Why internet strangers are following content creators on group trips around the world

Exhibit A: It took less than 20 seconds for Plotpackers, founded by TikToker Louise Truman, to sell out a March 2024 group trip to the Mount Everest basecamp. Truman first gained a following for videos about her post-pandemic backpacking trips. She’s amassed an audience of almost 150,000 followers. Now, through her new group travel company, she and partner content creators host group trips that particularly appeal to an audience of Gen Z women interested in solo travel. Many of her early followers came of age during COVID-19 lockdowns. They, too, were interested in planning similar “revenge travel” trips. But solo travel can seem intimidating if you’ve not done it before. And the social anxiety of traveling with internet strangers apparently seems less daunting. Consequently, the 2025 Everest basecamp trip sold out immediately, too.

Exhibit B: There’s an open wait list for the next group trip to Zanzibar, hosted by Bethany Thompson’s Black Travellers Collective. She’s found a small but engaged audience for her “group wellness trips around the globe,” as she writes on her TikTok bio. Her account, @black_wellness_travel, may have fewer than 3,000 followers but she’s selling out trips. The February 2025 Zanzibar trip sold out in four days, similar to how quickly the first one did in 2024. 

Exhibit C: Last June, more than 150 people happily grabbed complimentary undereye masks as they arrived at London’s St Pancras International station. They were all there for a yawn-inducing 6 a.m. train to Paris to celebrate Fête de la Musique — brought together largely via Out of Office Collective and its TikTok. It’s ”a space for Black and minority travelers to find comfort in exploring new destinations,” co-founder Mel Anyamene tells ESC KEY .CO. Out of Office Collective has turned hundreds of strangers into friends on more than half a dozen marquee group trips around the world, from Hurghada, Egypt, to Bali, Indonesia, since launching in late 2023. 

These are merely three examples of an evolving trend you might have spotted IRL if you happen to live around popular TikTok destinations: groups of internet strangers bobbing their heads to the DJ by the resort’s pool or pulling up to the beach with boards around sunset. 

More likely, though, you’ve seen videos of people making friends in some similarly photogenic locale popping up in your TikTok For You page. It’s a trend that’s picked up pace as tourism exceeds pre-2019 highs in almost every sector of the industry. Plus, it reflects another consumer behavior, where people seem open to trying novel ways to make new friends from run clubs to friend-finding apps like Timeleft, which promises to match you for group dinners with strangers, as advertised in many big city dwellers’ social media feeds. 

You might think, damn, c’mon, who really wants to travel the world with strangers, let alone strangers who follow the same influencer? Kinda cringe. But then some percentage of you will see the group trip travel content pop up in your feed, maybe while you’re feeling a little lonely on a Friday night. Then you might admit to yourself, OK, sure, I wouldn’t mind having a few new friends to travel with, too. You might swipe to exit the app in frustration. That might ferment into a little FOMO. Then you might tap the link in the bio. 

That is, after all, how all those other internet strangers first learned about these trips too. Then some percentage of them book the trip.

This phenomenon — group trips hosted by people with an audience on social media platforms — has experienced a few distinct iterations in the past decade. And we’re in the midst of another paradigm shift that’s doing the unlikely. Yep, group travel seems cool. I can hear sighs. No, this isn’t merely another gimmicky TikTok travel trend. The weird revolution happening in the group travel vertical reveals a lot more about the power and disparities at play on the internet — and what happens when an algorithm randomly ordains the next hustling content creator. 

One key factor here is who is influencing whom. In the years following the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, the shift can appear largely generational. The shift is from millennial bloggers and Instagrammers. Many of them have moved on from the above-the-table dinner photos to #blessed moms making reels where they’re “real” with their fans about aging into their mid-30s and, wow, even 40s. The shift started to turn to younger Gen Z in the early 2020s. In the travel space, it happened as many Gen Z travelers started heading out on their first big solo trips, circa 2021 and 2022. That’s when the insurgent wave rose on TikTok. 

Yes, it’s easy to reduce and overly simplify this trend to generational platform and aesthetic preferences — say, the algorithmic flavors of Millenial-central Instagram versus Gen Z-favored TikTok, or the self-described “influencers” versus the self-described “content creators,” the latter who cringe at the former’s Millennial tropes. But there’s some truth to it: social media platforms have become cultural touchstones in ways that musical artists have. Tumblr is to Millennials what Vampire Weekend is to some Millennials what a white plastic MacBook with GarageBand on is to some Millennials, etc.

While many social media users with some meagre audience manage their personal brand across several channels (including, sadly, LinkedIn), they tend to find a core audience on one platform at a particular point along an upswing in that platform’s growth curve. 

