This is our wheelhouse — within the planning and shopping stages of travel. We create ad opportunities from the time someone decides to take a trip until the moment they book.

Our Travel Media Platform connects brands with active travel intenders precisely when they are open to suggestion. We walk a unique path in travel media, focused on the ad delivery mechanism, not just data profiles.

Display Can’t Do It Alone. It Takes A Village.

No single method of digital media adequately reaches your target. Which is why media mix is such a critical component to any ad campaign. Spreading out the risk has merit. Surrounding your target throughout the funnel with multiple ad products delivers results.

Corralling travel intenders can get chaotic and expensive if the reach methods are kept to a minor number of tactics. We’re thrilled to let you know profitable scale is not only possible but achievable. It just takes the right mix of media to make it real.

A New Approach

Mapping Ad Products to Pre­-booking Activities

There’s a lot of places to run ads. We didn’t want to just be another one.

We wanted to understand how advertising impacts travelers. As you can imagine, setting out a course for comprehension is quite a departure from just trying to find smart placements.

We reverse engineered the pre-booking activities consumers exhibit leading right up to a purchase and isolated the behaviors where advertising can be presented. Then we poured over every type of digital media available and strategically selected an ad product that maps to those consumer behaviors.

Stroke of brilliance? Maybe. Effective? Definitely.

95% of our inventory is
unavailable on exchanges.

Products

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

We help travel marketers leverage more of digital then they realize is available to them.

The ad products we’ve assembled are a blend of strategic and tactical instruments interwoven specifically for the travel category. We operate under the premise that Big Data is valuable, but useless if your message is never seen.

The most important element of your campaign is getting your message in front of the target to influence their booking. That’s why our focus is on the method of ad delivery to the consumer.

We don’t claim magicianship or wizardry. But just maybe we’re the Yin to the travel consumer’s Yang. They’re peanut butter, we’re jelly.

Reach out for more details, we make one hell of a sandwich.

Trust Data Over Intuition

We’re not talking about Big Data. We’re talking about the proof, the evidence…the pudding. Algorithms can play their part. People can have their opinions. The facts should drive decision making. That’s why we combine machine and human intelligence.

When we say results come first, we’re not trying to be cliche. We know that pacing has its place. We dig algorithms. And we have our own opinions of media. We just believe nothing should come at the expense of performance.

Under the Hood

All we’ve done is run digital media campaigns for travel advertisers since 2002. We take that historical campaign data and expertise, map the best mix of publishers and placements, and couple it with your advertiser inputs to produce the best campaign results. The most subtle adjustments can make the biggest difference and we know which levers to pull and which buttons to push. It must be complex, look at the isometric illustration we needed to explain it!

Rollover a section to learn more.

We offer advertisers the ability
to enhance reach
while reducing risk.

The Numbers

We all know brand safety is front and center. While there are many tools available to help protect you, few can say that they’ve been around for over a decade. Our longevity proves the relationships we cultivate are lasting. Numbers aren’t just numbers when you have the experience and long-standing partners behind them.

“When you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it’s time to pause and reflect.”
– Mark Twain

We’re contrarians by nature. We see a trend and try to find its source. We see a standard and want to challenge it. We hear about new software and we want to break it.

Our due diligence, insights and the ability to see five moves ahead is what lets us watch others come and go, while we continue to provide advertisers with repeatable success.

Publishers

We’re persnickety. Over 300 publisher relationships allow us to be picky when designing custom travel programs. This also affords us the ability to only admit publishers to our platform who meet our insanely high standards. Go ahead, ask them about us. They’ll say we’re a pain in the arse about performance.

We’ll freely admit there are pubs on our list that don’t look the part of how we hope a travel site is designed. But it’s not about quality of design – it’s about performance, period. And we know exactly which work for each category and brand.

We strategically leverage each pub for different reasons, crafting a custom program every time we run media. While numbers are important, it’s the blend of publishers that enhances our value.

Become a Publisher
Got the Goods? Tell us about your site. Spin us a story. How do you fit into the master plan?

We’re 100% travel.

We only work in digital.

(And we smell of rich mahogany.)

Advertisers

More than 2,000 travel clients — that’s over 10,000 travel media campaigns. Whether you’re a DMO looking to drive more visitation, a cruise line needing higher fill on forward sailings, a hotel who needs to increase RevPAR or an airline trying to increase an O&D yield – we’ve been there. We’re travel industry veterans from Airlines, Hotels, OTAs and CVBs, and we’re passionate about two things: Travel and Digital.

Your Destination is your passion. DMOs are our bread and butter. We understand 501(c)(3) organizations have large boards with their own agendas and every penny needs to drive more visitation — we get it. And we’ve meticulously crafted ad products for the intricacies of Tourism Marketing. With us, media spent turns into visitors delivered.

