--Updated July 2026--
Third-party cookies are still here. On April 22, 2025, Google confirmed it would not deprecate them in Chrome after all. Six months later, it went further: on October 17, 2025, Google shut down most of the Privacy Sandbox APIs it had spent six years building as the cookie's replacement. If your travel marketing plan still treats cookie deprecation as a fixed deadline to prepare for, that plan is now built on two outdated announcements.
That doesn't mean the work was wasted, and it doesn't mean you can stop investing in first-party data. It means the reason for doing it just changed, from a countdown clock to a case that was always true regardless of what Chrome does.
Google first announced plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome in 2020, targeting full deprecation within two years. That target slipped repeatedly as testing, regulatory review from bodies like the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, and industry pushback stretched the timeline into 2023, then 2024. A limited rollout began affecting roughly 1 percent of Chrome users in January 2024 as an early test, well short of the full deprecation the industry had been bracing for. In July 2024, Google pivoted from automatic deprecation to a browser-level opt-in choice, a meaningfully smaller commitment than what four years of industry preparation had assumed was coming.
Google confirmed it would not roll out a new cookie consent prompt in Chrome at all. Existing cookie controls in Chrome's settings would remain the only mechanism, meaning most users would keep seeing third-party cookies exactly as they always had, by default, with no new choice screen forcing the issue.
Google retired most of the Privacy Sandbox APIs it had built as cookie replacements, including Topics, Protected Audience, and Attribution Reporting. Around the same time, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority released Google from the commitments it had made around the cookie deprecation plan, closing out the regulatory process that had shaped the timeline for years. The six-year, industry-wide effort to build a privacy-preserving alternative to third-party tracking ended without a replacement standard in place.
Chrome keeping third-party cookies doesn't mean every browser does. Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies by default, and Brave blocks them outright. A meaningful share of your travelers were already untrackable through third-party cookies before any of this Chrome news broke, simply because of the browser they use, not because of anything Google decided.
That split matters more for travel marketing than for most categories, since travel research happens across devices and sessions in a way few other purchases do. A traveler comparing flights on a work laptop running Chrome, then finalizing a booking on a personal phone running Safari, was never one continuous third-party-cookie trail to begin with. If your attribution model assumes it was, the gap predates anything that happened in 2025.
None of this changes what privacy regulations require, either. Consent obligations under rules like the EU's ePrivacy framework and US state privacy laws apply based on what data you collect and how, not on whether Chrome happens to allow third-party cookies this year. A cookie surviving in one browser doesn't retire your consent management process.
Chrome is one browser. Safari, Firefox, and Brave were never part of this reversal, and travelers using them were already reachable only through first-party methods before Google made any announcement. A single browser's decision doesn't reset a strategy that needed to account for every browser to begin with, and treating the Chrome news as a green light to pause first-party data work just delays a shift that was already overdue on every other browser.
Cookie behavior now genuinely differs by browser, not just by user setting. Safari blocks third-party cookies by default and limits the lifespan of some first-party cookies too. Firefox partitions cookies per site so they can't be used for cross-site tracking even when technically present. Chrome and Edge, by contrast, still allow third-party cookies unless a user changes the setting themselves. Campaign performance built on a single cross-browser assumption will read differently depending on which browsers your travelers actually use, which makes browser-level segmentation in your reporting worth setting up even if it wasn't before.
Privacy Sandbox was one specific technical framework, built and controlled by Google, meant to replace cookies with a narrow set of browser-level APIs. Its shutdown says more about the difficulty of getting an entire industry to agree on a single Google-led standard than it does about privacy-first advertising as a broader approach. First-party data strategies built on a traveler's direct relationship with your brand were never dependent on Privacy Sandbox succeeding, and nothing about its shutdown makes those strategies less viable.
Cookie policy isn't one universal setting anymore. It's five different browser behaviors, and campaign performance depends on which of your travelers are on which one.
Chrome does not block third-party cookies by default. Travelers keep seeing them exactly as before unless they've manually changed their settings, and Chrome remains the browser with the largest share of global traffic, which is why Google's decision drew so much attention in the first place.
