Skyscanner Ascend 2025 welcomed advertising leaders from airlines, destinations, agencies and brands who travelled from around the world to explore how traveller behaviour is shifting, how our AdTech is evolving, and how we continue building products and solutions that support partners and travellers in meaningful ways.
Guests heard from our senior leaders and partners who joined us on stage to discuss new features and data-led experiences as well as how we’re building products and advertising solutions that serve travellers better while helping brands connect in smarter, more dynamic ways.
Here are the biggest takeaways from this year’s event.
1. Discovery is evolving and the ‘vibe economy’ is here
Travel discovery is no longer linear. Travellers move through repeated cycles of research and inspiration, switching between destinations, dates and ideas as they go.
One interesting insight from the day is that themes are quickly becoming the new currency of discovery with many of our natural-language queries containing thematic intent such as romantic getaways, family trips, city break, travel, and budget breaks. With intent increasingly expressed through vibes rather than just fixed locations, we’re exploring ways to incorporate this into our platform.
One new capability is our Vibe Targeting audience segmentation, connecting brands with travellers earlier in their journey and targeting them based on the themes behind their inspiration, with creative that matches the vibe they’re searching for including beaches, nightlife, culture, outdoor adventures, and underrated destinations.
2. AI is solving real challenges in travel
Our Senior Director of Product Management, Kirsten Stirling, shared how AI will play a growing role in removing complexity from travel advertising and unlocking solutions the industry has struggled with for years. With deep travel expertise and a strong tech foundation, Skyscanner is uniquely positioned to apply AI in ways that feel native to the travel ecosystem and grounded in real traveller and partner needs. As expectations rise and budgets tighten, we’re focused on bringing purposeful intelligence into the partner experience – not as a gimmick, but as a long-term evolution.
Some of this vision is already close to launch. AI-Powered Guidebooks and AI-Powered Campaign Creation will begin rolling out next quarter, offering timely, relevant destination information that helps undecided travellers make confident decisions and faster, more intuitive campaign setup. Other capabilities, like AI-Powered Analytics, represent the longer-horizon future of where we’re headed, a world where partners can ask natural-language questions and receive instant, actionable insight without navigating dashboards.
3. Intelligence is reshaping advertising at Skyscanner
Our engineering teams are focused on making partner budgets work harder. Rather than relying on manual optimisation, our machine learning systems improve campaigns in real time, responding to traveller demand as it shifts. This philosophy comes to life across three pillars: delivery, spend, and creative.
- Intelligent Delivery: New capabilities were introduced such as Auto-Pacing which adjusts delivery rates to respond to peaks and troughs in demand, Auto-Targeting which uses first-party data to activate routes that are most relevant to your goals and Placement Control, an intelligent filter that removes irrelevant or low-quality placements.
- Intelligent Spend: TargetROAS brings automated bidding that continually seeks out the best opportunities based on value, helping advertisers maximise sales while achieving their ROAS targets.
- Intelligent Creative: Dynamic Creative Rotation learns which combinations of copy and imagery resonate with each type of traveller, while Creative Split Testing compares multiple variants to see which performs strongest.
- Conversion Data Feed serves as the backbone of all the intelligence that makes every spend by partners work harder extracting maximum efficiency.
Finally, Sponsored Booking Panel Ads was highlighted as a smart new advertising format at the lower end of the funnel to capture intent at the exact moment travellers decide who to book with.
4. Skyscanner strengthens its full-funnel offerings
More than 51% of Skyscanner users are still exploring where and when to go. This early, high-intent moment is where our combination of context, trust and audience insight creates real impact. Since travel planning almost always begins with booking flights, Skyscanner, with the world’s largest air traffic audience, is uniquely positioned to reach travellers at the very start of their journey. Travellers move fluidly between discovery and decision, and Skyscanner is bridging that gap, uniting inspiration and performance through new innovative features and formats:
- Homepage Video Ads: A high-visibility, autoplay video format on the homepage built to capture attention and inspire at the start of their journey.
- Brand Affinity Targeting: Turn traveller trust and brand familiarity into measurable revenue.
- Vibe Targeting: Connects with users through interests, like beaches, food, culture and more.
- Explorer Targeting: Reach travellers open to new places and exploring several destinations.
- Audience Extension: Expands reach beyond Skyscanner using first-party data across YouTube and Programmatic display for a multi-touch strategy.
5. Partners gain more control with Ads Manager
Last year, we introduced our vision for Skyscanner Ads Manager, a proprietary platform built to give partners more control, transparency and efficiency in how they advertise with us. Since then, partners using Ads Manager have gained greater visibility into campaign performance and deeper insight into traveller motivations and behaviour.
Partners asked for more control, flexibility and speed in their campaign activation, and this year we’re investing in Ads Manager Self-Serve to give them the freedom to move quickly and optimise without the back-and-forth. Self-serve brings agility and flexibility, while your account managers remain focused on strategy and growth. And while this new functionality empowers you to move faster, our role as your trusted advisor remains exactly the same.
We’re expanding access across EMEA and APAC, inviting more partners to test the platform, shape its roadmap and work directly with our commercial and product teams.
Conclusion: A smarter, more connected future for travel brands
Skyscanner Ascend highlighted how the future of travel advertising will be built on intelligence, partnership and a deep understanding of traveller behaviour. As discovery shifts, AI accelerates and expectations rise, the opportunity for brands has never been bigger. We’re committed to building the products, the data and the technology that help you meet travellers with relevance and clarity at every step of their journey. And we’ll continue to do it the only way that works, in close collaboration with our partners. This is just the beginning, and we’re excited for everything we’ll build together next.
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