Creator marketing is now infrastructure - and AI search is raising the stakes

41% of marketers say they use creator content for AI-driven search visibility - a use case that didn't appear in any previous wave of the study.

The source: the fourth annual Creator Marketing Study from LTK and Northwestern University (209 marketers surveyed in June), landed last week, well covered by Influence Weekly. The other headline numbers:

- 91% of the brands surveyed now run creator programs with an always-on component. Not one of the 209 marketers called theirs ad hoc or experimental

- The average brand works with 275% more creators than last year. 52% work with 100 or more

- 57% say content generation is now a campaign goal in its own right (up from 42%)

- 95% call AI a must-have or important in their creator platform - yet 45% still run the program on spreadsheets and DMs

This is in fashion, not travel, yet when a traveller asks ChatGPT or Perplexity where to stay or which tour to take, the answer here also draws on what's published about you: your own site and listings, yes - but also what third parties say. This is now definitive.

Creator posts, reviews and videos add exactly that: independent descriptions of your business that discovery systems can encounter.

No single post comes with a guaranteed citation. But if AI answers lean partly on third-party content, a business nobody writes about gives those systems less to work with. That's where the 41% are steering towards.

So why isn't every travel business already doing it?

The study maybe answers that too: the work surrounding the work has never been greater.

90% of the brands surveyed want a less complex stack, and nearly half are still wrestling spreadsheets and DMs. (Why???)

Finding creators, vetting them, agreeing terms, chasing deliverables - for a global brand that's a team. For a tour operator, hotel or attraction, it's the reason it never happens.

Which is exactly what we built CollabsMap to accomplish, for a travel business of any size.

You list your offer in plain language - what you'll provide, what you want back - and creators who don't like the terms simply don't apply. First triage done before anyone writes to you.

The creators who do apply are often already planning a trip to your area - 1,600+ upcoming trips have been shared so we know where creators are travelling next.

Because they're coming anyway, the starting point is your offer, not a negotiation about flights and fees.

Applications land in one inbox (including the ones from your own site), each with the creator's real numbers - followers, engagement, average views - pulled from their connected platforms, plus an AI fit score against your brief.

Listing is free and takes a minute. 3,800+ travel creators used the map last month to look for a collab.

The brands in this study have teams and agencies. You don't need that. We have creators already planning trips past your front door. You just need to provide a reason for them to talk about you when they arrive.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor CollabsMap.com who help you find the creators that are already heading your way.

Start for free at CollabsMap.com/start 

Worth a read: Skift's creator-economy piece (sponsored by Meta) on why travel brands need a proper operating model for creator marketing.

Book. Hold. Cancel. AI agents are about to make free cancellation very expensive.

Gunnar Hafsteinsson (who builds AI travel agents for a living) posted a scenario this week that should make every tour and activity operator sit up.

An AI agent planning your five-day Iceland trip doesn't know which day the weather will cooperate. So it holds three restaurants a night and four tours a day. Glacier hike, whale watch, snorkeling, horse ride - all on the same Tuesday, just in case.

Fifteen dinners and twenty tours held. Five of each used. The rest dropped just before each free cancellation window closes.

The traveller gets a perfect trip. The operator gets a 75% cancellation rate.

And here's the trap: there is no move a single operator can make. Block the bots and you disappear from the inventory agents pick from. Drop free cancellation and Viator delists you, GetYourGuide buries you. Tighten terms on your own site and the agent sorts you to the bottom of twenty near-identical options.

The OTA doesn't mind. It sees every hold and every cancel, takes commission on what sticks, and loose terms convert better. Everyone who could change the rules is better off leaving them alone.

The most flexible operator wins the booking. And eats the most cancellations.

Worth a read (and the comments are good too - deposits, differentiated rates, and a game-theory take on why suppliers can't fix this alone).

Meta's travel agent is landing in Japan and Singapore with zero inventory of its own

Meta launched its AI travel agent Muse in Japan on October 23, its first market outside North America. Singapore followed five days later. The interesting part isn't the launch - it's that Meta got there owning no rooms, no flights and no tours.

The timeline: US launch in September, flights via Duffel, with Expedia holding the hotel slot in North America. Japan followed with Klook as the experiences layer: 426,000 bookable experiences across 4,600 destinations. Travellers approve in chat, pay on Klook's page, and Muse confirms the booking. Agoda switched its connector on this week for both Japan and Singapore - the first travel platform in the region with one live.

Klook's SVP of global marketing Jakii Chu framed it as discovery, not just booking: "Now, we're taking travel discovery to the next level with Meta's Muse."

