. But let me be clear, just saying AI won't make it happen. And even though electricity is cool, if you put it in water, you're definitely not gonna like the result. ... AI itself doesn't create the magic. You have to have the human intelligence to figure out where to use it and how to use it. And I can tell you that our teams are asking smart questions and constantly finding paths to create value for you and for travelers. So thank you for all being here with us this week, and thank you especially for your partnership. With that, here's our CTO, Rathi Murthy, to share exactly how we're putting AI to use and also share our exciting new product announcements.
Thank you. Thank you, Ariane. So these days, talking about AI is like talking about Taylor Swift's latest album. Whether you're a fan or not, everyone has an opinion. Everyone's talking about AI and how we can use it to accelerate their business. And while there's so much good in AI, it's not a silver bullet. AI is a tool that can drive incredible results, but like any other tool, it really depends on how it's used. We believe in starting with the traveler experience and then using technology to bring these to life, and that's exactly what we'll show you today. But first up, I'm excited to announce our spring release. We're launching a ton of new experiences that assist travelers across their journey: discovery, planning, shopping, booking, service, powered by AI. And let's take a look at a few that really make travelers' lives easier.
Choosing your next vacation spot can take up a lot of time. You may want to go to Mexico, but finding that exact place in Mexico that matches all your needs can need a lot of research. We're using GenAI to compare destinations based on themes like beach, family, nature, so you can land that ideal place, like, much faster. Discovering new places just got easier. We all know finding that best value flight is far from easy. Last year, we built price tracking to allow our travelers to know exactly the right time to book your flights. This year, we're launching air price comparison, powered by ML, to help you compare flight prices across different dates to understand the best time to travel, so it's much simpler. I know most of us read dozens and dozens of guest reviews before we book our hotel.
Last year, we made this smarter by using GenAI to summarize the guest reviews of key amenities and services at a property, like, for me, the coffee machine in the room or the pool. This year, we're taking it a step further by summarizing what guests liked and didn't like about a property, and putting it right up front, so you can make your decision much faster. Smart shopping just got smarter. Often, you want to make a change to your booking, but really don't know where to start. We've brought GenAI into our help center as well, and it's really easy to ask a question and get a summarized answer to that, saving you a ton of time looking through articles. Making changes is also now easier.
As you can see, all these experiences and more are live starting from today across Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo, demonstrating once again the immense power of our unified platform. But these experiences only scratch the surface of what we're now capable of. We were the first to launch conversational trip planning with ChatGPT. That means we're learning first, we're adapting first, and we're maturing fast. We're in a prime position today to lead the industry again and be the first mover to reimagine and reinvent the travel experience using GenAI, to hyper-personalize the traveler experience to a completely different level, and let me explain what I mean by this. Last year, I organized a reunion with friends, and I'm sure many of you have experienced this nightmare, whether it's organizing a birthday party or a getaway with friends.
So I hope it won't come as a surprise to you that it was a tangled web of emails, WhatsApp, texts, and as a technologist, I was keen to use AI assistants to maybe help manage this much smarter. But frankly, what I found was essentially a bunch of generic chatbots. What was missing was an AI assistant that knew me, knew about my trip, and remembered the key details from all my conversations across all those different channels. What I needed was a travel agent, a concierge, and a personal assistant, all in one. Now, I'm super excited to introduce you to Romie.
Tell your future like a psychic. Baby, you gon' end up right in my bed. Chemistry is science. I could play it cool, but I'd be lying. I read you like a psychic. I'mma tell you something, you gon' like it. Chemistry is science. Better than what you was fantasizing.
Romie is your roaming buddy, built with three key principles in mind. Romie is assistive, not intrusive, always there at the ready, waiting to jump in like that perfect waiter. Romie meets you where you are, whether that's in our app or iMessage, WhatsApp, wherever. And Romie gets progressively intelligent, building memories as you interact, such as your love for boutique hotels, Italian food, and traveling with your dog. Let's take a look at how Romie actually assists travelers. Joanna starts a group chat with her sister and her husband to discuss a trip she's planning with her son. And as you can see, all she has to do is plus Romie to join the conversation and help her. Romie listens and makes suggestions when asked, just as a smart agent would. Now, that is groundbreaking.
