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Last week, I exhorted you to make the most of the sliver of summer we had left. Alas, on this gloomy Tuesday after Labor Day, that dream seems further away than ever. And don’t even think about wearing white.
However, there is some good news: it’s never too early to book your holiday travels. After all, there are savings afoot!
I had your airfare covered last week, when I talked about American Airlines’ creator program, while your hotel search is taken care of thanks to my recent profile on Accor. But how will you lose your reservations to make your reservations? Where should you go for tickets?
I don’t know, but I know someone who knows…
That’s right: it’s the world’s largest online travel agency!
With a 30th anniversary coming up next month, Expedia is still going strong as ever. An offshoot of Microsoft, Expedia was the first place on the internet you could go to make travel reservations, and remains a go-to source for the practice.
But how is this digital pioneer adapting to the age of social media—especially amid the highly competitive travel vertical, which is one of the most active creator marketing spaces I’ve observed recently?
Turns out that you can teach a thirty-year-old dog new tricks, which is good news for me. Let these graphs tell you more:
Expedia Creator Count, 2020 - 2025
Expedia expanded from a smidge over 1.1k creators in 2020 to 2.5k creators in 2025, a 2.2x increase over six years. It’s not the most spectacular growth we’ve ever profiled in this newsletter, but keep two things in mind: doubling your creator count is still quite a feat, and this smaller population expansion only makes Expedia’s more significant progress in other metrics all the more impressive.
Expedia Post Count, 2020 - 2025
One of those more significant growths, albeit marginally, was on display with Expedia’s post count. After declining from 2020 to 2021 and from 2021 to 2022, the numbers rebounded in a big way. In all, Expedia’s content total increased from 4.1k posts in 2020 to 9.7k posts in 2025, a 2.4x increase.
Expedia EMV, 2020 - 2025
Now things really start to kick off. After a similar shakiness from 2020 to 2022, Expedia’s Earned Media Value (EMV), a metric that gauges the virality and impact of individual content in social media conversations, took a big jump. In all, the metric ticked up from $6.3M EMV in 2020 to $32.9M EMV in 2025, a 5.2x increase.
Expedia Impressions, 2020 - 2025
But this is the grand prize, folks—the crowning jewel of Expedia’s social strategy. The brand is making a bigger impression, and reaching more people, than ever before. In practice, this looks like surging from 21.6M impressions in 2020 to 393.8M impressions in 2025, an 18.2x increase that’s especially remarkable given Expedia’s comparatively modest creator count growth. Clearly, being spoken about by the right creators is more important than being spoken about by more creators.
Expedia Engagements, 2020 - 2025
Finally, Expedia’s engagements improved from 2.2M in 2020 to 12.7M in 2025, a 5.8x increase that’s more in-line with the brand’s EMV growth. Engagements’ pattern across these six years doesn’t really fit in with the other metrics: we see that same 2020-2022 shakiness, but also a decline from 2023 to 2024, rather than the uninterrupted growth we’re used to with other metrics. Regardless, the end result is more growth for Expedia.
All of this growth paints an intriguing picture, and begs the question:
Expedia's Share of Impressions by Platform, August 2025 - July 2026
Instagram is Expedia's largest source of audience reach, generating roughly half of the brand’s impressions from August 2025 to July 2026. TikTok contributed approximately one-third of total visibility, while YouTube provided some additional scale. Notably, Expedia is growing across all these channels YoY, demonstrating that a channel mix is an effective strategy for the brand.
Expedia's Share of Engagements by Platform, August 2025 - July 2026
We see a similar breakdown when it comes to engagements. Instagram accounts for just over half of all interactions, while TikTok once again delivers approximately one-third of the total, with YouTube trailing behind, but still growing YoY.
This channel picture doesn’t really narrow it down: basically, Expedia is doing well everywhere. That means we’ll have to dig deeper in order to find out…
While Expedia's creator community proved relatively compact, as evidenced by the brand’s lower creator count growth, those advocates ended up generating a very healthy EMV total. That’s the kind of punching above its weight that you’d expect from a community spearheaded by two hugely impactful creators from the world of sports.
