The global travel blogging market was valued at $4.72 billion in 2024 and is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 12.5% until 2032, according to a Future Data Stats report. 

Travel content creators went from unpaid bloggers to professional media producers in just over a decade. iambassador has been a key player aiding them in this transformation since its establishment in 2011.

This company convinced tourism boards to start paying creators for their work back when free trips were considered sufficient compensation. The shift, however, required establishing new business models, setting industry standards for content quality, and developing metrics to prove ROI to skeptical brands. 

Today, as tourism boards grapple with AI content generation and platform proliferation, iambassador’s founder, Keith Jenkins, draws on his previous corporate experience to tackle an even bigger challenge: creating a universal system to track content impact from first reader engagement through final travel booking.

“Bloggers are both publishers and entrepreneurs. They have to create this income for themselves, and they bring a lot of value to the table,” explains Keith. “They’re not only going to get the content on the blogs, but on social media as well. You get a lot of engagement, which all the bloggers have to work on as well.”

Keith’s transition to the creator economy wasn’t a casual career switch. “Jobless during the 2008/09 financial crisis, I resorted to blogging about my travels. By the time I got the first job offer, I was really into travel blogging,” he recalls. “I was already thinking about making a career out of it. The only question was how. How was I going to monetize my blog?”

Hence, Keith started identifying the market gap between tourism boards and content creators and eventually launched his first travel blog venture, Velvet Escape. “Back then, we had to think of things like pricing and ROI,” he explains. “It was all very exciting, and many travel bloggers were trying to figure things out themselves.” 

This recognition of creators as business professionals led Keith to implement rigorous standards that would define iambassador’s approach.

Value Creation Through Professional Partnership

iambassador operates at the intersection of travel brands and content creators, offering three core services: strategic campaign development, creator education initiatives, and white-label content creation.

The company’s impact was first demonstrated through its campaign with the Kingdom of Jordan. “It was very challenging, but that’s what put us on the map,” Keith recalls. “We did such a great job. Everyone had a great time, and the bloggers were paid to go to Jordan to promote all the beautiful sites. It even reached the Queen of Jordan, who thanked us in an Instagram post.”

Building on this early success, iambassador continued to thrive. Over the years, they worked with tourism boards worldwide, from Germany to South Africa and Australia. Some of their proudest moments include: creating blogger houses in Italy and Malta; the #LoveCapeTown campaigns, which later became the city’s tourism brand; winning the World Travel Award 2017 for ‘Europe’s Leading Marketing Campaign’ in partnership with two European destinations, Emilia-Romagna and Costa Brava; winning the same award the following year for the groundbreaking ‘24 Hours in the UK’ campaign with Visit Britain; and promoting sustainable travel in Germany through the ‘EnjoyHiddenGermany’ campaign, a 7-year-long partnership with the German National Tourist Board.

One of their largest campaigns to date was its “Viaggio Italiano” campaign. In fall 2022, the company coordinated 21 travel content creators to document Italy’s lesser-known regions, from the Aosta Valley to Calabria. 

The campaign, part of Italy’s National Promotion Plan 2020, demonstrated iambassador’s ability to manage complex, multi-stakeholder projects involving regional tourism boards, government ministries, and diverse content creators. 

Mergozzo, Italy – from the 2022 “Viaggio Italiano” campaign

Professional Standards and Performance Tracking

Tapping into his banking experience, Keith implemented rigorous professional standards that distinguish iambassador. 

“We had to maintain that reputation,” he emphasizes. “It was very important for us to be very selective about the bloggers we work with when pitching their names to a client because that reflects our work. It just takes one bad apple, and then everything comes falling.”

The company thus built a proprietary database that serves as both a talent management platform and an analytics tool. “The database does our reporting for us as well, and it also does the monitoring,” Keith explains. “For instance, if we agree with the content creator that they have to produce ten Instagram stories or maybe three IG photos, the database will also already tell us whether the content creator has reached the deliverables.”

This systematic approach enables thorough performance tracking, but as these professional standards took hold, iambassador faced an even bigger challenge: adapting to the creator economy’s quick transformation.

Keith Jenkins and business partner Nicholas Montemaggi at the World Travel Awards

Industry Evolution and Innovation

The creator economy’s dynamic nature has brought new challenges and opportunities. “Working with our clients, they sometimes get used to the idea of blogs, but now there’s video, and there’s this, and there’s that, and everyone gets confused,” Keith observes. “That’s another thing that we do – the educational aspect. We try to educate our clients about these changes because we are in touch with the content creator community.”

Recent developments have particularly focused on artificial intelligence. “I think we need to discuss what is accepted and what is not accepted in the industry as well,” Keith notes. “Is it okay to write a blog post of 1,000 words according to your style and then run it through ChatGPT to maximize SEO? Or what if the blogger just writes a paragraph and asks ChatGPT to generate a 1,000-word article? These are the questions we need to address.” 

The emerging challenges have pushed Keith to envision new ways of measuring and demonstrating creator value.

Measuring Impact: The Future of Creator ROI

Keith envisions changing how content impact is measured through what he calls the “reader journey.” This proposed metric would track the entire consumer path from initial content engagement through final travel booking and beyond.

“I would love to know the journey of a reader who sees a photo or a reel or reads a blog post,” he explains. “There’s a reason why you’re reading this blog post: a blog post is usually about a thousand words. If you keep reading it right to the very end, you’re obviously interested; you’re looking for something – inspiration, information. You’re already planning to go to that place, or maybe you’re open-minded and thinking, I’m looking for ideas.”

The concept transcends traditional engagement metrics. “If someone visits Amsterdam after reading a blog post, reading the blog post was the first step in a much broader journey,” Keith elaborates. “They’ll visit restaurants, museums, boat tours, etc. If we can show this entire journey and go back to the client and say, ‘An X amount of income was generated through this blog post in your destination,’ that would be amazing.”

Keith notes that measurement often stops at surface-level metrics like views and engagement, while his idea is to connect content directly to tourism revenue. This vision of impact measurement shapes iambassador’s strategic priorities for the years ahead.

iambassador’s conference in Hamburg, Germany

Strategic Vision for 2025

Looking ahead, iambassador is focusing on several key initiatives. “Our main goals for 2025 are basically to come up with new campaign ideas, something new, something out of the box,” Keith explains. “Another thing that we’re hoping to push more of is the white-labeled content creation. Because I see many of our clients spend sizeable sums on content creation internally or for their marketing, I think we can generate more value for the same budget.”

Keith particularly emphasizes the need for industry dialogue: “Something great that we would love to do this year is to create an event to get both the industry and content creators to sit down together and talk about the challenges they’re facing and come up with ideas or even standards for how we work together going forward.”