When Joanna is ready, she asks Romie to summarize the conversation, and she's taken straight into Expedia's booking path. From the chat, Romie already knows that Joanna wants to visit her sister in Chicago and has a young son who loves dinosaurs and museums. And as you can see, Romie is continuously learning and getting progressively more intelligent. Joanna is now ready to find a hotel, and with the smart, personalized search, filters, and tags, she's able to narrow down her options, compare them easily, and book her ideal hotel, which has a rooftop, a view of the river, and an early check-in. How many of us book flights and hotels but completely forget about the actual trip? As your friendly concierge, Romie's got your back.
Romie thoughtfully reminds Joanna to build out her trip, pulling in tickets from her emails and suggesting fun things to do that they'll all enjoy, and helping her reserve a deep dish pizza restaurant near her hotel. Whether it's suggesting a show or helping you book a tour, the possibilities with Romie are endless, and with each interaction, Romie is learning, remembering, and understanding you better... Joanna's enjoying her trip with her son when Romie lets her know that a storm is rolling in. So that outdoor architecture tour in the morning probably isn't a good idea anymore. So Romie steps in to assist. Romie suggests she visits a museum with dinosaurs and sharks instead, remembering Joanna's earlier conversation with her sister and husband.
Romie has it all covered, helping her change her tickets and magically updating her itinerary on the go, so her husband knows exactly what memories they're creating on this trip. It's the last day of Joanna's trip, and her flight is unfortunately delayed. Like a good personal assistant, Romie lets her know and already has a few hotel options that are convenient for her. Joanna books a hotel close to the airport. Romie updates her itinerary in real time. All her husband needs to do is @Romie to know what time they'll land. Now, what you just saw was a combination of a travel agent, a concierge, and a personal assistant, all in one. Romie is live today in EG Labs, ready for you all to play with. Yes, it is an early version. We want to learn fast, mature quickly, and build new experiences.
The full Romie experience will include more magical moments and many unique travel experiences. I want to leave you with this: AI, fundamentally, is a learning journey. The experiences we've launched today are just the beginning. We are committed to learning how to deliver the ideal experience for each traveler, so we can deliver the ideal traveler to each of you. Artificial intelligence is how we will do this. Thank you.
Please welcome to the stage, Jochen Koedijk.
Hi, everyone. I'm Jochen Koedijk, and I'm honored to lead our amazing marketing division. Today, we're going to show you how our marketing efforts both serve our travelers and our partners. Peter and Ariane touched on our broader transformation, but we also drastically simplified our marketing playbook. It's a remarkable shift that has seen us do roughly three things. One, focus on fewer brands, allowing us to elevate each and carve out distinct value propositions that are aligned to our products and each customer segment. Two, increase ownership of our marketing, cultivating an in-house marketing powerhouse, championing strategic storytelling and cohesive communications across all channels, across the funnel. And lastly, consolidate all performance marketing and technology. With unified data and tools, optimized across all of our brands and bringing a scaled approach to everything we do in social, paid search, meta search, and more.
Our biggest shift is to our business model. We've moved away from a pure transaction focus to an app-first strategy, where we prioritize acquiring and retaining customers with high return rates. Our app is now front and center to how we market. What this does is it creates stickiness within our environment, moving more travelers from one-time visitors to highly engaged travelers. As you just saw in Rathi's session, we're laser-focused on building products and tech features that create great experiences for our travelers in every part of their booking journey, and that manifests itself best in our app. As you just saw, Romie is in our app. There's huge benefits for both our partners and for us, as app members are stickier, spend more than regular visitors using the website. So with that shift, how are we getting these travelers through the door and into our apps?
The truth is, we do this in multiple ways, and our marketing team is going to walk you through exactly how we do that. First, we'll have Michelle Russo, who leads our brand marketing and creative teams, and who will demonstrate how we are building effective brands, the brands you know and love, Expedia, Hotels.com, and of course, Vrbo. Next, we'll have Abhi Ashok, leading our advanced marketing experiences function, who will cover the power of scale through the intersection of creative and technology. What we're doing is we're bringing the two disciplines from marketing together and we're using and experimenting with generative AI to do that. Lastly, Lauri Metrose, leading Global Communications, will showcase new ways in how we amplify our excellent products through various channels, such as social, and she will close off with an exciting announcement. Please first welcome Michelle to the stage.
