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About Expedia
Expedia is one of the world’s leading full-service travel brands, helping travelers easily plan and book travel online. Founded in 1996, the company has evolved to offer customers the widest selection of vacation packages, flights, hotels, rental cars, rail, cruises, activities, attractions, and services.
“Expedia Group is one of the world’s largest travel platforms, and our mission is to power global travel for everyone, everywhere.” — Katerina Thomas, Head of Content, Expedia Group, Media Studio.
Expedia delivers its services to 6M+ daily visitors across its sites and apps, and offers a comprehensive Destination Partner program for its travel providers.
Through the Destination Partner program, Expedia helps its tourism service providers attract customers at every stage of their journey with powerful creatives and advertising that helps them stand out from the competition.
“As an in-house creative studio, we help tell stories, overseeing content production. We lean into our travel expertise, and industry data, and insights to help.”
The challenge
Expedia is a travel business. However, like most brands nowadays, they’re also in the content business. Savvy brands realize that effective content is all about storytelling and forming an emotional connection with your audience.
Therefore, Expedia needs to create content at scale to effectively engage its Destination Partners and spark wanderlust in its consumer audiences.
Content, particularly video content, is one of Expedia’s most valuable tools for attracting and holding attention. Katerina says, “It’s not just about booking travel. It’s about inspiring moments of discovery and joy, connecting people with places and experiences that enrich lives and broaden horizons.”
In the modern marketing landscape, it’s no longer just about having the best product, policies, or lowest prices. It’s about building a recognizable and trustworthy brand identity through captivating story-driven content.
One of the biggest ongoing challenges that Expedia was experiencing when producing content was finding a variety of high-quality, royalty-free, and readily available creative assets for their videos. “We understand the impact of music in storytelling. It’s essential to our creative process.” – Michael Buell, Senior Video Editor, Expedia Group Media Studio.
Before Artlist, Expedia would go through a time-consuming and costly process of sourcing and licensing individual songs whenever they wanted to work on a video or campaign. “We produce a high volume of content and often work on videos concurrently. Sourcing individual songs and going through all of the time-consuming legal formalities didn’t fit our business model, and it was holding us back” – Michael.
Attempting to source high-quality content presented a challenge to Expedia in three key ways:
- Lack of variety
- Production time and budget blow-outs
- Complicated global licensing processes for every channel.
“Time and budget. Licensing can take time, and not knowing the full cost of a song impacts our budget constantly.” – Michael.
The solution
Expedia started using Artlist a year ago, and they haven’t looked back.
The search for a scalable solution
The Expedia team needed to access a large volume and variety of content in an efficient, cost-effective, and scalable way, “We needed to find a partner who could help accommodate our audio needs and improve the entire process in terms of impact.” – Michael.
Expedia discovered Artlist after researching possible vendors but ultimately chose the platform because of its flexibility and scalability. Michael said, “I compared Artlist to a bunch of other music libraries and options, and we decided that Artlist was the one that fit our needs. We wanted to find a solution that covered a lot of our needs like music, sound effects, stock footage, and anything that could work with our studio.”
Stress-free licensing
Artlist’s comprehensive global licensing has been a game changer for Expedia. Not only has it alleviated time and budget pressures, but it also fits into their existing workflow.
Michael explained that before Artlist, the team would often experience frustrating production roadblocks, “For example, we would usually add a watermarked preview of a song to our videos as a placeholder while we finished the editing process. Once we finished the editing and approval process, we would suddenly realize the song wasn’t licensed for a certain country or platform. Then we’d have to start all over again”.
Not only does Artlist’s Business licensing alleviate time and budget pressures, but it also has the added advantage of fitting into Expedia’s existing workflow.
“With Artlist, we can go. We know everything’s covered. We already have the agreement in place. Everything’s already there, tidied, cleared for our use. We can use it and go through the process without worrying about all the other stress.” – Michael.
Music for every mood
Between brand campaigns, marketing activity, partner marketing videos, and more, Expedia publishes a large volume of video content. Artlist has given the Expedia team the variety of content they need to work at scale.
“Artlist gave us the opportunity to work more smoothly and freely. It has the variety of content and audio tracks we were looking for to elevate our content in the best way possible.”
Expedia is also a global brand that represents cultures and travel worldwide. In terms of content, they need a wide selection of creative influences from diverse cultures to accurately reflect their global destinations and audiences. Artlist’s catalog is well-positioned to cater to Expedia’s content needs. The diverse and culturally rich catalog has been built by global creators to serve global brands. Michael explained the simple search process, “I usually type a few words into the search bar, then I use the staff picks filter. If I can’t find what I need there, I’ll go into the collections, see what’s there, and go from there.”
Delivering content on time and in-budget
Like any business, operating efficiently in terms of time to market and budget is a primary objective for the Expedia team. Artlist has allowed the team to fulfill their creative and content needs efficiently without compromising on quality.
Katerina said, Artlist was a great fit because “it helped us elevate our creative work and also complemented our internal processes.”
Before Artlist, the team found “we were spending a lot of time sourcing tracks; it was time-consuming, expensive, and limited the quality of the audio we were able to work with.” – Katerina.
In terms of budget and time to market, Expedia’s experience before and after Artlist is like night and day. She says, “With Artlist, we were able to save 20% of the time sourcing and vetting, so now we can focus on creative execution and producing inspiring content.”
Expedia’s content engine is fired up and working more efficiently and creatively than ever before. The world of global travel is set to explode, and with Artlist by its side, Expedia is primed to remain a significant player in the space.
“It’s really important for us at Expedia to inspire travelers worldwide. We spend time and effort creating beautiful content across a variety of destinations. It’s very important for us to be able to elevate that work through sound and footage, and Artlist allows us to do that”.
Now it’s your turn
Chat with the team and discover how Artlist can help your business create content with impact.
- By Rebecca Helfenbaum
- 4 MIN READ
Rebecca Helfenbaum is the Artlist Blog Editor. She is a passionate storyteller who loves to find an interesting angle for any topic or trend. Rebecca has crafted content for some of the world's biggest brands, and now she brings her expertise to the Artlist audience.
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