A Smoking Gun thought leadership report
The most interesting work happening in travel right now isn’t simply “more influencer activity” — it’s a handful of brands redefining what influencer marketing is for
Influencer marketing has quietly become one of the biggest line items in the travel marketing budget, and one of the most consequential. For an industry built on inspiration, that’s not a surprising shift on its own. What is surprising is how differently the leading travel brands are now using it. The scale of the opportunity is clear from the numbers:
- The global influencer marketing industry is now worth $24 billion.
- UK brands spent an estimated £930 million on influencer marketing in 2024, forecast to reach £1.3 billion by 2029.
- TikTok travel content views are up 410% since 2021, and almost a third of TikTok users say they’ve booked accommodation discovered on the platform.
- Average reported returns sit at around 6.5 times spend.
- 81% of UK brands plan to increase their influencer budgets again in 2026.
Two structural shifts sit behind those headline numbers. The first is platform mix:
- TikTok carries the highest engagement rates in travel content (around 3.2%, against 2.8% on Instagram) and the steepest growth curve.
- Instagram remains the established home for luxury and aspirational travel content.
- YouTube does the heavy lifting on long-form itinerary guides and reviews.
- Facebook holds on mainly for family travel and older audiences.
The second, and arguably more important, shift is the creator tier. The sector has moved decisively away from a celebrity-led model:
- Micro-influencers (roughly 10,000–100,000 followers) now account for around 45% of travel campaign activity.
- Macro-influencers (100,000–1 million) account for around 30%.
- Nano-creators (under 10,000) account for around 15%.
- Celebrity and mega-influencer activity sits at roughly one in ten campaigns — reserved almost entirely for genuine cultural moments or brand-fit partnerships rather than used as a default.
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TUI’s UK programme is a good illustration of what that spectrum looks like in practice on a single roster. Led by a dedicated UK influencer team, it runs everything from celebrity cross-channel activations through to tightly targeted micro-creator campaigns.
Recent activity has included a roster of ten TikTok creators, among them The Budgeting Mum and The Travel Bae, built around budget travel hacks for cost-conscious travellers, generating 4.2 million video views and a measurable uplift in brand recall. As UK Influencer Lead Hayley Shortman has put it, the goal is giving customers the inspiration and reassurance they need to pick the right holiday, wherever they sit on that spectrum of trust.
The most interesting work happening in travel right now isn’t simply “more influencer activity” against that backdrop — it’s a handful of brands redefining what influencer marketing is for, folding it into product design, content operations and commercial strategy rather than treating it as a media line that sits alongside a TV plan.
Below are five of the most instructive examples from the past year or so of what genuinely effective, best-in-class influencer marketing for travel brands now looks like, including how each is using creators across the spectrum from micro to celebrity, and what they suggest about where the discipline, and AI’s growing role within it, is heading next.
1. Build a content engine, not a campaign
For most of the last decade, travel marketing followed a familiar pattern: shoot one big ad, then cut it down for every other channel. easyJet has spent the past few years dismantling that model entirely. Speaking at the DMA Conference in March 2026, Marketing Director Gabriella Neudecker described how the airline moved away from spending heavily on a single TV ad and slicing it up for social, toward a model built around a standing bank of creators across Europe whose footage is then automated, localised and distributed at scale using AI.
The clearest expression of that model is the Big Orange Sale, the latest iteration of easyJet’s ‘Get Out There’ platform, built entirely from creator-shot footage gathered across Europe rather than a single studio production. The campaign runs as 20-second films alongside social-first and static assets across TV, video-on-demand, online video, audio, social, display, web and app — effectively one shoot feeding every channel, in the creators’ own voice rather than a script.
The creator tier behind it is deliberately weighted toward mid-tier and micro talent across multiple European markets rather than any single big name. easyJet’s view is that breadth and authenticity at that level outperform a celebrity face for this kind of always-on content.