Good morning. When it comes to building effective brands, the first thing that we did was simplify, and we simplified on three. Shifting from a portfolio of individual siloed brands to a unified house of brands, and we leveraged our deep understanding of travelers to find a unique space for each of them to own. Then we crafted memorable, creative platforms that delivered on different audience needs. Expedia offers big, multi-element trips, but we know for travelers, realizing a big bucket list trip can feel overwhelming to tackle and complex to plan. Our creative platform helps them overcome barriers and reminds us that humans have an innate need to explore, discover, and connect through travel. We all have a traveler inside of us, and we're all made to travel. I'm gonna just run one of our films that really brings our platform to life.
Hotels.com leans into existing traveler behavior around spontaneous, shorter trips, but there are as many perfect getaways as there are travelers, and it's not about chasing a one-size-fits-all of perfection, but rather tailoring perfection for specific needs and desires. Our substantial marketplace, combined with our matchmaking expertise, helps travelers find their perfect somewhere, no matter what that might be. We worked with Jimmy Butler, the NBA All-Star, and he's gonna tell you a little bit about his perfect ten.
Quiet on set, please.
I'm Jimmy Butler. I am a perfect ten, and this is my perfect ten. The Peninsula Beverly Hills is for sure my favorite hotel. Because my daughter has so many allergies, it's more about safety and being comfortable when it comes to my family and my kids. They already know her allergies. We've been there before. The pool's great. Everybody's always so nice and generous. I'm bougie when it comes to my coffee, so take that into account. I normally travel with, like, my own coffee stuff. Move everything off the counter. Espresso machine, move everything off that counter. Pour over station, take everything out the mini bar. Ready-to-drinks and sparkling water, you get to stay. The Four Seasons George V. I think that means five. Their French toast, phenomenal, even though I don't think they call it French toast. Yeah, just bread. Bread toast. Signing off.
And cut! Thank you. Thank you.
Vrbo plays a challenger in a category where traveler trust is up for grabs. By understanding what travelers truly want from a vacation rental: privacy, moments of togetherness, and, above all, relaxation, we emphasize our position as the trusted VR brand by becoming the other way to VR. We're really proud of the work that we're gonna show that really shows travelers the privacy that they've been craving.
Just what I've been looking for. Relax, you booked a Vrbo.
Thank you. If you too want to dance in your underwear, then don't forget to book a Vrbo on holiday. So we bring these platforms to life through engaging and emotional storytelling, with tangible product benefits that then inspire action. Simply put, the stronger our brands become, the more business we can bring to you. But we also need to engage with travelers in new ways and in ways that matter to them, and one of the ways we do that is through passions and our partnerships. For sports fanatics, it's partnerships with major institutions like Liverpool Football Club on Expedia, the NBA in Hotels.com, and the College Football Playoff and Fiesta Bowl with Vrbo. And for music fans, it's live music, like Expedia's partnership with the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, where we are the official travel and loyalty partner.
Through these partnerships, we drive high visibility for your destinations amongst these highly engaged, passionate fans. I'd love just to share one quick example with you around Liverpool Football Club. We worked with both independent and chain hotels and provided incentives with travel ad funds to boost their marketing efforts to Liverpool's global traveling fan base. And as a result, they saw a 15 to one return on investment. Our role within all of this is to show travelers the benefits of choosing our brands to get them to where they want to go. And the power of these partnerships lies in the value that we bring that no one else can provide. Whether it's an insider view into your favorite football club or providing travelers with exclusive member benefits, this is one of the unique ways that we work to bring everyone in this room more travelers.