Even as Meta has attempted to crib TikTok features for Instagram, the distinct platform affordances on each helps define a silly sounding typology of who hosts group travel. I’ll verbosely dub the first type as the Instagram Influencer Group Trip Hosts, which emerged almost a decade ago. The other contemporary type we have is the TikTok Content Creator Group Trip Hosts, who are in their heyday. While both types coexist, and may even overlap in some respects, the types couldn’t be more different.

And understanding the differences explains why internet strangers are paying anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars a head to travel with someone they all follow. It also helps explain the current state of “influence.” 

Viewed as a whole, the trend relates to other macro trends such as tech-mediated socializing — the idea that, say, a new friend-finding app might help address some of the loneliness that social media apps first helped create. 

Certainly, Silicon Valley wants to promote itself as doing something totally new, bringing people together in ways that would not be possible without their latest product. And given their social products’ powerful influence over large swathes of the public, there is some truth to that. But it’s also important to ground any conversation about travelers connecting — especially marginalized travelers finding safer spaces — in this obvious fact: we have always found ways to connect with likeminded people when we travel. It is, for instance, why hostels are as much about a cheap place to snore as they are about who you might meet over the abysmal free breakfast. In my experience, backpacking always meant store-bought bread you toasted and then spread with Nutella — that’s it. But I was there to talk to anybody who wanted to walk around Pompeii with me, not the Nutella. 

Historically targeted travelers have used all kinds of tools to identify the physical location where they’ll be welcomed, find a sense of belonging and connect with their communities. The tools never needed to be that technically complex to do the job. Sometimes the tool was as simple as a list of places to go. Think the mid-20th century legacies of the Green Book for Black road-trippers or the Damron Address Book for queer travelers. 

In the past several years, however, algorithmic content feeds have increasingly become the place a lot of us go first — to the degree that many traditional modes of finding your crowd in a new city have fallen out of favor. This holds some answers to the lengths that we, the people of the internet, will go in turning to platforms for solutions to problems that platforms might have played a part in creating. 

Influencers versus content creators is semantics. And semantics — to be sure, the branch of linguistics concerned with meaning — really do matter. In the paradigm of Instagram Influencers, group trips emerged as yet another thing to sell. Finding something new to monetize is the key to success in the peak web 2.0 economy, where every piece of content is ideally sponsored or #ad. 

It’s this particular market force that first turned relative nobodies into internet celebrities, occasionally with followings that exceeded “IRL” celebrities. And with an audience as large as theirs, individual travel influencers became a new kind of travel media company — not directly competing with traditional legacy media but certainly reaching audiences that legacy media hoped to reach. And influencers were doing it more effectively, often, natively on the platforms where lots of us were spending arguably too much of our free time scrolling. The force to monetize these audiences soon “gentrified” Instagram, turning it into a virtual shopping mall, a feed of virtual billboards interspersed with a few videos of your second-cousin’s first child.

At various points since the trend first emerged about a decade ago, uncritical lifestyle media has repeatedly declared it as the next big thing. Uncritically so, because while the channels may differ greatly, the business model of influencers isn’t all that different from the business model of a glossy lifestyle magazine. In both cases, it's to make a lifestyle look enviable, then find new ways to sell stuff to anyone who will pay attention. 

Take this headline: “The New Trend: Traveling With Instagram Influencers.” That’s a 2022 column on Forbes.com. Sure, Forbes is a business publisher that’s never been known as a bastion of what’s cool. It’s known more for, well, the quantity and low quality of the SEO-y and clickbait-y articles that the site published throughout the 2010s, often written by a network of unpaid contributors (Forbes got traffic, contributors could promote themselves). But in this reported piece, “The New Trend,” writer Laura Begley Bloom precisely and earnestly reveals the business dynamics at play with the Instagrammers, in particular, who are hosting and selling group trips. 

Bloom identifies the benefits for followers and influencers: For followers, she writes, “you’ll get to experience the same kinds of bucket-list itineraries that you lust after on your social media feeds.”

For influencers, it’s another revenue stream in a self-employed but platform-dependent career path that can be notoriously challenging to monetize. Bloom continues: “Instead of hoping a tourism board pays them to create content, the influencers receive a commission when followers book trips through their links. Leading trips for solo travelers is one more lucrative way to diversify their income and connect with their followers IRL.”

It’s a case study in the Instagram influencer paradigm when Bloom interviews Alyssa Ramos, who blogs at mylifesamovie.com. Ramos is arguably best known for her Instagram account, @mylifesatravelmovie, where she has more than 200,000 followers. Bloom’s description of Ramos highlights the income diversification that influencers aim to attain: “In addition to creating content and hosting group trips, Ramos has created a sustainable swimwear line […], launched an e-commerce shop, published her first book [...] and is teaching courses on how to start and run a business from home.” 