The output is striking less for any single piece of content than for its sheer volume and consistency:
- The same budget that once produced a handful of TV executions now generates over 60,000 individual pieces of content — a 350% increase in output at the same cost.
- Impressions are split fairly evenly between TikTok and Instagram, with meaningful contributions from YouTube and Facebook too.
- Earned Media Value has grown 9x since 2021, with creator post volume tripling over the same period.
- The airline posted its strongest customer satisfaction scores in over a decade, alongside 9% profit growth in its most recent full-year results.
As Neudecker put it, creators have become better advertisers of travel than travel brands themselves, and easyJet built its model around learning from that, rather than competing with it.
The lesson for other categories is less about TikTok specifically and more about infrastructure: the brands winning here have stopped asking “what’s our next influencer campaign?” and started asking “what’s our content production model?” That’s a fundamentally different, and more durable, question — and one that depends on having the right creator relationships, briefing process and distribution technology in place before a single brief goes out, not bolted on afterwards.
2. Build creators into the product, not just the promotion
The second shift worth watching is brands moving influencer relationships out of the media plan and into the product itself. Airbnb’s Icons platform is the clearest example: rather than sponsoring creators to talk about Airbnb, the brand built an entirely new category of bookable experience, hosted by cultural figures and pop-culture IP, that has continued picking up major creative awards through 2025.
Recent experiences have included staying with Kevin Hart in his speakeasy, a night in Prince’s Purple Rain House, and the Up house from Pixar — almost all hosted by genuine celebrities or cultural icons, priced low or free to enter, with the prestige of access doing the work a media budget normally would
The results speak for themselves:
- Over a billion social impressions, almost entirely through earned and organic creator content rather than paid media.
- 1.7 million new sign-ups generated off the back of the campaign.
- A string of Cannes Lions and effectiveness awards, with applicants and winners posting of their own accord rather than to a brief.
Individual Airbnb hosts continue to generate a steady stream of organic user-generated content alongside the celebrity-led Icons programme, giving the brand a presence at both ends of the creator spectrum simultaneously.
Expedia’s Travel Shops takes a related idea in a different direction. Shoppable storefronts let creators curate hotel collections from Expedia’s inventory directly inside the app, earning commission on resulting bookings, with access widening to more creators through 2025 and into 2026.
Its founding roster deliberately spanned the full spectrum of influence in one move: travel creators such as Renee Hahnel and Brett Conti sit alongside actor Jaime Camil, Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk and Arsenal FC, and publishers including Condé Nast Traveler and Variety, plus tourism boards Visit Orlando and Travel Alberta. Mid-tier creators do the day-to-day curation, with celebrity and sports figures used specifically to drive awareness of the format at launch.
As SVP of Global Communications Lauri Metrose has framed it, with around 80% of people now finding travel inspiration through social media, the natural next step is building a direct path from looking to booking, rather than hoping inspiration eventually converts somewhere else.
Both approaches point to the same underlying idea: the most effective influencer strategies no longer ask creators to promote the product — they make creators part of how the product works and deliberately mix tiers to do so, rather than leaning on one type of creator throughout.
3. Design mechanics that turn the audience into the amplifier
A third pattern, well demonstrated by Marriott Bonvoy, is using contests and storefront mechanics that invite the audience to participate rather than simply consume.
Its current niche creator programme — running across France, Germany and the UK and matching creators to specific traveller types such as couples, families and pet owners — delivered:
- An 85% creator response rate.
- Reach of 11 million.
- A cost-per-thousand roughly ten times below industry averages.
The creators involved sit firmly in the niche micro and mid-tier bands rather than at celebrity scale; Marriott’s bigger-name partnerships tend to run through sports sponsorships (Mercedes-AMG F1, Manchester United, NFL teams) rather than its creator programme itself.