We're expanding globally, too, and as we launch campaigns into new markets across TV, digital, out- of- home, streaming, social media, this work gives us the opportunity to bring you more international travelers. But engaging with travelers and bringing them to the front door is just the first step in building strong brands. We are also investing in getting travelers with the highest lifetime value to return and to repeat. And that's why we created what we believe is the best loyalty program in the industry. It's perfect for travelers, and it's great for partners. One Key is not only a new reason to cross-shop and to repeat, it's also a powerful differentiator in the vacation rental space, and we're already starting to see Vrbo travelers earn and burn their One Key rewards across Vrbo and other places.
We've designed the program to reward our travelers with every... for every trip they take. They get access to great member discounts and OneKeyCash that we fund, so it doesn't hit our partners' bottom line. And we deliberately unlocked greater flexibility, so if a Vrbo traveler wants to use their OneKeyCash on a hotel, or likewise, air travelers can use it on their favorite hotel. It encourages them to travel more and to spend more. And since launch, we've seen an increasing number of members cross-shopping across our brands. In fact, One Key today has over 100 million members. Members are- Thank you. Members are earning OneKeyCash on their very first booking, and members with OneKeyCash are 140% more likely to book travel with us versus those that don't.
We've also seen great engagement from our partners. Over 50,000 properties now leverage the power of gold or platinum member-only deal discounts, and we're also getting member-only discounts on air, car, cruise, and activities. Just an enormous thank you to all our partners who have participated. Our rewards program is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creating stickiness and engaged customer love. Travelers are craving an OTA that can accompany them on their journeys, from dreaming to planning and to booking. We're investing in creating complete shoppable brand experiences for travelers, like our curated travel guides and digital magazines. We've designed them with powerful engagement hooks, helping travelers explore popular destinations and creating a habit of using our apps for both inspiration and also trip planning.
There's so much more on the way as we continue to embrace technology and AI, and I'm now going to hand over to Abhi to tell you how we are innovating in this space. Thank you.
Thanks so much, Michelle. Earlier, Rathi touched on how AI is driving almost every feature and service in our products. Now, I want to delve into how Gen AI is supercharging our marketing efforts here at Expedia. Our goal is to increase access to more travelers and demand for all of us. We're building progressive intelligence across our products to understand our traveler preferences and personalize their experiences. Now, with our marketing, we want to showcase the authenticity of a destination and help you scale to more places and across more channels. This is artificial creative intelligence. Take a look. That video shows the full potential of what the models were just capable of. But at Expedia, we have thoughtfully and intentionally applied these principles to build an incredible set of capabilities across three key pillars. The first is protecting the brand, both yours and ours.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and that is so true in the travel industry. We've emphasized the importance of having the best photography available to help you, and that one small change can be the big difference between a traveler booking and not booking. Content matters, and now we've gone further. Across our brands, our programmatic ads pull photography from our own catalogs. It can be quite challenging to pull the most relevant photos because human quality control, at high volumes is quite challenging. Gen AI is helping us take this to a whole new level. We now have the ability to read what's in an image, intensify the core components of that image, and then make a decision on whether or not a traveler meets the criteria, the image meets the criteria for our travelers to see.
And while it makes sense for this image to be displayed, it doesn't quite make sense for it to be the hero image. What not to show at the wrong times is just as important as showing the right image at the right time. Here's that exact same property, but this time the tech has chosen the best image to be showcased as the hero. You can really tell the difference between the two. The more you help us with quality images, the better we can help you turbocharge them to perfection. Our next example looks at a micro-story campaign from last year. At Expedia, a micro-story is the biggest traveler story shot in the smallest amount of time possible. Each five to 10 second video tells the tale of a traveler using a product feature to fulfill their dreams and destinations.
Take a look at an example.
Monica's dad taught her how to float. 30 years later, she taught him how to retire. You were made to be rechargeable. We were made to combine flights and hotels for less.
We've bridged the gap between brand prominence and performance through the subtle art of storytelling, and we have the benefit of AI to now scale it. Imagine if we took that film we just saw, and we used AI to understand the context of the film, the keywords and the phrases, and then generate multiple scripts based on that content about the traveler and the destination. This allows us to scale our production by bringing down our complexities in both cost and distribution. On to our next example. Earlier, you heard Michelle talk about how we're getting more front-footed in many more markets across the globe, and now we're using Gen AI to help effectively distribute our messages in those markets. Now that we have our baseline script, AI can directly translate the story across geos and then inject local relevancy to make the creative work as intended.