Ramos has got a claim to several “firsts” in the influencer business: On her My Life Is a Travel Movie website’s homepage, she self-identifies as “one of the first ever solo travel blogger/influencers.” In Forbes, she’s credited as “one of the first to launch influencer-hosted travel itineraries when she took a group of eight followers to Iceland” nearly a decade ago now. Bloom also writes that Ramos is “the first travel influencer to sell group trips as NFTs,” though in classic lifestyle media style, Bloom does not ask Ramos what “group trips as NFTs” means or why her audience of “like-minded women” would want them. 

For the trips themselves, Ramos speaks candidly about the appeal — traveling with people who follow the same influencer implies you’re alike in some other ways. “Because when you think about it, if you’re all following the same person, you must like what that person does, right?” Ramos told Bloom. “For example, without fail, on all of my group trips, I have ambitious, hard working women, who love a glass of wine as much as they love going on a hike and shopping for local clothing to wear in photos.” In other words, you go to be a part of the group photo with the other ladies wearing saris in front of the Taj Mahal.

Ramos is among the first Instagram Influencer Group Trip Hosts. But now that’s become big business. Many Instagrammers and bloggers have now followed suit, sometimes in partnership with a group travel company such as Camp Wanderlust, a Baja California company that positions itself as “the only all-inclusive mobile glamp camp” in its Instagram bio.

Startups have also launched to serve the growing market, as numerous PR pitches in my inbox reveal. Last July, I received one such email from the spokesperson for Portland startup TrovaTrip. And I sincerely appreciate that she had read my Condé Nast Traveler author page because she knew I was previously based in the Pacific Northwest and that I’m queer. “We're headquartered in your old city of Portland and best known for partnering with creators to help them launch and run group trips — taking their online communities offline,” she wrote. “So far, we've operated over 1,000 trips.” I was intrigued. 

Portland, Oregon was also once the home of Kinfolk Magazine, which influenced much of the mid-2010s “authentic” Instagram aesthetic. (In a disclosure that doubles as me roasting myself, yes, I owned several copies — and did not get that editor job.) Portland was also home to a wedding photographer that went viral on Instagram in 2015 with the satirical account Socality Barbie, a stereotypical Portland influencer account in every detail, down to the “Authentic Living” line in her bio. The only difference was that the influencer pictured in the images was, yes, an authentic Barbie doll. Socality Barbie exceeded 600,000 followers on Instagram in part because of her on-the-nose recreation of the #PNW influencer aesthetic and because mid-2010s Portland was a ripe era to satirize. Portland was one of major mingling points for the Instagram influencer class — so much so that you can almost imagine Socality Barbie posting group trip content. That is, if she were still posting on Instagram at all. But she’s not.  

Portland also has a tech scene, but venture funding can be a challenge for startup founders there. Launched in 2017, TrovaTrip raised an impressive-for-Portland $15 million in Series A funding in 2022 to service the widening market for influencer-led group trips. TrovaTrip calls influencers Hosts and travelers Travelers. And the spokesperson told me they focused on managing “the logistical fun like payments, trip prep and Host insurance — but our Hosts and their Travelers are the bringers of the vibe and the ones taking a leap of faith to go from sharing behind the screen to IRL.” 

One such “bringer of the vibe” is Haleigh Hendrickson, known for her Instagram account @wherewewentnext, where she has more than 239,000 followers for her outdoors content. Journalist Rachel Levin took a TrovaTrip with Hendrickson and wrote a beautifully descriptive feature about every detail of the experience for Outside Magazine, published last July. Levin wrote that she wanted to answer this question: “Should you go?” 

Months after the trip, her answer came. Levin lounged on her couch at home, looking at the photos from the group journey, concluding in the kicker to her article: “Yosemite with Haleigh was actually more fun IRL than on IG.” 

Or as TrovaTrip’s voice-y spokesperson described Levin’s article to me when she included it in her pitch: “For a detailed walk-through of how this comes to life from ‘WTF who wants to travel with an influencer’ to ‘holy shit, in-person human connection is joyful AF,’ Outsider Magazine has you covered.” Indeed!

“It’s easy for folks to wrap their head around the jump from ‘outdoor influencer’ to ‘outdoor group trip Host,” the spokesperson continued. But the opportunity is “in the space of connecting humans who don't have the privilege of feeling safe everywhere in the world.” Yes, as I said, I’m queer. I sometimes write about queer things, too, so the PR angles I get pitched are often “some trend but make it queer.” But this spokesperson, who cited the “hundreds of LGBTQ+ trips” TrovaTrip has run, correctly identified another component driving the paradigm shift in the influencer space: traveler groups that are often overlooked by traditional tour operators. In that way, influencer-led group trips are being sold like they’re the new “Friends of Dorothy,” by which I mean the precursor to LGBTQ+ cruises (à la what evolved into the lesbian cruise satirized on the HBO Max series “Hacks”). 