That's borrowed local infrastructure, not a translated app. As Forrest Zhang's breakdown puts it, the bottleneck for agents going global was never the model - it's assembling transactable inventory in a new market, from a flight down to one dinner reservation.

His sharper point for suppliers: a conversational shelf shows three to five options, not twenty. In the old list, number 20 still got seen. Now not selected means doesn't exist. A listing used to persuade a hesitant human; now it must also be legible to a machine. Klook spent a decade building the structured fields that make comparison possible, and no foundation model does that work for you.

Alexander Dillon (COO at hotel AI vendor ChatBlu) reads the same launch as the OTA endgame: an agent expanding abroad with hotel sellers already connected is "the clearest sign yet that the OTAs plan to be the hotel layer inside every AI agent". His warning for independent hotels: inside Muse, the room a traveller sees may come from an OTA feed, not the hotel's own site. Who wins inside the agent - the hotel brand, or whoever feeds the inventory? Skift puts a price on the possibility: if Meta takes a fee, hotels could end up paying twice for the same booking.

My take: Japan is now the number one outbound market from Australia, but Australians can't access Muse yet. I'd also treat any early sales numbers with caveats, because it's unclear what personal agents do to domestic tourism for Japanese exploring at home. Instinct, which we do have in Australia, hasn't announced travel partnerships, though it says it will earn this way.

Sources: PhocusWire, Klook newsroom, Agoda, Skift.

Worth a read: eMarketer's new AI Visibility Index for travel puts Marriott at a 26% brand-mention rate across ChatGPT and Gemini in September, ahead of Hilton at 20%.

Your agent is making first impressions now. Yours might be blowing them.

Katalina Mayorga, founder of El Camino Travel, got her first travel planning request from an AI assistant last week. Not a ChatGPT-assisted human, they get plenty of those. An actual agent doing the asking itself.

She hated it.

The agent wanted the budget broken down line by line "in ways no one could answer". It wanted the guide's name, credentials and educational resume. Layer after layer of detail, all before it mentioned who was travelling or what motivates them. Her verdict: a cold, transactional laundry list that turned her into "the agent's admin assistant, sourcing data". Her line: "Jesus, do you want to at least buy me dinner first?"

The sharper point she lands on: your agent is making a first impression on your behalf. It tells the human on the other end what matters to you and what kind of person you are, and you only get one chance. This one blew it for its human. Her question for everyone in luxury and service businesses: what are your red lines with AI-generated requests?

And it wasn't a one-off. Days later Lucas M. Peters (Tourpreneur) posted that AI is "killing" his boutique tour business, not by taking clients but by making him too discoverable to the wrong travellers. He's inundated with enquiries from people using AI to search for operators: real people, wrong budget, wrong timing, trips "next week" when he plans months out. Sifting them is eating his time, and he's weighing AI triage just to filter the AI-sourced leads.

My take: the highest-touch, most recommended personalised services are the ones starting to get pounded, and I'm not sure there's another answer than AI triage of the inbox. But there's an upside. If an enquiry doesn't fit you, it probably fits someone. Referring poor-fit leads to operators who can actually serve them, and earning a little from the position you've built, is a real opportunity. And it can be automated.

Source: Katalina's post (89 comments and counting).

The map is out - and it is already out of date

A quick note on this week's special edition: the (in)complete landscape of AI + Travel put 172 AI companies in travel on one map - accommodation, tours, corporate, flights, cross-sector and consumer.

It is already out of date, and that is half the point: this landscape is moving weekly. If you missed it, my post walking through it is here.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Instinct Diaries

Each week I hand real jobs to Bax, my AI agent, and report back - the wins and the misses. Here is 19-25 Oct.

Done:

• Followed up with Michael Culhane after his episode

• Brought the Chris Stockwell releases forward when the schedule moved

• Nudged the Maria + Filip bookings along

• Designed this week's LinkedIn cards

Missed:

• Substack lockout - still unresolved

One more since this graphic went out on Sunday: Bax built the AI + Travel landscape map behind this week's special edition - 172 companies sourced, categorised and drawn. Credit where it is due.

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

All podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure! Now is a great time to binge those you may have missed.

This week I chatted with Chris Stockwell from Scout, who deleted two million AI-written insights - $30,000 of content - and bet on real travellers instead. Hear the episode here.

Partner with Us - sponsorship info for the newsletter and podcast can be found here.

Most clicked last week was the link to the piece on travellers wanting AI to track room rates, not plan their itineraries.

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