Here's an example. What you just saw was our ability to take these creatives and not just infuse text, but voice, which takes us to our final step. Remember I mentioned a picture speaks a thousand words? Well, a video speaks a million. We've cracked the code where we're able to take static images and convert them into stunning animations, and we're beginning to figure out how to use AI to bring these existing destination footages to motion. We're able to film a story with a deliberately ambiguous ending, and then fill it with existing content and footage of a desired location. Here's an updated variant of that same video, except with a brand-new ending, entirely shot on AI, brought to motion using real and authentic destinations.
Our goal is to lead this space, which is why we're partnering with the absolute best in the business, Runway ML and ElevenLabs, two incredible startups, to bring these experiences to life. Our aim is to eventually insert these capabilities into media studios, part of our advertising businesses. We're incredibly excited for the opportunity to soon partner together, co-brand, and integrate your products into our creative platforms. With that, I'll hand it over to Lauri.
Thanks, Abhi. And as Michelle said, we are always looking for meaningful ways to connect to travelers. Every single day, travelers find inspiration through social media and influencers. It won't surprise you that almost 80% of travelers use social media as a source of influence and research for their trips. And we know that influencers are credible. 69% of consumers use influencer recommendations. I know that I've bought many products from people that I follow and trust, and as we know, trust equals sales. Affiliate marketing is key to the creator economy, and travel is one of the top most profitable categories, but no one has been able to link the two, despite the fact that it can drive more business. Let's say you've been admiring an influencer trip through Italy. How great would it be if you could book that exact trip all in one place?
I am thrilled to announce that as of today, this is possible. Introducing Travel Shops. As we said earlier, with the opportunity of the travel category on social, this is the first time we combine the ability to bring these two things together. Influencers are the new class of travel agents, but they lack the right tools, until today. That's exactly what we're doing with Travel Shops. We're partnering with top influencers, brands, and destination organizations to create customized, shoppable marketplaces in the Expedia app and across all points of sale. Content creators can earn commission, increase visibility, and customize their own personalized space for travel content by curating lists of their favorite experiences, including hotels, activities, car rentals, and more. This is a great opportunity for you, our partners, to get even more exposure and make the travel booking experience simpler.
We know that there are a lot of noise and choice online, so Travel Shops can personalize the travel experience. Within the shop, influencers will be able to upload social-first, user-generated content, promoting destinations and many of your properties. This is a huge win, especially when 60% of marketers say that influencer-generated content performs better on social media than branded content. By the end of the year, this program will scale. Anyone who loves to travel will be able to create their own travel shop. Please welcome two of our incredible ambassadors to show you their Travel Shops, Oneika Raymond and Brett Conti. Woo-hoo! Thank you guys for being here. Oneika, what a gorgeous picture.
Oh, thank you.
Can you tell us how Travel Shops come to life for you?
Absolutely. I would love to. Thanks so much, Lauri. Travel Shops is a critical unlock for creators to monetize our recommendations and provide value back to our audiences. As a creator with over 15 years of experience, every day I share travel tips and recommendations on social media, and now I'm going to be able to link directly to my travel shop. Now, there are two central elements of the travel shop. The first being inspirational video content that models my firsthand experience in a destination or at a property. And secondly, we have collections curated by each influencer for their shop. Collections are property picks bound by a common theme, whether it be by aesthetic, price point, or destination. In this example behind me, you will see some of my favorite properties across Paris and information on what makes these properties compelling for consumers.
There will also be tips like whether this property is best suited for families or solo travelers, or even special amenities that I think you're going to love. Through Travel Shops, Expedia offers my audience a central place to go to find all of my recommendations, so that they don't have to cull through my social media archive to find the hotels that match their needs perfectly.
Thank you, Oneika. Brett. Brett, you're a content creator. Tell us how this tool makes it easier for you.