The primary career dream for many young people is not to become an astronaut, basketball star or guitarist in a punk rock band. It is, rather, to become an influencer. Yes, 57% of young Americans say social media influencer is their ideal career, according to one poll conducted by Morning Consult and cited by The Economist. And yet, while it feels like everybody online wants to be an influencer, nobody wants to be labeled one. 

That’s different from only a few years ago. At the height of Instagram in the 2010s, many influencers self-described that way — it was often more aspirational than accurate. But calling yourself an influencer now has become as passé as sockless ankles. 

“Content creator” is the preferred terminology for many reasons. And all of those reasons are embodied in the infamous Fyre Festival scandal, which was heavily promoted by the biggest influencers in the game. Kendall Jenner reportedly received $250,000 for one Instagram post promoting the event that was canceled because it didn’t deliver what it promised. After guests paid handsomely for tickets, they arrived at the luxury-branded festival which they quickly discovered was not as luxurious as advertised. Not in the slightest. The whole ordeal might be best summed up for that infamously sad looking cheese sandwich, which went viral online as evidence of how dim the reality of the experience was versus what was promoted by the influencers. The sad cheese sandwich in the styrofoam box became a meme for everything wrong with influencer marketing, too — it hardly mattered that the cheese sandwich meme was itself a scam. 

The current preference for the job title “content creator,” as generic and godly as it can sound, makes a bit more sense in that context. It’s a reaction to everything perceived to be bad about influencers: the shallowness of the influencer lifestyle, the focus on selling stuff, the fixation on follower counts and the reality-distorting commodification of, well, everything. 

It also reflects, in some small way, how Instagram’s cool factor cratered as TikTok’s star rose in recent years. On Instagram and most other dominant social platforms, who you followed was paramount to your experience on the app. The Instagram Influencer Group Trip Host sells not only travel, but travel with a new kind of internet star, almost like if you got to join the cast of your favorite reality TV show, a show which you primarily watched unfold across Instagram stories and reels. In Outside Magazine, Rachel Levin writes about a moment on the last trail day in Yosemite with Haleigh Hendrickson when a stranger stopped the group exclaiming “You’re @wherewewentnext!” Levin writes “she was as starstruck as if she’d spotted an actual celebrity.”

While TikTok continues to produce plenty of its own algorithmically ordained stars, the TikTok Content Creator Group Trip Host peddles a slightly different vision. TikTokers aren’t only offering the allure of traveling with someone you follow. Who you follow matters a lot less here. Why? It’s all because the algorithm primarily prioritizes content that is likely to engage you based on your overall viewing habits.

That’s part of the reason why you might spend more time on TikTok than you like. The most addictive thing about its algorithm is also the eerie sense that it’s reading your mind. It works by tracking everything you do — from the obvious likes and comments through to the videos you’d never smash a heart for but will dwell on until the video restarts again, often because you’re hate-watching with spite (e.g., American study abroad students telling you about the best “secret spots” and “hidden gems” in London even though they only arrived two months ago) or horror (e.g., bungee jumping selfies — why?). All those signals feed TikTok’s black box algorithm, which fills your For You feed with videos it predicts you’ll have a higher likelihood of consuming. It’s an algorithmically defined reel based on everything assumed to be true about you. It’s not that other social platforms don’t have similar features, but there’s a general sense that TikTok’s algorithm more quickly adapts to what’s currently on your mind. 

It’s funny when TikTok’s algorithm accurately predicts that, yes, I want more videos of parrots dancing to Rihanna. Correct. More parrot videos, please. It’s freaky when the algorithmic curations so rapidly react to my moods, based on the signals I’m giving it — for instance, when it determines I am, in fact, feeling a little SAD, or seasonal affective disorder. And it’s kind of meta when the algorithm amplifies my anxieties, also based on the signals I’m giving it — serving me content about how bad doomscrolling is, with talking head videos going on about why we all need to log off more. Got it. Keep scrolling.

Based on all that data over time, TikTok algorithmically categorizes you and decides if you’re, say, gay. If you watch a lot of gay content, TikTok places you in “clusters” — similar to Netflix’s infamous “taste clusters.” TikTok’s clusters have topical labels such as “LGBT,” which prompted employee complaints, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023. When you think about your For You page in those terms, you start to wonder how specifically labeled your other not-specifically-gay clusters might be. Maybe the “Cockatoo Dancing” cluster is split by genre and I’m in the “Cockatoo Dancing to Bad Bitches” sub-cluster? If I dwell on enough videos about weaning off antidepressants, then maybe I’m in a “Post-Wellbutrin” sub-cluster, which is nested within the broader “Neurospicy” macro-cluster? Maybe we’re all in the universal cluster labeled “Needs to Go Outside to Make Friends IRL?!” 

