The challenge
Expedia wanted to elevate its YouTube presence and offer travellers something more than surface-level destination snapshots. The goal was ambitious: produce a global library of cinematic videos that inspired and informed.
This meant creating content that wasn’t just beautiful, but trustworthy, evergreen and scalable across hundreds of destinations.
Our approach
TM partnered with Expedia to produce a long-running series of destination travel guides shaped around narrative, local character and world-class production. Each guide was carefully designed to engage viewers in the dreaming and planning stages, boost search visibility and reinforce Expedia’s authority as a global travel brand.
Between 2013 and 2020, our teams travelled the world capturing iconic locations, building consistent storytelling formats and delivering a premium content pipeline large enough to transform Expedia’s YouTube strategy.
Our approach
TM partnered with Expedia to produce a long-running series of destination travel guides shaped around narrative, local character and world-class production. Each guide was carefully designed to engage viewers in the dreaming and planning stages, boost search visibility and reinforce Expedia’s authority as a global travel brand.
Between 2013 and 2020, our teams travelled the world capturing iconic locations, building consistent storytelling formats and delivering a premium content pipeline large enough to transform Expedia’s YouTube strategy.
The work
Legacy destination travel guides (2013–2020)
Our destination video guides were built to inspire and inform, blending cinematic visuals with meaningful editorial insight. Across this period, we produced roughly 200 long-form guides for Expedia, including high-performing hits such as:
- Iceland — 7.6M views
- Cape Town — 2.69M views
- Oregon Coast — 1.5M views
- Osaka — 624K views
Scale & impact of the library
The full body of work became one of Expedia’s most valuable content assets, powering extraordinary long-term performance.
The results
Channel Growth
The subscriber count grew from several thousand to over one million during the production period.
Content performance
- 249,039,064 total views
- 14,959,990 hours of watch time (that’s 1,706.5 years of continuous viewing)
- 1,559,767,012 impressions
- 5.21% average click-through rate
These results cemented Expedia’s YouTube presence as one of the strongest in the travel category, with videos continuing to acquire views and engagement years after release.
The takeaway
The video series was a foundation for Expedia’s global brand identity. The cinematic guides drove massive reach, built sustained audience trust and positioned Expedia as a leader in travel storytelling.
Following the global pause, the project relaunched with a fresh creative direction. The new series dives into the character of local neighbourhoods, helping travellers explore destinations in a more human and meaningful way.
Explore more case studies
Tourism Media has been a long term and trusted partner of Expedia for several years. They provide us with photography, edited video and written destination content. Their video’s have been a big success for Expedia in terms of customer acquisition and the comments and community they have built on our YouTube channel have brought us major brand value in addition to conversions to actual sales. The Team provides an outstanding level of customer service, has excellent technical skills and puts in 100% to our relationship. We would recommend Tourism Media as a content provider with no hesitation.