Travel’s New Creator Economy: Why Brands Need Smarter Systems

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner. Creators and social media now influence over $7 trillion in global travel spending, according to figures shared by Skift Head of Research Seth Borko at the inaugural Skift Creator Summit, which took place in New York City on September 22, 2026. That level of influence shows how far creator marketing has moved from the margins of the travel industry, but the challenge facing brands now is turning that influence into a repeatable business function. Sanjay Bhatia, director and head of industry, travel, auto & experiences at Meta, and Laura Troy, senior director, creative and content, U.S. and Canada at Marriott International, joined Skift Studio Content Director Alison McCarthy on stage to discuss how travel brands can move beyond one-off creator campaigns and build a more scalable, measurable system around creator marketing. Creator Marketing Needs an Operating Model Bhatia identified three characteristics that distinguish established creator programs from more fragmented approaches: organizational ownership, a defined budget, and creative planning that begins alongside the media strategy. “Creator strategy has to be a priority internally, with clear accountability,” he said. “There needs to be someone on the organization chart who owns the program and is responsible for it.” According to Troy, there was “no rule book” and “no playbook” for social media when she joined Marriott’s luxury division in 2007. That early experience shaped a test-and-learn approach, but Troy said experimentation still needs a clear definition of success. “You could have a beautiful piece of creator content, but if you weren’t aligned on the goals and what success looked like, it could fall flat,” she said. Paid media has consequently become central to Marriott’s approach to creator content. Troy said creators need to understand not only the organic story they’re being asked to tell but also how the asset will function once media investment sits behind it. That integration also changes the internal structure of creator marketing. Work that may once have primarily involved social or PR now requires creative, brand, media, and performance teams to agree on objectives and measurement. Bhatia described organizational constraints as one of the biggest barriers he sees across brands. A shared definition of success can help bring those groups together. He said creator marketing was growing at four times the rate of the rest of the media. Meta’s presentation also cited forecasts putting paid creator amplification at $13 billion, up 48% year over year, while 92% of marketers said creator content outperforms their own. Investing in the Full Cycle Bhatia broke the creator process into four stages: discover, connect, scale, and optimize. Discovery increasingly means looking beyond follower counts to identify creators who match a particular audience or traveler intent. For example, Meta’s Creator Marketing Hub makes more than seven million creators across Instagram and Facebook discoverable, with recommendations informed by Meta’s machine learning and first-party performance data. The second step is creating the permissions and rights structure that allows brands to use creator content beyond an isolated organic post. Scale then becomes a matter of identifying content that’s already resonating and backing it with media. Bhatia said Meta is seeing Partnership Ads generate two times the incremental return on ad spend and a 94% improvement in cost per lift for brand consideration. Results from those campaigns can then feed back into the discovery and planning process. Marriott has followed a similar test-and-learn path. Troy said its creator strategy has evolved from early hotel-stay exchanges around 2015 into a broader marketing function, with creators now used both for social distribution and as talent in paid campaigns across multiple formats. However, the starting point still depends on the business problem. “Understand what scale means because it might mean different things to different people,” Troy said. Brands should then demonstrate impact against the chosen objective, whether that’s awareness, engagement, or attributed revenue, before expanding the model. Performance Data Should Make the Next Campaign Smarter A recurring theme throughout the summit was the need to treat every campaign as a source of intelligence. Troy said she works closely with Marriott’s paid media teams to understand which creative performed well, why something underperformed, and whether factors such as campaign optimization or too many competing assets affected the results. “The worst thing you can do is decide something didn’t work and never talk about it again, because you’ll make the same mistake,” she said. Paid amplification can make that learning more concrete. Bhatia said brands can examine metrics such as cost per acquisition, return on ad spend, and incrementality once creator content enters a measurable media environment. The roundtable discussions that followed the session added an important caveat. Creator influence may take months to convert into a booking. One participant said partnership ads run with Booking Holdings and Tripadvisor Group had produced about a 30% improvement in conversion rate and efficiency, but many conversions did not appear until 90 days or later. Longer attribution windows can therefore give travel marketers a more accurate picture of performance. Evan Frank, co-founder of Fora, who also spoke at the summit, made a related point. He said brands often confuse awareness with transaction, even though the content that drives discovery is not always the same content that drives a booking. That should also shape the next round of testing. Brands should test content first, not simply creators. A creator who performs well in one context may need a different format, message, or placement elsewhere. Likewise, an organic post already generating a strong audience response can serve as an important signal before a brand commissions entirely new material. Successful programs, therefore, do not simply replicate one winning asset. Bhatia argued that brands should scale their production models by using different creators, formats, and placements around the same underlying consumer insight. Scale and Specificity Can Both Be Advantages Marriott’s portfolio gives Troy a large canvas for this strategy. The company has over 30 hotel brands, in addition to partnerships spanning sports and entertainment. That breadth helps Marriott target different interests. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all,” Troy said, adding that younger consumers increasingly expect more personalized content. Smaller travel brands can turn the opposite characteristic into an advantage. Bhatia said a single hotel or destination can define a much narrower audience and go deeper with a smaller group of creators. He cited research showing that over 90% of people value expert knowledge most in creators. His recommendation was to “go narrow deliberately,” finding a specific niche and building deeper relationships with creators who understand it. Dan Holowack, founder and CEO of CrowdRiff, who also spoke at the Skift Creator Summit, made a similar case. He said nano and micro influencers are generating the highest engagement, with 73% of brands now seeking them out. The Next Step for Creator Strategy The main takeaway of the summit was that learning needs to compound. Brands planning their 2027 creator strategies should focus as much on accumulating knowledge as accumulating reach. Troy encouraged marketers to identify what’s worked, decide where the business needs to drive demand, and define what success should look like before choosing creators. The same idea surfaced repeatedly in the roundtables. Participants stressed the value of building longer-term creator relationships, looking beyond follower counts, and giving campaigns enough time to show their full impact. Some also pointed to the importance of reusing strong creator content across channels rather than treating each activation as a standalone asset. Bhatia’s closing point was that each campaign should leave brands better informed for the next. “Creators earn trust, brands amplify what works, the results demonstrate value, and both sides invest more deeply,” he said. Join Meta on Nov 5th for a webinar on how to drive results through creator-led travel campaigns. This content was created collaboratively by Meta and Skift Studio.