In one end zone, we have New Heights, the blockbuster podcast hosted by NFL stars and Swifties Jason and Travis Kelce. From August 2025 to July 2026, New Heights inspired $3.4M EMV across 54 posts, each of which mentioned Expedia as a season sponsor, rather than dwelling on the brand at length or with great specificity. This is a repeatable format that garnered significant viral impact from other sponsored partners, including Zachery Dereniowski ($2.4M EMV, 19 posts), who thanked Expedia for helping him reward fans with unique gameday experiences.
And on the other end of the pitch, we have Liverpool FC ($3.7M EMV, 94 total posts), which ranked as Expedia’s No. 1 overall EMV-driver during the time period monitored. With travel-specific content pairing soccer superstars and Expedia getaways, this partnership cements the link between two disparate audiences—a link further reinforced by Expedia’s other teammates across the world of sports. This roster includes both Liverpool’s women's team and the official NHL account, which runs the "Stanley Cup Playoffs Bracket Challenge presented by Expedia.” Together, Liverpool and the NHL reflect Expedia's strategy of embedding in sports fandoms where travel is an inherent part of the fan experience, similar to American Airlines’ recent creator activations surrounding the World Cup.
Apart from its high-profile partnerships with megawatt stars, Expedia maintains an effective ambassador program with a range of travel and lifestyle creators. These brand fans author posts tagged with #ExpediaPartner or #ExpediaAmbassadors, producing destination-specific, high-quality travel content.
Amid this cohort, Melissa Ngo ($2.2M EMV, 97 posts) stood out as a standout performer on Instagram and Facebook, sharing aspirational travel content, often with a ‘date night’ or ‘romantic getaway’ twist. Meanwhile, travel creator Kevin Droniak ($433k EMV) runs a distinct challenge format in his content, pushing himself to extreme shows of endurance and logistical coordination. For her part, Sally Nguyen ($524k EMV) covered Expedia's curated "2026 Destinations" list with Big Sky, Montana as the featured destination, while also drumming up enthusiasm for Expedia's Black Friday sale.
For both official Expedia partners and unaffiliated travel creators, Japan is a destination of choice. Creators from this cluster include kawaiiicoco ($997k EMV, 19 posts), who specializes in sharing suggestions that social media users can save for upcoming trips, while Toshi Guide from Japan ($322k EMV) covers practical matters like entry rule changes and tourist etiquette. However, Japan isn’t the only popular destination out there, with Expedia’s creator community also singling out Scotland, Canada, and the European rail system, in case you’re looking for hot tips about where to go next.
Beyond sports and its official partner program, Expedia's community contains three distinct threads that power significant engagement across social media.
One of the world’s most famous and popular creators, iShowSpeed ($389k EMV, four posts) offered a straightforward #ad activation in which the streamer encouraged his followers to travel like him. While limited to the scope of this team-up, the resulting Instagram content generated $177k EMV, $117k EMV, and $84k EMV across various Instagram posts—high totals that clearly demonstrate iShowSpeed’s tremendous efficacy.
Also effective? A massive and burgeoning market for hotel deal and staycation content. Within this population, sam.mom.shop ($2.5M EMV, 948 posts) is the most prolific creator in the entire dataset, tagging Expedia in mostly TikTok Shop-style content promoting specific hotel deals, discount codes, and budget destination guides. Other creators from this cohort exemplify the form: high-frequency, quick-view hotel recommendations aimed at deals-seeking families and budget travelers. This cluster generates significant aggregate EMV, and reflects Expedia's distribution across the TikTok Shop and deal-discovery ecosystem, rather than a more curated brand effort.
The third factor, as you probably could have guessed, is Ken from Barbie ($117k EMV, 10 posts). That’s right: Mattel's Barbie brand enrolled Ken as an official 2026 Expedia Ambassador, a high-concept brand moment that signals Expedia's willingness to play with IP and cultural references in its partnership program. Ken appeared alongside Drew Barrymore ($216k EMV, six posts), Witney Carson McAllister ($352k EMV, nine posts), and @subwaytakes ($165k EMV), further confirmation of how Expedia’s creator program effectively mixes content across entertainment, sports, travel, and pop-culture personalities, casting a wide net across social media and fueling the brand’s ascent.
*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.
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