Sure. Well, one of the biggest challenges we face as creators is maintaining trust with our audiences and ensuring that our recommendations are authentic and actionable. Social platforms aren't always set up to share links, so when I post about an amazing hotel stay, I get comments on a daily basis asking how they can book the same trip. Now, I can send my audience straight to my travel shop, and now anytime they ask, they have a place to go. On top of that, travel can be a big purchase, and many of us put a lot of thought and planning into a trip before we book it. Travel Shops is a game changer because it extends the shelf life of our recommendations. They won't vanish after 24 hours, and they're always in the same place on the Expedia app.
It's a win for us creators, so we can monetize our content and our recommendations. It's a win for hotels, since creators will be incentivized to share more property and recommendations, driving more content and more bookings. I'm super proud to be an Expedia Ambassador, and now more than ever, you can see how the brand looks out for the best interests of their partners and us creators. No other brand in the travel space has a shoppable marketplace like this, and even better, Travel Shops was built based on interviews and feedback from creators like Oneika and myself.
Thank you, both. ... And even emerging influencers like Ariane can create a shop. It's just that easy. You'll hear more about this next with Rob, and please come visit us in the Product Experience Lounge if you would like to see how you can get involved. Thank you, and now back to Jochen.
Thank you, Lauri. This was pretty awesome. So what I really hope you take away from our session today is that our marketing is pushing the boundaries of innovation. Our brands house over 10 million visitors every day. We're significantly investing in the latest technology, meeting travelers outside of their regular booking moments, with the purpose of bringing more traffic and demand to you, our partners. We're continuously exploring new ways to unlock this access, and we've shared a lot of those ways with you today. This means more people on your planes, in your hotels, visiting your destinations, and booking your experiences. With that, I'll now hand it over to Rob. Thank you.
Well, thanks, Jochen. It's fantastic to see the innovative work coming from our marketing team. Well, hello, everybody. It's great to be back at Explore. For those of you I don't know, I'm Rob Torres, and I lead Expedia Group's Media Solutions, really the largest leading global travel advertising platform. As Jochen mentioned, we play a crucial role in elevating your brand and connecting you with high-value travelers. With over two decades of advertising experience, our creative advertising solutions help partners reach and convert ideal travelers. We collaborate with partners of all sizes, and there's several ways that you can leverage our marketing campaigns to boost your brand's visibility. We have best-in-class experts here to help you and assist you all along the way.
We recognize that your marketing objectives are unique, and our industry-leading solutions cater to a range of goals, whether it's increasing awareness, boosting engagement or consideration, or ensuring the final booking, we've got you covered. But, you know, the travel advertising landscape has changed. Travelers are getting their travel content from multiple sources. On average, travelers view over 141 pages, that's 141 pages, of travel content in the 45 days before booking a trip. We also see that people are inspired to book their next vacation after scrolling and scrolling through TikTok. I know we do. In fact, travel is one of the top 10 categories on TikTok, and the hashtag has now surpassed over 265 billion. That's billion with a B, views.
This fragmentation means it's more important than ever for travel advertisers to surface their content wherever the traveler is in their journey. That's why today I am so excited to announce that we are launching our Travel Media Network. Let's hear it! As one of the largest advertisers in the world, we bring you unparalleled scale, and we make, make it easy to reach a high-value global traveler. Now, you could pay a team of media planners to reach across various platforms, and many of you do, or you could just come to us for a one-stop shop. We're gonna do all the hard work for you. Now, with our Travel Media Network, we're going to connect you to millions of travelers through our, through our site traffic, our comprehensive first-party data, and a suite of advertising solutions. We offer tailored strategies and detailed reporting to achieve measurable results.
Our ads are personalized, so they only show up to travelers that want them. Now, we, we not only target travelers searching our sites, and this is the beauty, we also find them wherever they are in their journey in the wider travel ecosystem, whether they're researching, window shopping, or ready to book. Now, let's take a closer look. First, we provide scale and reach. As we mentioned, we are one of the world's largest advertisers in travel. Our portfolio of high-value, globally recognized brand and suite of advertising solutions engage millions of travel shoppers across hundreds of channels around the world. Now, this gives you unparalleled access to our massive scale and reach. From our partnerships with Netflix to Disney+, to our extensive out-of-home advertising in premium locations around the world, our networks offer you significant exposure.