Safari has blocked third-party cookies by default since 2020 through Intelligent Tracking Prevention, and it also shortens the lifespan of some JavaScript-set first-party cookies. Any traveler comparing options on an iPhone or Mac was already outside third-party tracking's reach well before this year's Chrome news.
Firefox uses Total Cookie Protection, which partitions third-party cookies into a separate jar per site instead of removing them outright. For cross-site tracking purposes, the practical effect is the same as blocking: a cookie set on one site can't follow a traveler to the next.
Edge blocks trackers from sites a user hasn't visited and known harmful trackers by default, but it doesn't block third-party cookies broadly the way Safari and Firefox do. Its default behavior sits closer to Chrome's than to the privacy-focused browsers.
Brave blocks third-party cookies outright by default, going further than any of the other major browsers without requiring a user to change a single setting.
The strongest argument for first-party data was never "cookies are going away." It's that first-party data holds up on its own merits, independent of anything Chrome decides.
Information a traveler gives you directly, through a booking, a search, or a site visit, reflects real intent. Third-party data stitched together from browsing behavior across sites is inferred, several steps removed from an actual signal, and gets noisier every time another browser restricts how it's collected.
When a traveler books directly with you or signs up for updates, the consent question is already answered by that action. Third-party data collected across sites you don't control carries compliance risk that doesn't disappear just because Chrome allows the cookie, since regulators evaluate what was collected and how, not which browser permitted it.
A first-party data strategy performs identically whether a traveler is on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Brave, because it doesn't depend on what any single browser allows. That consistency is worth more long-term than optimizing around whatever Chrome's cookie policy happens to be this year, given how many times that policy has already changed.
Sojern's Traveler Ecosystem™ is built on exactly that kind of data: booking intent, search behavior, and travel signals collected directly, not stitched together from third-party trackers that Safari and Firefox travelers were never reachable through in the first place. That's the actual case for first-party data, and it holds regardless of what Chrome does next.
Every booking, loyalty signup, email open, and on-site search is a first-party data point if you're set up to capture it. Audit your booking engine, CRM, and website for gaps where traveler data is generated but never actually stored or connected back to a profile. A booking confirmation that never syncs to your CRM is a first-party data point you paid to generate and then let disappear.
If your retargeting or lookalike audiences still lean on third-party pixel data, that's a dependency worth reducing regardless of Chrome's decision, since Safari and Firefox traffic was never reachable that way to begin with. Traveler Audiences built from booking intent signals reach travelers consistently across browsers, rather than only on the ones that still allow third-party tracking.
Pixel-based attribution gets less reliable every year, not because of one Chrome decision but because more of the web sits behind browsers that restrict cross-site tracking by default. Lean on holdout tests and first-party conversion data instead, so a policy change in any single browser doesn't quietly break how you measure what's working.
Don't let "Chrome kept cookies" become a reason to deprioritize consent infrastructure. Regulatory requirements haven't moved, and a stale consent banner is a compliance risk whether or not the cookie behind it is still technically alive. Review your consent management setup on the same schedule you'd use for any other compliance-critical system, not on Chrome's news cycle.
None of this is theoretical for Sojern. Our Traveler Ecosystem™ and Traveler Audiences already run on first-party travel intent data, not just third-party cookies, so nothing about Chrome's decision or Privacy Sandbox's shutdown changes how those campaigns perform. Data & Privacy handles the consent and compliance layer underneath all of it, built for a world where cookie policy varies by browser rather than assuming one universal standard.
If your team is still piecing together a cookieless-ready setup from parts, let's talk about what's already running.
No, not on Google's timeline. Google confirmed on April 22, 2025, that it would not deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome, and Chrome remains the browser with the largest share of global traffic. Safari, Firefox, and Brave already block third-party cookies by default, so the cookie landscape varies by browser rather than following one universal deadline.
Yes, but not because of a Chrome deadline. Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies for a meaningful share of travelers, and first-party data is more accurate and consent-safe than third-party tracking regardless of what any single browser does. The case for first-party data holds independent of Google's decision.
Google retired most of the Privacy Sandbox APIs, including Topics, Protected Audience, and Attribution Reporting, on October 17, 2025. The initiative was meant to replace third-party cookies with privacy-preserving alternatives, but after six years of development, it was shut down without a replacement standard in place.
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