Booking.com ran ~40x more Google ads than Expedia last month. I pulled the ad counts for 8 travel brands.

#marketing #webscraping #datascience #seo

TL;DR: I pulled Google's own ad counts for 8 travel brands from the Google Ads Transparency Center: every ad shown in the US over the last 30 days (2 Sep – 2 Oct 2026), split by platform and format.

Booking.com showed ~300k–400k distinct ads, about 40× Expedia (8k–9k). Tripadvisor and Priceline were at 100k–200k each, and Kayak at 50k–60k.
Booking.com is almost entirely Search text ads. It ran just 29 video ads. Expedia ran 2k–3k, about 90× more, and Priceline ran none.
Booking.com also ran 20k–30k ads on Google Maps. Kayak ran 0 there.
Expedia Group refreshes its ads; Booking.com and Kayak barely do. Among the first 400 ads Google lists for each brand, the number launched in the last 30 days was 84 for Vrbo, 71 for Hotels.com, 58 for Expedia, 1 for Booking.com and 0 for Kayak.

The numbers

Brand	All ads (US, 30 days)	Google Search	YouTube*	Google Maps	Video format
Booking.com	300k–400k	300k–400k	90k–100k	20k–30k	29
Tripadvisor	100k–200k	100k–200k	10k–20k	4k–5k	100–200
Priceline	100k–200k	100k–200k	30k–40k	8k–9k	0
Kayak	50k–60k	50k–60k	10k–20k	0	36
Airbnb	30k–40k	30k–40k	10k–20k	100–200	500–600
Vrbo	9k–10k	8k–9k	700–800	2	600–700
Expedia	8k–9k	5k–6k	3k–4k	800–900	2k–3k
Hotels.com	1k–2k	900–1k	400–500	200–300	400–500

* "YouTube" counts every ad shown on YouTube, including text ads in YouTube search. That's why it's much bigger than the video column.

Google Shopping was small for everyone (25 ads or fewer per brand), and none of the 8 ran Google Play ads in the US in this window.

What stands out

1. Booking.com plays a Search-volume game. Hundreds of thousands of distinct text ads usually means programmatic ads: one per destination, hotel or search phrase. The few headlines I could read look templated, for example "Book Now, Change Later" and "Book for Tonight".

2. Expedia plays a video game. Expedia had about 90× more video ads than Booking.com, and its sister brands Vrbo and Hotels.com lean on video too. Airbnb is the only other brand with hundreds of videos.

3. Ads that never die. Among the first 400 ads Google lists for Booking.com, half were first shown in January 2022 or earlier, and they were still running on 2 Oct 2026. The archive's earliest "first shown" dates are in October 2021, so many are probably older still. For Expedia, the median listed ad was about 7 months old.

4. Maps is a real channel for some brands and ignored by others. Booking.com (20k–30k), Priceline (8k–9k) and Tripadvisor (4k–5k) advertise heavily on Google Maps. Kayak and Vrbo almost don't.

5. Pricing hooks are everywhere. Priceline: "$39+ Room Deals - Last Minute Rooms". Tripadvisor: "The 10 Best Hotels (2026) - … Special Offer: Now From $58".

How I did it

Source: the Google Ads Transparency Center, Google's public database of every ad from verified advertisers.
Filters: country United States, ads shown from 2 Sep to 2 Oct 2026, one website at a time (booking.com, expedia.com, …). I repeated the query for each platform (Search, YouTube, Maps, Shopping, Play) and each format (text, image, video).
Counts: these are the ad counts Google itself reports for each filter, which come as ranges (e.g. "300000–400000"). They count distinct ads (creatives), not impressions or spend.
Ad-level sample: the first 400 ads Google lists per brand (3,200 in total), used for "first shown" dates and the new-ad counts. This sample follows Google's order, so it isn't random.
Open data: both CSVs (counts per brand × platform/format, plus the 3,200 ad records) are in github.com/ISHEMAH/travel-price-studies, under CC BY 4.0.

Caveats

Counts are not spend. A brand with 300k programmatic text ads may spend less than one with 3k videos.
A website search returns every advertiser that ran ads for that domain. That's mostly the brand itself, plus a few resellers or partners (e.g. 13 different advertisers for airbnb.com, 386 of the 400 sampled ads from Airbnb, Inc.).
One country, one 30-day window, one collection day.
Ad text is only partly available. Google archives many text ads as images, so only some ads expose readable copy.

Reproduce it (or watch your own competitors)

Disclosure: I built the tool I used. It's the Google Ads Transparency Scraper on Apify. Give it advertiser names, IDs or websites, and it returns every ad with format, first and last shown, preview, link, and (optionally) the ad text, landing pages and YouTube video. It costs $1 per 1,000 ads.

{
  "searchTargets": ["booking.com", "expedia.com", "airbnb.com"],
  "country": "US",
  "platform": "youtube",
  "lastDays": 30,
  "maxAdsPerTarget": 200,
  "includeAdDetails": true
}

# pip install apify-client
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("kuezi/google-ads-transparency-scraper").call(run_input={
    "searchTargets": ["your-competitor.com"], "country": "US", "lastDays": 7, "onlyNewAds": True,
})
for ad in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(ad["format"], ad["firstShown"][:10], ad["adUrl"])

Run it daily with onlyNewAds: true and you get a feed of every new ad your competitors launch.

More open travel data from the same tools: 24 booking sites compared on 47 hotels · the cheapest day to fly

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