Turn sails into sales. Given the average booking window for the cruise category is 3-10x longer than other travel categories., and the lion share of cruise bookings occur over the phone, we’ve developed a solution that doesn’t just drive visits, but makes the phone ring-a-ding.
Your life is metrics. Whether ADR, RevPAR, BAR, head-in-beds, revenue per stay, etc — we speak fluent Revenue Management. We plan custom programs to meet your specific property, destination or market needs. The timing of travel purchases plays a significant role in how we perform for the lodging category. We know the timing, we know the opportunity cost, and we know how to get it done.
As former Airline Revenue Managers ourselves, we understand the art and science behind managing yield. We\’ve found both direct and indirect causations between publisher type, carrier, O&D pair, price, seasonality, and bookings. And we manage this blend on your behalf every day, for each custom program we execute.
The sequence of a travel booking plays a critical role in Car Rental marketing. You may want to find consumers who have already selected a destination, perhaps even already booked their flight and hotel. Targeting based on this activity is what ensures every impression and click aren’t wasted.
You work with slimmer margins than most. PPC has been an important part of your business. But efficiency is waning as brands catch up to modern digital marketing. We remove the risk from exploring different options while making your media more effective.
Sundance to Six Flags. Disney to the Emmy’s. When the destination is an event or attraction, travel planning takes on a different angle. Locating consumers with specific intent beyond simply a destination requires precision and timing that seldom few can deliver.

Our Story

In the early 2000s, we saw an unfulfilled need for travel advertisers to have a publisher that spoke their language. No, not Green Screens — but the lexicon only those in travel understand. The bevy of ad networks at the time were focused on other verticals and didn’t quite get the nuances of travel. And we felt our category deserved better representation in digital.

We’re born from travel companies like Airtran, Delta, US Airways, Kayak, Orbitz, Cheaptickets, Travelocity, Travelzoo, Hotwire, LastMinuteTravel and more.

We set the very first rate card for SideStep who would later be acquired and integrated into Kayak. We partnered with Trip Advisor during their startup mode to help widen their reach. Travel Spike created Travel Ad Network® in 2002 paving the way for others to dive deeply into a niche category rather than walk broadly into unfocused territory.

We’re former Revenue Managers, Travel Execs, Travel Marketers and Media Veterans. Finding the latest technologies/publishers and introducing them to the category is not only our passion, it’s placed us firmly in travel media lore.

Digital is our stage. Travel is our playground.

What can we say about Ryan — we’re all here because of him. His vision started this shindig and his enthusiasm for the category keeps it focused. The hard part is pulling all the travel data out of his head. Good thing we have really sharp pencils. He was a Revenue Manager with USAir responsible for $500M/yr before heading to AirTran where he built airtran.com into the #1 airline site with no marketing budget. Prior to taking the plunge into entrepreneurship, Ryan was an exec at LastMinuteTravel.com. He has been featured on MediaPost, ABC Radio, NY Times and USA Today and regularly speaks at industry events like PhoCusWright, US Travel Assoc. and DMAI.
Favorite Trip: Spain
Bucket List Trip: New Zealand
Tidbit: Don’t ask Ryan about his beloved Chicago Bears or Demon Deacons hoops unless you have plenty of time on your hands.
Every company should have a Howard. He’s not just an endless bridge connecting us with the right partners. Howard’s crystal ball is second to none and we don’t say that lightly. He’s not just playing chess three moves ahead, it’s like he’s already finished the game. Howard spent his career at the crossroads of media and technology focused on revolutionizing the travel industry through innovative strategies, digital applications and technologies. Before Travel Spike, Howard was one of the founders of Screaming Media as well as CEO of iPace, a venture-backed online personalization and recommendation platform optimized for leisure travel purposes. Howard was involved with building the first website for the New York Times and has been affiliated with the American Film Institute’s Digital Content Lab in Hollywood, CA.
Favorite Trip: It’s a strange tie between Paris and Tel Aviv
Bucket List Trip: Seeing the World Cup in Brazil
Tidbit: Howard has a love/hate thing with Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s the only place in the world where he feels short. He’s been there 3x.
We heart Ian! We can’t say enough about him and the energy and experience he brings leading our sales team. When you think of the person in your life who “knows everyone,” that’s Ian. And they all like him which is rare for a native New Yorker. Ian has been a VP at Orbitz and held senior roles at Disney, Sabre, Preview Travel and GetThere.com. Ian loves being on the road, which we try not to take as an insult. Ian doesn’t boast his accolades much, so we’ll do it for him. He was President of 212 in NYC, a founding board member of Boston’s BIMA,the First Committee Chair for the IAB Professional and an AWNY Notable Notables.
Favorite Trip: Backpacking through Europe…7 countries, 3 days
Bucket List: Stand on the Great Wall of China
Tidbit: Ian goes where the locals go. On business trips, he’ll chat up cabbies, clerks and more to get the local scoop for any destination.
 

Travel Spike, creating advertiser smiles since 2002.

2,000 Clients. 10,000 Media Campaigns. We must’ve learned something over that time, right?!

Questions. Comments. Standing Ovations? Reach Out.