Trending Travel turned the standard influencer marketing model upside down by becoming a million-follower platform itself before brokering brand deals. 

The UK-based company now amplifies micro-influencer content to audiences up to a hundred times larger than the creators’ own followings while connecting travel brands to the growing creator middle class.

“We realized very early on that we had to become the influencer ourselves,” explains Keith Herman, CEO of Trending Travel. “Instead of using influencers on their terms, we created a proposition where influencers come to us because they want the product.”

Origins and Industry Gap

In 2019, while running a traditional travel agency, Keith identified a critical gap in travel marketing. “Social media wasn’t being done correctly in travel,” he recalls. “Whether it was an influencer or not, basically social media was failing very badly in the travel industry five, six, seven years ago.”

The potential for change became clear through an unexpected collaboration with YouTube star PewDiePie at Four Seasons in Bali. “His video blog was the highest followed video that day on YouTube worldwide with over 18 million views in one day,” Keith notes. “We hadn’t done anything special – we just literally posted this guy and saw this enormous flood of people that wanted to go to this hotel.”

However, this success also revealed the limitations of one-off influencer partnerships. “The hotel marketing department just goes, ‘they’ve not got 500,000 [followers], I’m not even looking at them,'” Keith explains. “They might be missing a huge trick there, but they haven’t got the time or energy to even reply to them.”

Platform Development Strategy

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated Trending Travel’s transformation from a travel agency to a media platform. “Instead of employing lots of travel staff, We employed influencer marketing experts, content specialists, and social media creative minds,” Keith explains. “We just thought, ‘Well, let’s just drive our followers up; let’s just do whatever we can to go from naught to as many followers as possible.’”

This foundation shaped their transition to a media company model. As Keith describes it: “Keiran Shaw [Trending Travel’s Managing Director] came along and talked to me about our reach and all the leads we’re creating and said you’re actually just a media company where you’re driving sales to other companies and charging them for the media proposition that you are.”

The Trendsetter Platform Mechanics

Trending Travel’s Trendsetter platform specifically serves creators with 10k-150k followers. “What we’re doing is keying into everybody who’s not necessarily a travel blogger,” Keith explains. “Somebody who might be into fashion or into sports or into finance. We appeal to a much wider range of influences than just a travel influencer.”

The platform combines exclusive hotel deals with clear content requirements and revenue-sharing opportunities. “The Trendsetter proposition is an earning platform,” Keith elaborates. “It’s a place where they can come and get great deals, but it’s also where we now use it for influencer marketing. We get approached by a tourist board or a hotel or a tour operator that says, ‘We want to put a package together.'”

Each deal on the platform comes with specific deliverables agreed upon before booking. “They have set deliverables they’re contracted to, and we agree to those before we do the contract with the hotel,” Keith notes. “It might be five stories in a particular time period or one post – whatever the hotel is happy with. Much of this is based on wanting to use that and unique content.”

Virgin Voyages Case Study

The Virgin Voyages campaign exemplifies the platform’s effectiveness at scale. “Virgin Voyages came to us and said, ‘Make us famous,'” Keith reveals. “We got to them with those 900 influencers, created half a billion views on Instagram. The year after, they were pretty much sold out the whole summer and again right now. We know we did a really good job with making them famous, but they had a fair enough budget to do that for us.”

The campaign’s success highlighted an important shift in the industry. “Things have changed. Hotels, tour operators, all these people want sales; they absolutely want sales,” Keith explains. “But they’re also learning that the exposure is really important. That demographic that they’re not getting to, the younger demographic that they’ve struggled to get to for a long time, and that is growing up and will suddenly be their customer in the next two to three years.”

Image credit: @nicolescherzinger
Trending Travel partnered with popstar Nicole Scherzinger in the early years and sent her to several stunning resorts. Her posts were hugely well-received.

Revenue Model and Market Position

Trending Travel has moved beyond traditional travel bookings into an all-around media and marketing platform. “We can work with clients on a consultancy basis, also as a media company selling media, and we work with many of these companies who want influencer marketing with influencers across many different propositions,” Keith explains.

The company uses sophisticated tools to measure campaign effectiveness. “We’ve got software that we use for influencer marketing where we’re taking their handle, putting it in there, and it gives us all the reach and all the following and all the data that we need to feed back to the hotels,” Keith shares. “It’s the widely available but expensive software that we use as a normal influencer marketing company to keep tracking our successes or even failures.”

Their approach particularly resonates with major brands looking to reach new audiences. “One of our biggest clients in the UK is TUI,” Keith notes. “They don’t have a particularly big following on Instagram, but they’re using us to find those clients for them and keep them for them. They’re almost building a platform for themselves for the coming years.”

The company’s revenue streams reflect its evolution from a travel agency to a media platform. “We’re better off turning our business into a media company where we’re driving sales but driving them to other companies and charging them for the media proposition that we are,” Keith says. “Every deal you click on goes off to different tour operators around the UK, a tourist board, or travel-related companies that we drive traffic to. “

European Expansion

Trending Travel’s next growth phase involves a partnership with HolidayPirates, one of Europe’s biggest travel media companies. 

“We want to build up to 5, 6, 10, 20,000 subscribers so that we’re the go-to place for influencer marketing across the UK and Europe,” Keith shares. The expansion builds on their proven ability to serve both major brands and individual creators through their unique platform model.

“Our biggest challenge is to get people to understand that this is a long-term proposition,” Keith concludes. “You’ve got to do lots of other stuff around it in terms of Meta ads and boosting, using companies like ours effectively. Don’t just expect to post an influencer along with your brand – that’s not enough anymore.”