What is the actual cost of working with travel content creators?

I wrote a post on LinkedIn a year ago and it was one of biggest posts I’d ever done at the time in terms of reach and reactions. I was reminded of it this week when I got a notification that someone had commented on it! Why is someone commenting on a year old post? How did they even see it? I reached out to the person, and they said it had been cited in an AI answer and they’d followed the citation through. Also a first for me on a LinkedIn post that I know about.

Anyhoo - it got me thinking about the question, because a year ago the definitive answer was 🤷 

But one year later having worked with dozens of brands I can now give the absolute and definitive answer: The cost of working with creators is $10 CPM. Note: I’m talking about a group of creators, not just one. This is cost when working at some level of scale.

I know that definitively because one of our more recent clients told us that was their KPI. Their goal was to get 5 million organic views on a $50K budget - total. That included travel costs, content creation costs, software costs, creator payments, everything. Hitting their 5M view figure was non-negotiable. There was no other cash and no possible way they were missing their KPI. That was the core of the brief.

Having now lived through that and actually hit 5.8M views (and growing) I’m confident we can achieve this for anyone in travel who has a similar budget.

The brand reps still got to choose exactly which creators they wanted to work with in advance. This was a simple process with our available dashboards.

For their money the brand got 18 creators to pay their own way to their locations. These creators posted 74 separate pieces of content (Instagram Reels) that followed the brand’s instructions. These creators were all also affiliates who are making sales off that content and we uncovered one piece of content that both the platform and the people on it absolutely loved! This will become the core of their paid spend with Meta.

We can do this for you too if you like. Drop me a line if interested.

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor Videreo - we run creator campaigns at a guaranteed $10 CPM for budgets $50K or larger

Trivago says forget cutting staff - give them AI superpowers instead

Trivago is a more interesting AI travel story than it probably looks at first.

Fortune has a piece on Trivago CEO Johannes Thomas and how the company is using AI to push back against disruption. On paper, Trivago feels like exactly the kind of business AI should be coming for. It is a hotel comparison site in a world where Google, Booking, Expedia, ChatGPT, Perplexity and every other search-ish thing wants to sit between the traveller and the booking.

And yet Trivago is apparently profitable, grew almost 20% last year to around $633m in revenue, and reported second-quarter revenue growth of 21%. That is not nothing.

The interesting bit is the management choice Thomas describes. At one point the board discussion was basically: do we shrink the company down for efficiency, or do we try to make 600 people operate with the impact of 6,000 by using AI? That is the actual AI strategy question for travel businesses.

Not “can we put a sparkle icon in the app and call it innovation?”

The harder question is: what does the business look like if every person, process and team can be materially more capable?

Thomas says he now spends more than half his time on AI transformation and has even built a “role evolution agent” that looks at an employee’s work, messages and job description, then gives them a personalised playbook for what to automate and how their role may change. There are obvious HR and privacy questions there, but as a signal it is quite useful. This is not AI as a side project. It is AI as operating system.

Travel has a lot of mid-sized companies in exactly this awkward zone. Too big to behave like a scrappy startup. Too small to outspend the giants. Too exposed to distribution shifts to sit still.

For those companies, AI probably matters less as a front-end gimmick and more as leverage. Faster analysis, better content workflows, smarter merchandising, cleaner ops, better support, sharper commercial decisions, more testing, less internal sludge.

Thomas’s advice is blunt: invest at least one or two hours into AI and rethink your work.
That sounds small, but I think he is right. The companies that win are not going to be the ones where one innovation person has a deck. They will be the ones where everyone is quietly redesigning the annoying parts of their job.

Boring? Maybe. Probably what everyone should have been doing for 18 months now.

The click you never heard coming

The hotel click might already be too late. In old search, you could at least squint at the dashboard. Rankings, impressions, click-through rates, conversion. Not perfect, but you had some idea of what was happening.

With AI search, a traveller might ask for “a quiet boutique hotel near the Javits Center” or “somewhere in nature for a weekend reset”, and the machine produces a shortlist before the traveller ever reaches a hotel website.
 
Hotel Dive has a good guest piece from Tim Major at Operto on how hotels should think about AI search. The point that caught me is that hotels are not just competing for rankings anymore. They are being interpreted by systems they cannot really see into and that creates a different problem.
 
If you are not in that shortlist, you did not lose the click. You lost the chance to be considered.
 
The article makes a useful point that vague positioning gets filtered out. A hotel that is “perfect for business and leisure travellers” may sound safe in brand copy, but it is not much help to an AI trying to match a specific traveller to a specific stay. A hotel that is clearly good for conference visitors, families with older kids, quiet wellness weekends, pet-friendly road trips or long-stay remote work is much easier to place.
 
This is where niche stops being just branding and starts becoming distribution.
 
For hotels, the practical work is not especially glamorous. Make the property legible. Keep descriptions specific. Make amenities, policies, location context, room types, accessibility details, nearby demand drivers and guest use cases easy to understand across your website, listings, reviews and structured data.
 
Also, accept that your website is no longer the only place your hotel is being “read”. AI systems are pulling from the messy wider web. Your Google listing, OTA pages, review language, local content and third-party mentions all become part of the interpretation layer.

AI Destination Marketing Ecosystem

Congrats to Tourism Fiji who just won a PATA Gold Award for what it calls a world-first end-to-end AI destination marketing ecosystem.

The lazy read is “Tourism Fiji built an AI trip planner with TikTok”, but that misses the important bit. This is really about stitching together two Chinese ecosystems: Douyin for discovery and planning, Fliggy for commerce and fulfilment.