What, then, if I might be able to meet a few strangers who have also been grouped with me in one or more of the same clusters? It’s an absurd question in theory, but it is, in fact, currently a key thing shaping what group travel looks like today, especially among terminally online people who don’t like the label “influencer.” Those younger users, often swiping on TikTok as their social platform of choice, want to meet like-minded people in the real world but don’t exactly know where to start. So, of course, many of us start on, yes, TikTok.

The irony with emergent platforms is how they capture the ambiguity of the keyword “authentic.” Instagram felt more “authentic” than Facebook at the pinnacle of Kinfolk’s success — that was before the young Mormon-founded magazine relocated its headquarters to Copenhagen and one of its key co-founders, Nathan Williams, came out as gay. And TikTok felt more “authentic” than Instagram’s polished and self-serious Millennial earnestness. 

TikTok, of course, trades in spontaneity, very online humor and subversive novelty. The appeal of TikTok’s algorithm and the For You page is how it can quickly surface otherwise unknown characters to the forefront of the social web. This lends a relatability to TikTokers compared to the more polished grid that popular hot-girl Instagrammers perfected in the heyday. 

“TikTok creators often feel like [quote] ‘normal’ people, which makes their travels aspirational yet achievable,” says Mel Anyamene, co-founder of the Out of Office Collective (OOOC). “When viewers see someone like themselves exploring the world, it not only sparks inspiration but also builds confidence that they can do it too.”

Given the way TikTok’s algorithm works, you don’t need followers to reach people — while it can feel like a lottery, posting into the void can lead “everyday” content creators to significant visibility. This is where the influencer versus content creator terminology carries some weight: “TikTok creators are transforming how younger travelers approach and experience travel [through content that feels] accessible and relatable,” Anyamene says. “This content helps people see that travel doesn’t have to be as expensive or unattainable as it might seem.”

Partly because of this perceived relatability, TikTok has become Gen Z’s default search engine, where they go to find an unfiltered view on destinations around the world. 

This paired with the For You page’s lottery factor has helped more niche creators find an audience — often serving groups overlooked and marginalized by the travel industry writ large. While claims of “creating community” are common among anybody who works in social media, whether they’re running their own or a brand’s socials, TikTok Content Creator Group Trip Hosts often elevate the community experience in their content. 

You see that collective keyword present in how OOOC promotes its content on TikTok. Despite being founded by self-described content creators, they focus their content on how they bring together hundreds of strangers aged 21 to 35 with similar interests — and hesitations. Anyamene explains: “There’s a lot of stigma around visiting certain places and concerns about how people of color might be treated and solo travelers are often especially mindful of this.” OOOC designs their trips to address both those concerns and the craving for new friends — even offering to connect solo travelers who might want to share a hotel room. “Even if you choose to explore independently during the day, you always have a tribe to return to at the hotel — a tribe where you can feel safe, seen and understood.”

A content creator before launching OOOC, Anyamene found inspiration to create a “travel community” in her DMs, she tells me: “Growing my TikTok page has shown me just how many people dream of traveling but feel held back — whether by fear, lack of knowledge or uncertainty about where to start. I frequently get messages from people asking to join me on trips.” 

Anyamene teamed up with her friend and co-founder Tamara Duncan to launch OOOC, first as a passion project. 

When more than a hundred people were waking up for 6 a.m. trains, they realized both the strength of their growing community — and how the algorithm’s clusters could help reach an audience. “TikTok's algorithm is also great at getting things out to people based on what they like,” she underscores. This has created an opportunity where content creators can bypass the conventional ways of monetizing through brand partnerships and bring folks together offline. And OOOC’s trips have been selling out.

On the surface, it can seem like this generation of content creators venture into the territory of group travel agencies and packaged tour promoters — selling and often directly hosting group trips bringing together complete strangers. But this is where you can’t really view “influencers” or “content creators” as a single class. Not only are the follower counts and incomes vastly different; the niche communities the algorithms help curate have no direct analogue in the travel industry. Especially for OOOC, which leans heavily into the concept of a “collective” to underline the focus on underserved travelers.

“I wouldn't exactly say we're a travel agency. I feel like ‘travel agency’ gives the impression of just booking travel for people, when it's more collaborative than that — it's a co-creation,” Anyamene says. “We're very hands on, getting to know our members, and going to these trips and events ourselves.”

