I designed every ad on Expedia

Before I drew anything, I listed every spot on Expedia where an ad could show up and every kind of advertiser buying one: hotels, airlines, airports, destinations, car companies, cruise lines and vacation rentals. Ad sales and the creative team told me what advertisers kept asking for. Then I looked hard at how travelers move through the pages those ads sit on.

Two things kept coming up. Travelers skip anything that looks like a banner. And once a page hides what’s paid, they stop trusting it. That set the bar for everything after: an ad on Expedia has to look and behave like Expedia, and say plainly that it’s an ad.

I didn’t want 29 one-off designs. The plan was one product family with one anatomy, one set of rules and one Figma system, so every new unit started from something that already worked and shipped faster.

I started with the Native Marquee Card, the big brand unit right under the search box. It was my first ads design at Expedia, and every unit after it is built on it.

In Figma I took the Marquee in a lot of directions, from loud brand layouts to cards that sit in the page like Expedia’s own content. The tempting option was letting every advertiser bring a free-form layout. It looked bold in a review. On the real page it broke the layout and blurred where content ended and ads began, so I cut it.

What survived is a card that matches Expedia’s content: one image, a short headline, one link and an Ad label that never moves. Every unit further down this page uses that anatomy.

There was no shared ads library in Figma, so I built the first one, on Expedia’s design and accessibility guidelines, and tested its documentation and its accessibility before other teams started depending on it. Later I reorganized the whole ad product file library from top to bottom, and the feedback from our creative vendors was overwhelmingly positive.

Accessibility is where I don’t cut corners. I hold Video Ads, Travel Ads and Display Ads to WCAG 2.2 AA. When engineers built the new ad creative templates, I worked with them so the templates used design tokens correctly, followed EGDS (Expedia’s design system) and met those requirements. Every unit was measured on click-through and conversion across lines of business, and what we learned went into the next round.

I spotted the potential for video ads in what Expedia’s Story team was doing, and pushed until video ads were on our team’s roadmap. I had three weeks for the proof of concept in search results. I had it done in about two.

From there I led the design of video ads for search results and the homepage on a one month deadline, and presented them to leadership, stakeholders and the consumer teams. Video now runs across the homepage, search results, Stories, TravelShop and the video player, and every unit carries a voiceover and closed captions.

Being the only ads designer meant I was in the room with PMs and engineers from the first concept to launch. It also meant I could easily turn into the bottleneck. So I wrote the rules down, clearly enough that someone in ad sales, an advertiser’s agency and an engineer all make the same call without waiting on me. They live on the public creative spec site advertisers use today.4

I also designed flows in the advertiser dashboard, so what an advertiser sets up is what a traveler ends up seeing. And back when the ads business was still called Media Solutions (MeSo), I wrote the technical documentation for every ad product, so design and engineering teams across Expedia Group could plan with it.

That’s incremental revenue, from one unit I designed. Across the family, my units raised click-through and conversion across lines of business.

For the company as a whole, Expedia Group’s ad revenue grew from $483M a year in 2023 to $758M a year in 2025, up 57%.1 Added up from Nov 2020 through the first half of 2026, that business has earned $2.9B+, and every traveler-facing ad unit in it is one I designed. Expedia reported that its video ads doubled click-through rates and that sponsored listings partners grew 22% to their highest level.2 It ended 2025 with a record number of active partners and video ads on the Expedia homepage.3

On the product side, Marquee Ads are now the top-selling product across Travel Ads, and the Featured Brand Carousel is one of the top three.

What shipped: every consumer ad unit in the public catalog (29 units in 8 families on Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo), including the Marquee on web and the Vrbo Marquee in the app, the Partner Gallery in app property pages and web search results, the Featured Brand Carousel, interstitials for flights and cars, and the TravelAds carousel on Trips. Plus video ads, ROKT, the Sponsored Listings redesign, flows in the advertiser dashboard, and a Figma ads design system designers across Expedia reuse.

If I did it again, I’d measure trust next to click-through from the very first unit. We only added it once the family was already live, because clicks are easy to count and they got counted first. The next thing I want is the copy and image rules built into the creative tools, checked as advertisers type, so a campaign launches right the first time with no review rounds.