$7.3T of travel passes through creators. Yes T - for Trillion

Sean O’Neil from Skift posted at the end of the inaugural Creator Summit the stat that should stop every travel marketer in their tracks:

“At the Skift Creator Summit today, Seth Borko of Skift Research noted that $7.3 trillion of the roughly $11 trillion spent on travel globally now carries some creator fingerprint. Wow.”

Creators are no longer extras swanning around in the back. They are core. Like SEO is core. Or Google is core. But if you look inside most tourism businesses, “creator marketing” is handled by the intern or lowest marketing coordinator, if it is worked on strategically at all.

The good news for those who do, is that the path is still relatively uncluttered.

In another session we learned a creator video might inspire a trip today — and the booking might not happen for another three months. That makes measuring creator marketing purely through clicks fundamentally flawed. This is how travel has always been booked. It is the reason why the “connected trip” never made it.

The big idea is incrementality.

Instead of asking “Did somebody click this creator's link and immediately book?”, marketers should be asking:

“Did this content cause bookings that otherwise wouldn't have happened?”

Meta's Diana Lucas pointed out that 60% of content consumed on Instagram and Facebook is now video, while click-based attribution captures only a fraction of the impact social content ultimately has. (Meta this week did give user the ability to add links to reels this week - if you pay! - and restricted the ability to add links to Facebook posts, unless You pay!).

Hyatt is already changing how it measures this. Rather than focusing on impressions, it looks at performance across the entire booking cycle, including both short and long-term returns.

And the results are significant: Hyatt says paid social now outperforms every other channel on incremental ROI, and it is shifting more budget there.

There was another interesting lesson for creator strategy.

Hyatt would rather work with 100 smaller creators who genuinely care about the brand than one huge creator generating millions of poorly engaged views.

Matador's Ross Borden also argued that creator campaigns should generate multiple pieces of content that brands can test against each other — finding what actually moves travellers before putting more media behind it.

This is one of the exact strategies we work with our clients on at CollabsMap.com 

This content is provided by the newsletter sponsor collabsmap.com - the place to find those 100 smaller creators who genuinely love your brand. You can test it for free at collabsmap.com/start

Something to Muse on

 Sanjay Bhatia, Meta’s Head of Travel, has a post up on Muse that is worth a look.

Sanjay took his family to a 49ers game and wanted upper-level, first-row seats so the kids had an unimpeded view. He asked Muse to keep scanning ticketing platforms, alert him when those seats dropped in price, and then help him transact quickly when they hit the right point.

That is a very different behaviour from search. It is monitoring, context, preference, timing and transaction all wrapped together. Not “show me options”. More like “watch this market for me and move when the conditions are right”.

That matters for travel because so much of travel buying works exactly like this. The right fare. The right room. The right seat. The right departure time. The right tour slot. The right price point. The right moment to book.

Sanjay also talks about Meta Business Agents being built with travel enterprises, with WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger all running from one agent and one source of truth. That is probably the more important commercial point. Customers have already chosen their surfaces. Some live in WhatsApp. Some reply on Instagram. Some still use Messenger.

The brand does not get to decide where the customer wants to talk or whether they’ll be doing the talking themselves at all.

So for travel companies, Muse is interesting not because it is another shiny AI assistant. It is interesting because Meta is pointing toward agentic travel inside the messaging layer where billions of people already are. That feels like a fairly big deal.

Did someone say “Apps are dead”?

Whilst on Muse, Apps are one of the many things that have had their death prematurely announced. OTA’s. SEO. Apps.

But Muse is an app. It is number 1 on the iPhone App store in fact. Second is ChatGPT.

Apps aren’t dead. They are the interface from us to our phones to our AI.

Siri could kill apps by becoming that AI. 🤣 But otherwise apps look here to stay until we throw away our phones.

No link for this one - 100% pure editorial comment here.

Beware the mediocrity of AI

Simone Puorto has a very good rant on LinkedIn about AI-generated strategy docs.

He says of the normal AI generated output: “the document had “EVERYTHING except SOMETHING I could actually use.”

I think a lot of travel companies have already run straight into this wall. And probably most didn’t even realise they’d hit the wall. Not because AI is bad. Quite the opposite. It is because AI is now good enough to produce something that looks like work.