But in the same way that Instagram influencers facilitated patterns of overtoruism in the 2010s, TikTok’s role in driving footfall to destinations around the world isn’t without known consequences — something Anyamene is cognizant of with OOOC’s work, too. “TikTok’s influence can create trends around certain destinations, potentially contributing to overtourism,” she says. “Younger travelers are particularly impressionable, so if they see many creators flocking to a trending place, they would want to go, too.”

The relatability factor partly stems from the public’s eroding trust in institutions, a macrotrend often conjured to explain why certain individuals-as-media-companies fare better in the 2020s’ fragmented information ecosystem. 

While that’s no doubt an element, there’s a less discussed role in how social media algorithms increasingly facilitate fame — and how that phenomenon has tilted the playing field toward platform dependency. 

TikTok’s algorithm can thrust a random hustling content creator from almost no audience to a major one based on one or a series of videos (from the Costco peach lady’s single viral video to Tareasa Johnson’s 50 video series “Who TF Did I Marry,” now slated to become a TV show). Even so, no content creator knows exactly how the algorithm works. They’re left reading tea leaves in the analytics. 

In the world of travel content creation, posting consistently about one trip can quickly lead to lottery-style fame, where strangers begin to randomly recognize you while you’re still on that very trip.

Alice Crossley, senior foresight analyst at London-based consultancy The Future Laboratory, first observed this while she herself was traveling through Central America: “In summer 2023, I noticed a series of ordinary people go viral extremely quickly on TikTok by documenting their post-COVID travels,” she tells ESC KEY .CO. One account, in particular — @fortheplotduo — caught her eye. “They quickly became known amongst everyone travelling a similar route to them. They would mention in their videos how often they were recognised by fellow travelers,” says Crossley, who also happened to be traveling a similar route at the time — and likely got grouped into a relevant TikTok cluster along with loads of other backpackers.

Soon after, the duo began to organise their own trips, collaborating with external travel companies to take other young people back to their favourite spots, Crossley says. It put a “more intimate, influencer-spin on traditional youth-oriented travel experiences such as STA Travel,” a long-running student travel agency that shuttered during the pandemic. 

Crossley wrote in October 2023 for The Future Laboratory that these “hyper-relatable” digital collectives were an evolution of what influence looks like, translating niche online communities into real-world gatherings — pointing to the likes of the Black Travellers Collective, Plotpackers and Queer Girls Trip from TikTokers/real-life couple @janineandgen. “Through watching the creator’s TikToks, the traveler has a parasocial intimacy with the creator, which makes them feel more comfortable joining a group of strangers for a trip to the other side of the world,” explains Crossley. 

A creator’s feed becomes a shoppable moodboard for what you could be posting to your own TikTok page. Except this time, the endless scroll actually leads somewhere — if you can afford to book a trip. Content begets group travel begets more content, in a flywheel that’s only been gaining momentum. 

This demonstrates the power of content creators’ abilities to forge profitable audiences around their content, which then directly influences where people go, quite literally. A few hospitality brands are paying attention, with one even launching an app that lets content creators of all sizes earn hotel credit through any content they organically create. 

Arlo Hotels launched such an app, If You Arlo, in mid-2022. It’s essentially an evolution of conventional loyalty programs but this time for content creators. It not only awards them for their own stays, but the stays booked by their followers, too. Content creators apply, are vetted by the hotel brand’s marketing team, then receive a unique code. When they share that code with their audience and their audience converts, the creator gets credit to use for future Arlo stays. “Each dollar of room revenue generated equates to 10 points. Each point equals .003 of a dollar,” explains Jimmy Suh, chief commercial officer of Arlo. The math, apparently, adds up. This year the app generated “several million dollars” in revenue for Arlo, he says. It now automates relationships with some 2,000 “next-gen travel agents,” as Suh calls the content creators they work with. 

Suh says the program’s concept stemmed from the team’s observation that the videos content creators had organically made about their properties were driving bookings. They wanted to reward that behavior and harness it as a revenue growth channel. 

There was also the fact of the pesky influencers emailing about being hosted: “Arlo, like other hotels, especially lifestyle hotels, get solicited daily by influencers/content creators requesting free nights for a post or two,” Suh admits. “There’s an obvious intersection between social media and travel, and we wanted to capitalize on it.”

Any trend analyst paying attention to the rise of influencer- and content creator-led group travel will join up a few dots on the topic: there’s the (widely felt to be true yet still debated) loneliness epidemic; the explosion of single-person households; a significant percentage of young people delaying or forgoing conventional lifestyles and traditional life milestones, either due to finances or by choice; the much-discussed preference for “experiences” over “things;” the widely felt malaise with the dark state of social media; and yes, the pandemic. 

