Cross-media 2025-08-20

How did the tourism industry prepare for the holiday season? Analysis of advertising activities

The holiday season is the time of year when the tourism industry generates the most revenue, but also when the battle for customers' attention is at its fiercest. Preparations for the summer season begin well in advance, and advertising becomes a key tool in the competition for consumers' interest. Which channels dominated? Who was most active in advertising? And finally, when did the industry's most intense advertising activity begin?

Based on data from the AdReal study, we examined the advertising activities of two key categories in the tourism industry: ‘accommodations’ and ‘travel agents’.

June – the peak of the advertising season

Contrary to intuition, it was not May Day, but June that brought a marked increase in the intensity of advertising activities in the tourism industry.

When analysing all media (Internet, TV, radio), we see the highest number of advertising contacts – as many as 2.8 billion – which translated into 31.8 million real users. This means that the average user had an average of 88.6 contacts with advertisements from the tourism industry.

In terms of the number of advertising contacts, the top brands in the ranking were: Wakacje.pl (325.8 million contacts, 26.3 million RU), Coral Travel (261.2 million contacts, 22.4 million RU) and TUI (189.4 million contacts, 21.2 million RU).

The dominance of the internet – especially mobile

The internet was the main channel of contact with advertisements – it accounted for over 69% of all ad contacts in the analysed industry (1.95 billion contacts).

The vast majority of ad contacts on the internet are observed on mobile platforms – nearly 82% of them took place on smartphones and tablets.

Television accounted for 536 million ad contacts, and radio for 335 million. Although still significant, traditional media were unable to compete with digital in terms of contact scale.

Where did brands promote themselves on the Internet? Meta and Google with the largest share

In terms of share of voice in the online advertising market, three media groups topped the ranking: Meta Platforms (23% of all contacts), Google Group (21%) and Wirtualna Polska Group (19%).

In total, these three groups accounted for over 60% of ad contacts on the Internet. This means that the majority of the tourism industry's advertising budgets were directed to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google and WP. Next in line were the RAS Polska Group (9%), the Agora Group (7%) and the TikTok Technology Group (7%).

Display wins, but video is more visible

In June, the vast majority of online ads were display ads: as many as 1.23 billion impressions, more than three times as many as video ads (381 million) or text ads (338 million).

Although graphic creations dominated in terms of the number of impressions, they were not the most effective in terms of visibility. The average ad visibility (as defined by the IAB) was 68% for video, 50.15% for display and only 24.3% for text formats.

In terms of ad contact time, the differences between formats were insignificant: 7.9 seconds for display, 7.2 seconds for video, and 6.8 seconds for text ads.

The average ad contact time for the entire industry was 7.63 seconds.

The largest online advertisers in the tourism industry

In the TOP 10 ranking in terms of the number of ad contacts, the top spots were taken by the following brands: Wakacje.pl (190.5 million contacts, 18.8 million RU), Coral Travel (177.4 million contacts, 12.6 million RU) and Booking.com (175.7 million contacts, 16.8 million RU).

The list is closed by kupbilecik.pl with 50.4 million contacts and 10.9 million real users.

Advertising activity on TV

Although the internet has dominated communication in the tourism industry, June also saw a clear increase in advertising activity on television.

In terms of the number of ad contacts on TV, the most active brands were: Wakacje.pl (135.3 million ad contacts), Travelist (95.5 million) and Coral Travel (63.3 million).

The TVN WBD Group had the most ad contacts among the media groups available in the study, with a result of 339.3 million. It was followed by the Polsat-Interia Group (131.3 million) and the TVP Group (30.9 million).

Data source

All data presented in the article comes from the AdReal study conducted by Gemius. This is a cross-media study that tracks advertising activity on the internet, television and radio, taking into account, among other things, the number of contacts, reach, formats, visibility and contact time with advertising for the entire market.

If you would like to obtain more data or detailed analyses for a specific industry, please contact us or visit the survey website: https://adreal.gemius.com/.