A traveller sees Fiji content in Douyin, ByteDance’s Chinese TikTok, and can move from that video into a conversational Fiji AI Travel Planner. So instead of “nice snorkelling video → leave app → Google Fiji holidays → compare OTAs → lose interest”, the journey starts from the moment of interest. The AI can use the context of what the traveller engaged with and turn that fuzzy intent into something more structured: dates, travel style, accommodation, activities and itinerary shape.

Then Fliggy becomes the commercial layer. Tourism Fiji describes its role as converting intent into transactions through conversational booking, live pricing, inventory matching and personalised recommendations.

The innovation is not the itinerary generator. Everyone has one of those now, and half of them still think you can teleport between islands.

The interesting bit is trying to preserve the context from social discovery all the way through to booking. Traditionally, travel marketing leaks intent everywhere. Someone likes a video, saves it, maybe clicks, maybe searches, maybe lands on an OTA, and the useful signal from “I liked this specific Fiji diving clip” mostly disappears.

Tourism Fiji’s model is trying to make that journey more like: I liked this, so I probably want this kind of trip, so build me an itinerary, match it to real products, show live options, book.

It is important to note that this all starts with an ad not just a regular post! So as a destination you are presumably paying for the ad to both be created and then displayed, paying for the tech and then paying a commission (possibly the supplier’s cost here). Award winning yes. Sustainable beyond a campaign? Not so sure.

Age of consent?

Might agentic travel have a consent problem? Atlas just open-sourced a flight-booking Skill for AI agents. Live fare search, fare verification, booking creation and issuing across its low-cost carrier connectivity.

Andrew Boch I think nailed the most interesting bit: “A vendor open-sourcing a connector is not usually news. But this one ships an opinion about consent, and that is the scarce artifact right now.” That is the line. The capability list is good. The control list is ultimately going to deliver a better result.

Atlas has built four points where the agent is not allowed to keep going by itself: authorising the booking, accepting a price change, choosing a seat fallback, and confirming the final payment summary.

Or as Andrew put it: “The hard part usually isn’t the API call — it’s knowing when not to make it.” That is the real agentic travel lesson because the expensive failure is not always the agent that cannot book. It is the agent that books the wrong thing with confidence.

Wrong fare. Wrong seat. Wrong assumption. Wrong moment to charge the card.

So maybe “agent-ready” travel is not just inventory plus an API. Maybe it is a clear list of where the human has to say yes.

Flights have one list. Hotels need another: deposits, cancellation windows, resort fees, bedding, accessibility, pay now vs pay later. Tours need another again: pickup points, weather risk, fitness level, age limits, private vs shared departures. Andrew again: “Guidance a developer can skip is not a control.” That is why the checkpoints sitting in the flow matters.

Every travel brand building for agents needs to write its own “the agent must stop here” list. What would be on yours?

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Love This!

loveholidays went from 7% to 79% AI-assisted code changes in a year. Deployments are up 73% without growing the engineering team.

This is a company who is changing who gets to build. Product managers, designers and commercial teams are increasingly contributing directly to codebases, prototypes and customer experiences instead of putting every idea into an engineering queue.

OpenAI says more than ten new search experiences have already been developed through loveholidays’ Search Playground. Most were built by non-engineers. At least three are now live on the website. Imagine even trying to suggest that could happen in 2021! You'd be locked up.

It reminded me of the conversation I had recently with Oliver Green from Tourstack on the Everything AI in Travel podcast. His advice to operators was not “go and play with AI”. It was build a company brain, connect your systems, and give AI enough business context to work on real problems. AI gets useful when it is not a toy sitting beside the business. It gets useful when it is wrapped around the actual business: your data, rules, design system, workflows, checks, booking logic, product knowledge and commercial priorities.

loveholidays seems to have done that properly. Engineers are not just letting everyone loose with a coding assistant and hoping for the best. They are codifying best practices, validations and workflows so non-engineers can move faster without breaking the machinery. They've built a grown-up's version of “everyone is a builder”.

For travel companies, the question is not whether your marketing team, product people or operators should all become software engineers. They probably should not. The better question is: which ideas are currently stuck because only a tiny number of people are allowed to turn them into working things?

And what would happen if AI made more of that expertise available to the rest of the business?

Slack Group!

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

Let's talk about resilience: An 18-year-old in Ukraine starts renting out a four-room summer house his grandparents built on the shore of the Azov Sea.

He loves the business, raises money from family and friends, builds 24 rooms, then another 24. Over time he owns a 48-room guesthouse, rents out another 98-room hotel nearby, then buys five hectares of beachfront land with plans for a 300-room hotel.
That is not a side hustle. That is a life’s work taking shape.

Then 2022 happens. The war starts, the territory is occupied, and the business is gone. Not “we had to rebrand”. Not “demand softened”. Gone. The hotels, the land, the plan, the thing built over more than a decade.

I keep thinking about the emotional weight of that. Because in travel and hospitality, businesses are rarely just spreadsheets. They are places. Families. Staff. Guests. Regulars. Seasons. Photos on booking pages that probably still exist somewhere. A whole little world.
And then suddenly that world is out of reach.

Usually when we talk about bouncing back from adversity it means someone had a bad quarter, lost a client, had to pivot, or got punched in the face by an algorithm update.
All real. All annoying.

But then you hear a story like this and it recalibrates the whole thing.

I don’t have a neat business lesson for this one. Honestly, I’m not sure it needs one.
Maybe the point is just that some people are carrying losses most of us can barely imagine, and still keep building. They start again in a new market, a new country, a new category, with all that experience and grief packed into the same suitcase.

That is resilience. Not the LinkedIn poster version. The real one.

Vadym Klymov is now building WinWin.Travel to help (among others) wheelchair bound travellers find hotels that will actually be practical for their stay.

You can hear the full story on the Everything AI in Travel podcast dropping in the next couple of weeks.

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.

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Most clicked last week was the link to CollabsMap.com - thanks for checking it out!

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