There is an undeniable COVID-19 coming-of-age driver here for Gen Z travelers. “The timing of this trend is so important — post-COVID, many young people were acutely aware they had lost two years of their lives when they would have been exposed to the most new people,” observes Crossley. “The opportunity to meet new people through group travel seems like the perfect antidote to years of COVID isolation.” Crossley says she’s only seen the trend blow up further since she first wrote about it a year and a half ago.

Indeed, almost every travel vertical has experienced growth in the years since 2020, when the industry momentarily came to a halt. And several marketplace startups have emerged to promote the concept of traveling with strangers. That includes London’s luxury-centric Flash Pack and Milan’s WeRoad, which announced in November 2023 that it had secured $19.6 million in a Series B funding round. WeRoad spent some of that funding on splashy ads plastered throughout the London Underground. The tagline: “travel the world with a bunch of strangers.”

That certainly confirms the demand in the market. But what, exactly, has motivated content creators, in particular, to go to all the hassle of organizing trips and even launching companies that function, more or less, as group trip operators? It has a lot to do with the inequity of pay in the sector.

There are, of course, classes of content creators, too. Unless you’re in the higher-income groups, where a single post can fetch you hundreds of thousands of dollars, monetizing a following remains painfully elusive for many. “The darker you are, the less you are worth,” one creator recently told The Guardian, pointing to the stark pay disparities among content creators on the major platforms. No wonder creators are aiming to build their own travel empires instead.

Money isn’t the only motivation for hosting group trips. Content creators would actually need to enjoy traveling with a bunch of strangers themselves. But it has become one way that extroverted content creators with audiences of all sizes can help sustain themselves in the platform dependent business of influencing. Some people also really enjoy hosting trips. Three years ago, when TikToker Louise Truman first set out to be a content creator, she was “immediately drawn” to the idea of hosting her own trips. So she started looking into the process and did a double take when she noticed how low the pay was.

“It was something I immediately noticed in the industry,” Truman tells ESC KEY .CO. “There was just a big lack in terms of compensation for creators that was actually fair in terms of partnerships for group trips.” She quickly determined that group trip products from established travel companies were “extremely expensive, didn’t include that much and then equally weren’t really reimbursing the creators too well on the other side of it. I was like, I’m not sure I want to offer this to my following.”

Next, Truman went deep into a “how to run a group travel business” clickhole. “I started looking into, like, package travel regulations — how to do it in a way that could all be done as a packaged product that was completely legit,” she says. “Because I knew that as a consumer, if I just saw an influencer posting about, like, a group trip and had nothing behind them, I'd be like, who? What? Like, why?”

“And then,” she recalls, “it basically just kind of snowballed into a whole brand.” In September 2023, she officially launched Plotpackers, aiming to offer packaged trips appealing to Gen Z women who want to travel solo but also make friends — and not spend too much. Many group trips can run into thousands of dollars, but Plotpackers trips target the budget backpacker end of the market. “We're reaching people who wouldn't otherwise sign up for a group trip,” says Truman. “When you're a startup with no funding, it's generally very hard to enter a market. And we've been able to do that because we've just kind of reached a group of people who wouldn't otherwise be signing up.” 

Truman has focused her business model on partnerships with other young content creators — such as @dominiquetravels and @emma.peto, who have each sold out many trips — as a growth engine. Plotpackers pays content creators “the same rates, no matter how big or small you are.” In our interview, she emphasizes that’s because of her own experience starting from zero.

On January 19, the United States’ ban on TikTok went into effect. The ban, which passed with support from both major parties, consumed online conversations in the lead up to the app's theatrical hours offline. American content creators, who had made their livelihoods on the platform, posted farewells-for-now to their audiences. Across both Facebook and Instagram, parent company Meta released “a flurry of new features and ran advertisements promoting its platforms as a comparable alternative,” Wired reported. Content creators were not thrilled: “Don’t make us go over there,” TikToker Erica Mags said in a video. “The vibes are not the same.” Over on Reddit, meanwhile, a flyer promoting a “Lights out Meta” boycott gained a little traction among frustrated TikTokers. 

In a comical protest, many users rejected American-owned Big Tech social alternatives and instead directed their audiences to find them on Chinese social app RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in its home market (where its competitor is Douyin, aka TikTok). RedNote surged on app stores. By mid-January, more than a half a million so-called “TikTok refugees” had made the move to RedNote, according to The Guardian’s reporting — at least for the moment.

What does the TikTok ban portend for the many content creators who make a living based largely, if not entirely, on income earned through that one platform? In some ways, this question betrays the obvious American bias in tech discourse, even though the United States amounts to only a fraction of global internet users. 

Estimates put TikTok’s active monthly users at more than 1 billion. By one count, the U.S. market accounts for about 17% of that global userbase. It’s certainly an important market for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, but TikTok’s reach and cultural impact extends far beyond the United States. There’s precedent for allied countries to follow U.S. bans of Chinese tech companies, including Huawei and ZTE. Yet that seems unlikely in, say, the European Union for now.