Advertising partners also benefit from the power of our B2B network. Many of you know about our hotel-sponsored listing feature, Travel Ads. Well, Travel Ads can be shown on our B2B partner sites, anywhere from financial institutions to airlines, and we have over 60,000 B2B partners in our network. That's a significant potential new audience for your content. To extend that reach even further, as you just heard from Lauri, we're launching Travel Shops. This provides partners a new way to connect with the growing number of travelers who use social media as their primary source of travel inspiration.... Secondly, creative. We have an in-house creative team that's just top-notch and one of the best in the industry, and we create advertising solutions tailored to your needs.
Through Media Studio and other creative initiatives, we bring you innovative concepts, and in the future, we plan to basically infuse all of your campaigns with the best-in-class generative AI to help bring your assets to life. From photography, to scripts, to video, to voice, we're gonna have you covered with our creative platform. Lastly, and probably the key to this whole network, is we bring it all together with our first-party data. It's really the heart of the Travel Media Network. This data allows us to track and understand consumer behavior within a privacy-protected framework. Our extensive data gives you insights into our customer's journey, it highlights traveler intent, and it enables partners to target the right audience with the right message at the right time. Now, this is really important because we don't want to bombard travelers with ads.
So we use the same technology that enables a personalized experience in our core products for our ad products, making the ads more relevant. And then we have a dedicated media and insights team, planning team, that analyzes this data to identify opportunities and inform campaign strategies. And our reports and insights help advertisers drive demand and deliver impactful, measurable results. So in reality, we bring you the best of all worlds, our data and tech, your creatives, to collaborate on award-winning campaigns, optimizing your marketing dollars and so that you get the best return on your ad investment. Well, now, I've shown you the why and the what of what we're doing, and now I want to invite Jennifer Andre, our Global Vice President of Business Development, to the stage to show you just how our Travel Media Network can work for you. Jennifer?
Thanks, Rob. Good morning, everyone. I'm Jennifer Andre, and I manage our partner-facing teams for our Travel Media Network. As Rob mentioned, finding the traveler via advertising can be challenging because that journey has become so much more complex, it's crowded, it's fragmented. This is really compounded by the fact that nearly three out of five travelers either do not have a specific destination in mind, or they're considering multiple destinations. I think we've all been there. We all know that feeling of being pleasantly overwhelmed with choice. It's our Travel Media Network that builds out extensive and impactful advertising experiences, helping you get your message to the traveler when they need it the most.
We know that travelers come to us to book, but they also engage with us for inspiration and planning, and that is where we play a really critical role in connecting travelers to your message, because they are coming to us at all stages of the path to purchase. So we have this really unique ability to both engage and influence travelers as they move from inspiration to planning and research, to ultimately finalizing their purchase, whether that be on or off our platform. So you heard Rob talk about this at a high level, but what exactly does this mean for you? So let's take a look at how our Travel Media Network really comes to life through the eyes of a traveler. Now, an American traveler, Sarah, she's planning a trip with her partner, and like most travelers, she's considering multiple destinations. She's feeling deprived of a vacation.
She just wants to go somewhere fabulous, but it has to be somewhere that works with her budget. So as Sarah goes about her normal week, and she starts thinking about all of her options, she's constantly inspired and guided by Expedia Group's advertising. Now, coming home from a business trip in the UK, Sarah is flying out of London Heathrow. While she's at the airport, she's dreaming about her upcoming vacation. She's thinking about all of the places that she can go, and she sees these beautiful images of California across the massive billboards that are throughout Terminal 5. Now, this is a real-life example of where our partner, Visit California, tapped into Expedia Group's media buying platform to secure a premium opportunity as part of our overall partnership.