A strategy deck.
A market analysis.
A customer journey map.
A five-point plan for AI transformation.

All very nicely formatted. All very plausible. But also all possibly useless.

Simone calls it “cognitive outsourcing”. The risk is not that people use AI. We all should. The risk is that people outsource the thinking before they understand the problem.

That is how you end up with 20 pages of AI-generated travel strategy that says nothing specific about your business, your customers, your constraints, your data, your distribution, your team, your margins, or what you should actually do on Monday.

It is strategy-shaped content and this is the warning for travel businesses. AI can massively increase the capability of someone who knows what they are doing. But it can also massively increase the output of someone who does not. And more output is not the same as better thinking.

The danger is a new layer of AI mediocrity. More decks. More summaries. More “insights”. More meetings to discuss documents nobody fully understands and nobody can really defend.

The skill now is not just prompting. It is judgement.

Knowing the problem. Knowing what good looks like. Knowing when the answer is generic rubbish. Knowing what to cut. Knowing what to ask next.

Tom Goodwin also touched on this point this week:

“Laziness used to be quite easy to see, because it would be people who didn't get much stuff done.
You could kind of weigh effort by a mass of output.
Generative AI changes this a LOT

From afar people who are not thinking, or being discerning, or applying taste, or pondering priorities, seem to be as good as anyone.”

He goes on: “…then there's a whole tranche of people who can't believe their luck. Decks made in seconds, research done while having a pee, emails replied to all hours of the day, we used to "phone in" work when we didn't care, now we can Claude it, and use the smokescreen of volume for cover.

The net effect of all this seems to be carnage.

The crap is diluting the brilliant.
The slop misdirects attention.
The culture of craft or accountability or taste, falls down.”

If your team’s main AI skill becomes “generating documents it cannot evaluate”, you don’t have an AI strategy.

You have a very fast photocopier with confidence issues.

What will you do when the agent comes calling?

Amazon this week decided to block Meta’s Muse from shopping on the platform.

Shopify on the other hand said Yes Please! give us more of that!

What is going to happen in travel I wonder? We see above that Sanjay Bhatia from Meta is saying he is already talking to the big players in travel. I wonder what they are saying back?

I’ve seen the phrase KYA - Know Your Agent floating around everywhere this week like in this post (which is mainly about payments) but also as the antidote to the Amazon problem.

If we think practically what an agent is likely to do - it will book a hotel with free cancellation and then cancel it and book a better one (or the same one) when a better price emerges and so on until we hit the cancellation gate. And there will be literally millions of these agents doing this billions of times for their various masters.

This will no doubt test the performance of any dynamically pricing algorithms but surely also create more changes that create more changes.

No wonder data centers run hot.

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:

Propellic watch travellers using AI to plan trips - find out what they saw

Propellic has a very interesting finding out ahead of its full report, shared in Navlog by host Brennen Bliss. They watched US travellers plan real trips with AI for a week. Destinations, hotels, itineraries, day tours and booking. Screen recorded, thinking aloud, using their own tools.

The headline finding? AI sent 71% of travellers direct to the operator. Independently, 68% of travellers said they preferred booking direct anyway.

That is quite a stat.

For operators, this is probably the best distribution news in a decade. If travellers researching and booking with LLMs are being pushed direct, then AI might do what years of “book direct” campaigns struggled to do: move people around the intermediaries and closer to the actual supplier.

Except, and there is always an except, this only helps if AI can actually find you, understand you and trust you enough to recommend you.

If your product pages are thin, your content is vague, your reviews are scattered, your FAQs are missing, your availability is hard to read, or your brand barely exists outside your own website, then “AI sends travellers direct” is not really your good news.

It is someone else’s.

For everyone sitting between the traveller and the operator, this is a harder read. If AI keeps collapsing the funnel and sending high-intent travellers straight to suppliers, then the value of being the middle layer needs to get much clearer.

Discovery is changing again.

Book your seat to learn the full findings here.

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Podcasts and Sponsors

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Amit Shamni, founder of Bridgify, chats this week about building a technology layer for one of travel’s most fragmented categories — tours, activities and experiences — and the journey that ultimately led to Bridgify being acquired by HBX Group.

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