The Bittersweet Success of a Travel Challenger

The Problem With Finding Somewhere First

There’s a wonderful moment when you discover somewhere nobody else seems to know about.

The one beach that isn’t on every travel influencer’s feed. A restaurant tucked down a side street. The tiny village where the only sounds are the sea and a stray dog barking in the distance.

But in this day and age, if it’s really that fantastic… a few months later, everyone is there.

That’s the bittersweet paradox of travel. The very things that make a destination a challenger: its hiddenness, remoteness, tranquillity, uniqueness, authenticity or sense of discovery… can disappear once everyone discovers it.

Thailand and Bali are perhaps the poster children for this phenomenon, but you can see it almost everywhere. A quiet beach becomes a must-see. A hidden restaurant becomes a hotspot. A sleepy town becomes a destination. And the thing people travelled there to escape: crowds, noise, commercialisation and the feeling of being just another tourist… arrives… eventually.

Social media has accelerated this dramatically. A single Reel or TikTok can turn an obscure viewpoint into a queue of hundreds within weeks. And now we’re seeing the curious phenomenon of “destination gatekeeping”, where creators deliberately don't reveal where their content was filmed because they know exactly what might happen if they do.

Which leaves travel marketers with an interesting problem… how do you sell the discovery without destroying it?

The Influencer Paradox

Influencers are, of course, incredibly powerful for travel.

They can make us want to go somewhere we've never heard of, show us experiences we hadn't considered and provide a level of personal recommendation that traditional advertising can struggle to replicate.

But there is a difference between inspiring someone to travel and sending everyone to exactly the same place.

Our annual TM100 study into consumer’s perspectives on challenger brands, gives us an interesting glimpse into this tension. We isolated 378 people who rated travel brands highly in the study and looked at their behaviours and attitudes.

60% are more likely to buy products and services from challenger brands, one of the highest scores we've seen across the TM100 groups we’ve isolated. These are people actively looking for brands, products, services and experiences that do things differently.

But here's the interesting bit: whilst 49% follow multiple influencers, 51% follow one or fewer, and around a third don't follow influencers at all.

In other words, large swathes of this audience, millions of everyday Brits, aren’t just waiting for a creator to tell them where to go next.

Yes, they're curious, open-minded, and they want to discover. But perhaps they don't necessarily need to be told exactly what to discover by someone effectively paid to travel the world and surface the hidden gems.

Be The Guide, Not The Megaphone

Having worked across travel for more than a decade, including brands such as Thomson Cruises, Marella Cruises, TUI and lastminute.com, I've noticed that some of the most effective travel communications don't simply tell people where to go.

Instead of saying 'here is the place everyone is talking about', perhaps the role of the travel brand can also be to encourage people to be open-minded about how they get there, what they do when they arrive and who they meet along the way.

Don't necessarily take the quickest route from A to B.

Take the slower road.

Get off the beaten track.

Stop somewhere you hadn't planned to.

Talk to someone who lives there.

Some of the best holiday memories aren't created at the destination at all. They're created on the journey towards it. Playing into that insight for a travel brand has implications not only for messaging and ideas, but also platform, format and the way content is created for audiences. It’s about discovery without necessarily concentrating everyone in the same photogenic location.

Talk To The Original Influencers

There's another opportunity hiding in plain sight.

The people who actually live in a destination.

Content creators can be fantastic guides, but there's a danger that we end up creating a new kind of travel monoculture, where everyone follows the same handful of people to the same handful of places.

The original destination influencers are the locals. They know the restaurant that isn't on TripAdvisor. The beach that's beautiful at 7am but packed by midday. The market their grandmother still shops at. The bar that doesn't need a neon sign because everyone who matters already knows where it is.

Many moons ago, we explored this idea with TUI, creating a campaign around the premise that the best recommendations don't necessarily come from people with millions of followers. Sometimes they come from the person sitting next to you.

And there's something wonderfully human about that. A conversation with a local can give you a recommendation, a story, a friendship or an experience that no algorithm could have served you.

Don't Just Sell The Find. Sell The Way Of Finding.

Perhaps this is where the travel challenger has an opportunity.

The brands that win won't necessarily be the ones shouting loudest about the next 'hidden gem'... they'll be the ones helping travellers become better explorers.

Because if your marketing strategy is simply to find somewhere beautiful, put an influencer there and tell millions of people about it, you may eventually end up marketing the very thing that ruins the experience.

The opportunity is to think beyond destination discovery and towards discovery itself. Encourage curiosity. Champion the unexpected. Make the journey part of the holiday. Connect travellers with locals. Help people go a little further, a little slower and perhaps a little more off-piste.

In other words, don't just be the brand that tells people where everyone is going. Be the brand that helps people find their own way. We want influencers to inspire wanderlust, but not necessarily create a stampede. We want destinations to become successful, but not at the expense of the things that made them successful in the first place.

This is where challenger thinking comes in. Because the answer isn't necessarily to stop telling people about the world. It's to give them a better way of experiencing it. And perhaps the best travel brands of the future won't be the ones with the biggest megaphone… they'll be the ones with the best map.

If you're interested in going deeper into the travel audience within the TM100, we've got plenty more data on their challenger mindset, purchasing intent, media behaviours and relationship with influencers. Drop me a line if you'd like to explore the data – we'd be very happy to share more.