This co-created campaign not only received 275 million impressions in total, it also gave Visit California 100% share of voice in one of the UK's busiest spots for travelers. A few days later, Sarah's on YouTube. She's searching for trip inspiration, where she's served a video called Where to Canada, and this is part of a docuseries created by Expedia Group and our partner, Destination Canada. Sarah had previously searched on Hotels.com for places to stay in Canada, so it was her real-time behaviors on our platform that informed us that Sarah would be receptive to inspirational content on the destination. Love it. You can see the Where to Canada campaign was developed to drive inspiration and create awareness of all of the wonderful experiences a traveler can have throughout the country....
Our KPIs are really around reach and engagement, but thanks to our media network, we were also able to track bookings. In addition to all of that great awareness, we also drove an 18% increase in bookings to Canada, as well as a 12% increase in average spend per booking. And again, this was on Expedia sites alone. Throughout the week, Sarah continues her trip planning, and she's consuming a lot of travel content across multiple channels. Sarah follows Expedia's Instagram account. While scrolling through content to help with her destination decision, she sees a short film on Scotland that was part of Expedia Group's Local Lens series and hosted by the famous Scottish actor, Ewan McGregor.
Go try and see the Northern Lights. Hopefully, got a better chance of seeing them up in Wester Ross. Okay, that's it. Forward. Go the other way. That's it. Now you sit down. Oh, God, we're upside down to the lake!
So this campaign secured 8.7 million views and 199,000 hours watched on YouTube. It also received 685,000 views on Instagram, Expedia's Instagram, and it was the top-viewed Instagram Reel in the month of March. So in addition to that great reach, it also received 10 times higher than average clicks to Expedia, where, of course, travelers could then find booking options for Scotland. So Sarah now stays on Instagram, and she sees beautiful content on Portugal, created by one of Expedia Group's influencer partners as part of the Travel Shops that you heard about in the last session. All right, later, Sarah is taking a break from trip planning. She's just relaxing.
She's watching her favorite film on Disney +, and she sees an ad for Kissimmee, Florida, that was co-created and co-branded by Vrbo, again, using an opportunity secured through our media buying team. Love that. All right. Sarah is now narrowing down her choices, and she's starting to look for hotels and flights because cost and availability are going to help determine which destination best suits her needs. So you saw earlier that Canada is one of the destinations that Sarah is considering. So she searches for hotels in Vancouver on Expedia.com, puts in her dates. So as well as the organic listings that appear in her results, she's also served a sponsored listing at the top of the search for a downtown hotel that meets her dates, her budget, her criteria. At the same time, she served an ad from Destination Canada based on her previous searches.
So to give you a sense of how effective these solutions are, properties that are participating in Travel Ads, that is the sponsored listing solution for hotels that you see here, on average, receive 120% more bookings and 50% higher conversions than those non-enrolled properties. All right, so as you may have guessed, Sarah lands on Vancouver as the ideal destination for her trip. It just checks off all the boxes. But she's going to do her due diligence, and she decides to compare prices on an airline app. Well, this airline happens to be part of the B2B network that Rob referenced earlier, where our hotel supply and our hotel-sponsored listings are shown. So Sarah sees a sponsored ad on the app for a hotel in Canada, which further influences her final decision.
So Sarah now feels really confident in her choices, and she decides to book a package trip for three nights for two people in Vancouver on Expedia.com. So you can see how our Travel Media Network really guided Sarah's travel decisions with relevant content that was based on her interests and her search behaviors. And as Rob shared, we want to offer you the most comprehensive and creative solutions for your advertising needs all in one place. And whether that's connecting you with travelers on our own sites at a global scale or attracting a wider audience, new travelers, as part of the wider ecosystem. And what's more, we can then package this up together in-depth reporting on reach, engagement, and conversion to really empower you to make the most informed marketing decisions. So thank you so much.
We are very excited to work with you to help you grow your business. We will be hosting a session tomorrow morning, taking a deeper dive into our Travel Media Netwo rk. So please join us then if you're interested in learning more about how we can help you with your specific marketing goals and objectives. And also, thank you for joining us this morning. Do not forget to join us after lunch because we have some very exciting programming, including our guest speaker, Simon Sinek, a look at our partner in B2B businesses, and a very exciting fireside chat with our Chairman, Barry Diller, and the CEO of MGM Resorts, Bill Hornbuckle. Thank you so much, and enjoy your lunch.