A parallel omnichannel campaign across London and Berlin, built on first-party Marriott Bonvoy data with The Trade Desk, reinforced the same point:
- Customers exposed across two or more channels were 1.8 times more likely to visit the brand’s site.
- The campaign delivered a 45% increase in conversion rate.
Concrete evidence that creator content performs even better when it’s planned alongside a brand’s own loyalty data rather than run as a standalone media line.
The thread running through all of this goes back to the contest-style mechanic that first built Marriott’s TikTok presence, inviting fans to apply as official brand correspondents rather than briefing a handful of creators directly — a preference for participation over polish that the brand has carried into every iteration since.
Because the audience effectively self-selects into these programmes, the resulting creators tend to already understand and care about the brand, which helps explain why Marriott’s targeted creator work has achieved both unusually strong response rates and unusually efficient media costs at the same time.
4. Use the full range of creator scale deliberately — including celebrity, where it earns its place
Not every brand needs a celebrity strategy, but where one exists, the best examples show real discipline about fit and a clear sense of which tier of creator each job is for.
Hilton’s approach is the clearest illustration of using the full spectrum deliberately: an always-on, platform-first TikTok strategy built mainly around macro and mid-tier creators, supported by a network of regional micro Key Opinion Leaders producing culturally native content across APAC and the Middle East, sitting alongside one carefully chosen, ongoing celebrity relationship with Paris Hilton — authentic precisely because of the surname, not despite the obvious gimmick.
Hilton has continued deepening that celebrity relationship rather than treating it as a single campaign moment — most notably with Paris Hilton personally designing guest rooms at The Beverly Hilton, turning the partnership into an actual product collaboration rather than another sponsored post. International Marketing Boss Gurmej Bahia has described the wider approach as starting with platform and creator first, not adapting a TV ad for social.
The wider point for marketers outside travel is straightforward: celebrity partnerships age well when the connection to the brand is genuine and is allowed to evolve into something more substantial than a single campaign moment, and when they sit within a broader programme that also has the micro and mid-tier layers doing the everyday work of reaching specific audiences cost-effectively.
5. Measure commercial outcomes, not just attention
The final, less glamorous but arguably most important shift is in measurement. Skyscanner’s approach is built around what it calls a lean methodology — working only with creators who are genuine users of the product, weighted toward mid-tier and micro talent, and measuring success against acquisition and activation metrics rather than reach or impressions.
That philosophy shows up in the detail: the long-running #SkyscannerRoulette series with creator Dan Flying Solo showcases spontaneous trip discovery through the app itself rather than a generic travel narrative, and Skyscanner runs dedicated workshops for its creator roster on SEO, content management and social strategy — treating the relationship as a genuine two-way partnership rather than a posting arrangement.
A TikTok partnership with Shaka Social, reported in February 2025, surpassed its projected targets by 50% and was described by TikTok itself as one of the most cost-effective follower campaigns it had seen, and the brand has continued investing in dedicated influencer marketing roles through 2025 as the programme has grown.
Across nearly every example above, the same discipline shows up: brand lift studies, conversion uplift, cost-per-result benchmarks, and clear commercial reporting sit alongside the creative work, not as an afterthought.
Marriott Bonvoy’s brand lift studies, easyJet’s earned media value tracking and Expedia’s direct line from content to commission all point the same way. That pairing of creative ambition with commercial rigour is, increasingly, what separates a memorable campaign from a programme that earns its budget year after year.
The same content is winning in AI search, too.
There’s a further reason all of the above matters beyond the social platforms themselves. AI search and chat tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are increasingly acting as a discovery layer for travel decisions — and a growing body of independent research confirms that the kind of content built by genuine creator relationships and earned coverage is exactly what these tools rely on most when constructing their answers.
Large-scale studies published through late 2025 and into 2026 are consistent on this point:
- Earned, third-party content — news coverage, independent editorial, and creator content distributed beyond a brand’s own channels — accounts for the large majority of citations across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, with the biggest studies putting the figure at roughly 80–90% of all citations.
