How Travel Influencer Marketing Is Changing the Way People Plan Holidays in 2026

What is a Travel Influencer?

These creators specialize in making travel accessible to their audiences. They document their experiences while travelling, provide recommendations, travel tips and discount codes, and feature the brands and products they use along the way.

Travel influencers can work to guide users at any point of the buyer journey, from discovery and inspiration all the way to making a booking with a specific provider.

Travel influencers are passionate travelers. They use trusted providers, trusted recommendations, with limited space in their suitcases – they’ll only bring the products that work, making their recommendations even more credible. They’re quickly becoming the de-facto mouthpieces of the travel industry. They give audiences the trust and confidence that they need to happily place themselves in the hands of certain brands or providers as they step into the unknown.

What is Travel and Tourism Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing in travel and tourism is all about storytelling. They’re a dream for travel brand collaborations looking to promote destinations, services, or products, folding naturally into the emotions and experiences that influencers share with their audiences.

Like with any vertical, influencer marketing in travel never stays still. In 2026, tourism influencer marketing is shifting away perfectly curated holidays and towards trend- and experience-driven content that converts. Recent research reports that over half of travelers are comfortable booking travel directly through social platforms, while 72% of travelers are swayed by social media (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) when it comes to planning their next trip.

It’s also important to note that, while your brand might not fit directly into the travel vertical, it doesn’t mean you can’t work with travel influencers. Travel influencers are, fundamentally, lifestyle influencers. That lifestyle extends beyond the destinations they choose, encompassing everything from the clothes and equipment they take with them to the vehicles they use, their health and wellbeing behaviours, and even crossovers like travel beauty.

Travel Trends and Travel Audiences

High end travel

These cash-rich users are looking for the best of the best, seeking luxury travel experiences like fancy restaurants, nice hotels, unique experiences and even outfit inspiration.

Thrill Seekers

Audiences looking for high impact excitement, whether it’s activities and experiences, challenging locations or off-the-beaten track itineraries.

Solo Travellers

More people are making the leap to travel alone in 2026, covering everything from backpacking to road trips and tables for one.

Staycations

These audiences are looking for experiences close to home, with a focus on learning more about their own country or city’s history, as well as saving money.

Learning Experiences

This community is all about cultural experiences, embracing history and experiences that develop their understanding of themselves and the world.

Family Travellers

Family travel is an evergreen and growing market that focuses on safe, creative, travel that suits a wide range of age demographics.

Why Should Brands Partner with Travel Influencers?

Niche Audiences with a Global Reach

Brands can easily active audiences that perfectly match their ideal customer demographic through their choice of influencers. Engaging with these pre-shaped communities help brands ensure they’re not spending on marketing to anyone but the most relevant potential customers. 

Influencers are also a great way to introduce brands to new geographical markets in a targeted way, or to tap hyper-localized audiences. 

Experiential Content & Dynamic Visuals

There’s a natural human response to jaw-dropping travel experiences, stunning landscapes, and seeing people on adventures. Influencers let you break up your standard brand feed and deploy truly engaging content that puts user experience at the front and center.

Increased Brand Awareness & Storytelling

Travel influencers are storytellers, giving audiences an unrivaled opportunity to live a place or a product.

Good travel influencers aren’t just selling their authority in travel. That additional brand selling – going to a certain hotel, a certain travel accessory, booking through a certain platform – becomes a natural part of their memorable storytelling and compelling recommendations.

The Trust and Credibility Piece

Travel influencers build genuine connections and trust with their audience over time. Their recommendations are seen as authentic reviews because users are seeing products/services being used first-hand.

They have incredible power to guide purchase decisions as a result, making them excellent vectors for things like offering influencer-specific discount codes for holiday booking, or niche-specific product recommendations.

How to Work with Travel Influencers Effectively

Don’t isolate yourself to large scale creators

Niche and micro-influencers often have smaller but more dedicated communities, leading to exceptional engagement rates. 

If you can clearly identify your audience and the type of content they enjoy, then leveraging the right micro-influencers will have a macro effect on your ROI.

Understand your audience before you address them

Who are you trying to target? Are they the solo traveler, a luxury traveler, environmentally conscious? Even if these traveler types can be found in the same destination, or even doing similar things, their priorities and values are often completely different. 

Your influencer choice and creative approach will need to be perfectly tailored to your audience – in some cases, you might be crafting distinct product campaigns in parallel around a single brand. 

While there are plenty of travel influencers out there, working with the wrong ones could see your travel campaign failing to reach its destination.

Transport Your Campaigns with Goat – The Travel and Tourism Influencer Experts

When the Goat Agency worked with Tourism New Zealand, we activated a variety of travel and tourism influencers to raise awareness of the country and bring their campaign to life across social media – targeting UK and US travellers specifically. Getting creative, we identified influencers who had recently travelled to New Zealand, and had genuine experiences to share. These influencers created high-quality content using existing footage from their travels, from their visit to key locations the client wanted to showcase to more niche experiences. These influencers had a proven track record of driving high engagements and perfectly exemplified Tourism’s New Zealand’s criteria. 

The result? 32.86M and 13.25M impressions from the UK and US respectively, with over 1K post saves across the content. This campaign proves that influencer content drives traffic and by carefully pinpointing influencers for your campaign produces content that resonates, drives consideration, and enhances brand awareness.

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So, If you want to build the perfect itinerary for your next travel and tourism influencer campaign, we can help. Get in touch to find your perfect creator partners and start crafting an unforgettable travel campaign.