Google has expanded its Search campaigns for Travel into an open beta for the Things to Do and Events verticals, opening the AI Max-powered campaign type to attractions, tours and event ticket sellers. Details on eligibility and reporting remain thin, which is exactly why early movers should test with guardrails.
Betas reward operators who show up early with clean feeds and modest expectations, then punish the ones who bet the season on them.
Google has expanded Search campaigns for Travel into an open beta for two new verticals: Things to Do and Events. Advertisers selling attractions, guided tours and event tickets can now access the campaign type, announced by Google's Ads Liaison on 8 July.
Search campaigns for Travel launched at Google Marketing Live in May as a bundled campaign type that pulls Travel Promotion Ads, booking links and travel feeds into one Search campaign powered by AI Max. Until now it was limited to traditional travel categories like accommodation. The expansion pushes it into the experiences economy.
The caveats are real. Google has not confirmed which bidding strategies, assets, reporting capabilities or feed requirements apply to the new verticals, availability remains limited and it is unclear how the beta interacts with existing AI Max for Travel functionality. This is a campaign type still being assembled in public.
For Australia this lands directly on the tourism and experiences sector: tour operators, wineries, attractions, festivals and event promoters. These businesses have historically been squeezed into generic Search campaigns that understand neither inventory nor dates, while accommodation got purpose-built formats. A campaign type that reads an experiences feed is the closest they have come to first-class treatment in Google Ads.
From Search campaigns for Travel launching at Google Marketing Live to an open beta covering tours and events
Why it matters
Early beta access is a genuine edge when it works. Competition inside the format is thin, learning is cheap relative to a mature auction and operators who understand the feed requirements before their competitors build an advantage that compounds into peak season. The Australian summer, when the experiences category does its serious volume, is close enough that testing now means competence by November.
The discipline is knowing what a beta is for. It is a learning allocation, not a performance channel. Treating an unfinished product as proven infrastructure is how businesses end up explaining a bad month to their board with a screenshot of a Google changelog.
What to do about it
Google will keep pushing vertical-specific AI campaign types through the year, and the operators who learn each one early keep buying attention slightly cheaper than the ones who wait for the case studies.