- Paid and advertorial content, by contrast, accounts for a negligible share of citations — well under 1% in the largest studies to date.
- Distributing the same piece of content across third-party outlets, rather than hosting it only on a brand’s own site, has been shown to lift AI citation rates several times over.
In other words, influencer and creator content doesn’t just build audience trust and engagement on social platforms — it builds the same independent, frequently updated, third-party-validated content that AI engines are shown to favour heavily over advertising. The brands above, with their always-on creator pipelines and steady flow of earned coverage, are already producing exactly the kind of content this next discovery layer rewards. It’s a further argument for treating creator relationships as core infrastructure rather than a campaign line.
Key take-outs for marketing leaders building their own strategy
A few considerations stand out for any senior marketer looking at this category and asking what to take from it, travel-specific or not:
- Build the operating model before the campaign. The brands seeing the biggest gains have invested in always-on creator pipelines, dedicated in-house ownership of the relationship, and the production or distribution infrastructure — including AI tooling, in easyJet’s case — to turn raw creator footage into usable assets at scale. The campaign idea is almost secondary to having that machinery in place; without it, even a good idea produces a handful of assets rather than a content engine.
- Match creator tier to objective, not to budget left over at the end of planning. Travel’s shift toward micro and nano creators (now roughly 60% of activity between them) hasn’t replaced celebrity; it’s clarified what celebrity is for. Use mega and celebrity talent for genuine cultural moments and brand-defining partnerships where the fit is unmistakable; use macro and mid-tier creators for awareness and storytelling; and lean on micro and nano creators where conversion, niche targeting and cost efficiency matter most. The brands above succeed by deploying several tiers deliberately and in parallel, not by picking one lane.
- Look for a genuine product or commerce integration, not just a content placement. Whether that’s a bookable experience, a shoppable storefront or a co-designed product line, ask whether your category has an equivalent — a way for the creator relationship to generate revenue or utility directly, rather than only awareness that has to be converted somewhere else. That almost always means involving product and commercial teams in the planning from day one, not briefing creators after the roadmap is fixed.
- Build participation into the mechanic, and connect it to first-party data. Contests, correspondent-style programmes and creator storefronts all generate organic reach from the audience before paid activity even begins — but the more advanced versions, like Marriott’s work with The Trade Desk, also tie that activity back into a brand’s own customer data, so the campaign improves targeting and measurement for everything that follows it rather than existing as an isolated burst.
- If you give creators a creative-freedom brief, define the boundaries rather than the content. The most-cited campaigns in this piece all gave creators latitude over tone, format and pacing — including formats as unconventional as a ten-minute TikTok — rather than a script. The discipline isn’t an absence of a brief; it’s a brief that specifies the outcome, audience and any legal or brand-safety guardrails clearly, then leaves the creative execution to the person who actually understands the platform and the audience.
- Treat commercial measurement as a design requirement, not a reporting afterthought. Brand lift studies, earned media value tracking, attribution to bookings or sign-ups, and cost-per-result benchmarks need to be built into a programme from the outset, with clear ownership of the data, rather than retrofitted once a campaign has already run its course. It’s this discipline, as much as any single creative idea, that turns a one-off campaign into a renewed budget line.
- Treat earned and creator content as your AI visibility strategy, not just your social strategy. Independent research now confirms that AI search and chat tools cite earned, third-party content far more heavily than paid media — by a margin of roughly 80–90% to under 1% in the largest recent studies. Brands already investing in genuine creator relationships and earned coverage have a real head start in a channel that barely existed two years ago.
- None of this requires travel-sized budgets to apply. The underlying principles — always-on over one-off, product integration over pure promotion, participation over passive viewing, deliberate tiering over a single default creator type, and commercial measurement over vanity metrics — translate well beyond the category. The brands above simply offer some of the clearest, most current proof points of what good now looks like.