When TikTok did come back online in the United States, following about 14 hours of no viral dances, the app pushed a notification to all users praising then-President-elect Donald Trump. On February 13, TikTok was once again available to download from the major mobile app stores. 

And while its future in the U.S. remains an open question, it has made content creators around the world freshly nervous about the concept of platform dependence. Newsletter platform Beehiiv was one of several startups that used the TikTok ban as a moment to emphasize the importance of content creators’ owning more of their audience relationships (yes, through a newsletter). It’s also worth noting on the topic of niche group travel and influencers that Beehiiv’s CEO, Tyler Denk, hosts his own startup newsletter, Big Desk Energy (BDE). And he’s hosted his own BDE group trip to Costa Rica for select startup founder subscribers.

Advocates for decentralized social media have recently suggested the U.S. TikTok ban could be a boon for the “fediverse.” Meanwhile, “many Bluesky users posted jokes about how many TikTok-addicted Gen Z and Alpha would rather migrate to Chinese social apps than get on Bluesky — likening the platform to a kind of retirement community for millennials,” I wrote in late January in a profile of Katherine Cross about her new book, aptly titled “Log Off.”

The conceptual beauty of the fediverse is that it doesn’t need to be all about text-based microblogging, as it currently is. Billionaire entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban said he was ready to fund a TikTok clone built on top of Bluesky’s AT Protocol. Vox reported last month that “the race to become the next TikTok starts now.”

But looking for “the next TikTok” sort of sounds like record executives in the 1970s still looking for “the next Beatles.” In other words, the world is different in many ways. The fragmenting social landscape is in significant flux. 

You can’t really understand why internet strangers today are following TikTokers around the world unless you understand why the first followers started traveling with Instagrammers a decade before. And as distinct as Instagram Influencer Group Trip Hosts are from TikTok Content Creator Group Trip Hosts, it’s also fast becoming a false binary. The paradigm is shifting yet again. But where do the content creators go?

For many, single platform dependence is no longer an option. The future increasingly seems to require channel diversification, relying less on a sole third-party platform and maintaining a presence across several emerging ones while building out their own audience channels, as well. This is, in some ways, how it’s always been for branded social media strategies, but a new concept for some content creators who found their voice and audience on a single channel. It reminds me of the challenge indie bands had when Myspace’s cultural currency faded: Facebook wasn’t really an alternative to musicians in the same way Instagram isn’t a like-for-like alternative for TikTok. It’s crucial to consider the features and the vibes together. 

In the travel content creator space, cross-channel operations like OOOC and Plotpackers increasingly look like one plausible future. Rather than relying on brand partnerships alone, with the most profitable deals often seeming to go to only a select group of largely white and already established influencers, they’re creating a revenue model directly driven by their niche audiences. While they may rely on social channels to drive visibility and awareness, they’re also creating other avenues to connect — OOOC brings its travel community together on Discord. Plotpackers sends trip updates in its newsletter, dubbed the PlotLetter. 

But, for now, content creators don’t have a lot in the way of choice. Even as other channels like a newsletter or a blog offer more direct ownership of the audience relationship, many audiences rely on algorithmic curation to discover new content creators. Social media algorithms have not only affected politics and culture — they’ve also determined who the tour guides are on group trips. And for many travelers, even if they follow the content creator to other platforms, TikTok remains the algorithmic matchmaker, arguably the A&R hub for travel industry talent. 

And still, the algorithmic hold on TikTok audiences is what’s giving certain content creator-led group trips the sales edge. While many traditional travel agencies still depend quite heavily on search engine optimization (SEO) and paid digital advertising, Plotpacker’s focus on TikTokers returned nearly $2 million in revenue in the company’s first year, Louise Truman told me in December, with 1,792 travelers hosted on group trips. It’s an impressive start from a young company she bootstrapped herself without any funding.

Truman says many established travel brands are on TikTok, but many don’t seem to understand how younger travelers use it — and that’s given her an entry into an already packed tour operator market. “[TikTok] allows us to have a really hyper-personalized connection with people, which other streams of marketing fall short on,” she says, “because there's only so much SEO can do in terms of building a personal connection with someone.”

Yes, the future probably means more platforms, potentially decentralized platforms that we don’t even know about yet alongside old-fashioned ones like newsletters, too. For the majority of content creators who may be earning anywhere from the average working class to middle class incomes, this creates opportunities for growth, reinvention and, yes, possibly unforeseen levels of multi-platform posting fatigue. 

But, hey, at least those group trips look like the perfect antidote to the content creator’s burnout — or that’s how they appear in our For You pages, right?