Finding the perfect travel influencer whose values resonate with yours, and whose content is not only pretty but delivers on your goals, can be a challenge. Influencer marketing is a great opportunity for travel brands with plenty of influencers out there waiting to showcase your brand. The influencer industry is huge and one of the fastest-growing ways for businesses to reach new audiences. In 2025 the global influencer market was estimated to reach over 32 billion US dollars.
84% of millennials and Gen Z say they use travel influencers for recommendations.
Finding the perfect influencer for your brand can take some trial and error, but here are the steps we follow to find the best match.
Define Your Influencer Campaign Goals And Budget
Campaign Goals
First and foremost, identify what you want to achieve with your influencer campaign. Are you wanting to focus on brand awareness and getting your name in front of new audiences? Or focusing on growing your social media platforms and building a community there? Or maybe your priority is getting sales and conversions. Setting goals might sound obvious, but this step gets skipped so many times and that is when campaigns start to go off track. Knowing what you want to achieve helps you choose the right platform and type of travel influencer. Once your goal is defined, it becomes a lot easier.
Campaign Budget
It’s also important to consider your campaign budget. You need to be realistic on your budget right at the start, as this can determine the kind of influencers you can get. Depending on whether you’re a consumer brand, travel destination, or an experience provider, you should decide what the influencer will get from the collaboration. Although gifted campaigns can yield great results, most influencers, especially micro-, macro- and mega influencers, will charge for a collaboration. Relying solely on gifted campaigns can limit your reach.
Travel Influencer Rates
Influencer rates vary based on the platform, there are lot of factors at play, including the type of content, and usage rights among other factors. Each platform differs in cost too, for example, Instagram costing differs to TikTok and YouTube typically has higher rates due to time and longevity. The type of content also plays a factor, a simple story is going to cost you much less than a video, the most effort and requirements from the influencer, the most the post is going to cost. You can use free influencer rate calculators that give you a rough estimate of how much you should expect to pay before you start negotiations. On average, travel influencers currently charge $215 for a sponsorship, though this can swing widely depending on audience size, niche, and deliverables
Understand Your Target Audience
It’s crucial to have a clear insight into your audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviours. The authenticity of your influencer campaign depends on a strong alignment between your brand, the influencer, and your audience. Someone looking for a luxury honeymoon responds differently to someone going backpacking or on a budget, you need to not only understand the influencer but who follows them, their age, gender, spending habits, travel style and what motivates them to book. Choose a travel influencer whose audience matches your brand’s target audience.
Research Potential Travel Influencers
Influencer Platforms
There are a variety of free and paid influencer platforms that allow you to search for travel influencers based on your specific criteria and analyse influencer accounts. You can filter things such as location, interests, audience, engagement rate and more. Have a look at options such as Influencity, Upfluence, and Promoty.
Manual Research
Another way to find influencers is through a manual keyword or hashtag search on your chosen platform. Once you find a travel influencer that aligns with your campaign, you can look at suggested accounts which have a similar niche or audience. You can also check if there are any influencers who have shown interest in your brand by engaging with your social media.
Travel vs Lifestyle Influencers
There are travel niche influencers who only share travel-related content, but there are also lifestyle influencers who share content around several topics that are part of their life.
Niche influencers are great if you want to generate brand awareness, however, they’ll likely collaborate with multiple companies which means that you’ll essentially be competing with them on the influencer’s profile.
With general lifestyle influencers, you might also reach people who are not specifically interested in the travel content, but if done authentically, the chances of conversions are higher.
It’s important to consider whether the influencer has done similar collaborations in the past and if they have any ongoing collaborations.
Analyse Travel Influencer Metrics
There are a lot of metrics that you could measure for assessing the suitability of an influencer for your travel campaign. Which metrics are most important to you, depends on your campaign goals. We recommend analysing audience, content reach and engagement regardless of your goals, as these are the main factors that will influence the performance of your campaign. Look beyond vanity metrics such as followers and focus on audience quality and intent. We want to reach people who are actually engaging in the content. Metrics like engagement rate, saves, shares and comparing to previous campaigns can tell you far more about whether an influencer drives bookings.
Audience
Consider the influencer’s audience demographics, especially location and age group. If you’re targeting people within a certain region, it’s important to make sure that the majority of the influencer’s following consists of people in that area.
Content Reach And Views
Reach and views are especially important if you want to increase your brand awareness. Regardless, it’s an important indicator to consider for gauging the potential impact of your campaign. Beware that influencers with a few viral videos can be appealing, but that doesn’t mean your campaign virality is guaranteed. Consistency in reach and views is more important to understand the quality of the influencer.
Engagement
A high number of followers doesn’t always mean high engagement. The bigger the account, the lower the engagement rate (usually). That’s why it’s also important to analyse content reach and views. The engagement rate will show you how invested the audience is in the influencer’s content. The average engagement rate for influencers is between 1-3%, anything above that is considered high.
How Can A Social Media Agency Help?
- Develop an effective influencer marketing strategy for your brand.
- Create compelling campaigns with strong messaging that aligns with your business objectives.
- Identify the perfect influencers and cultivate relationships for long-lasting partnerships.
- Oversee content creation and manage deadlines, to ensure effective execution of campaigns.
- Manage contracts and negotiate fees to get the best value for your brand.
- Analyse campaign performance to improve strategy.
In Conclusion
Finding the perfect travel influencer can be daunting, but following the steps outlined in this article, you’ll be on your way to a successful influencer campaign. The most important thing when choosing an influencer is the alignment of values with your brand. Influencer marketing isn’t just about getting more eyeballs on your brand, but cultivating an authentic connection with your target audience. If you’re ready to take your brand to the next level with influencer marketing, reach out and let’s discuss what we can do for you!
