Founded in August 2024, Videreo addresses a disconnect in the travel industry that has so far not fully optimized effective collaboration between creators and brands. Unlike fashion, where platforms like LTK have built successful creator-to-consumer sales channels, travel has been slower to develop professional, measurable relationships with content creators.

The company is focused on transforming travel creators’ existing social media videos into AI-powered, searchable stores that match viewers with bookable experiences within minutes, creating an attribution system connecting travel brands to creator-driven sales.

“I’ve been the one on the brand side saying no to creator campaigns for lack of attribution or ROI metrics for that investment. I know what I needed to see,” explains Tony Carne, co-founder of Videreo, who spent 17 years at Intrepid Travel before launching this solution.

Unfortunately, according to Tony, the travel industry’s approach to creators hasn’t really changed. “In social media and video in particular, it’s still just very ad hoc. It’s very bespoke. Every brand goes about it differently. There’s no central place where creators and brands can meet to have a professional relationship with each other,” he notes.

This fragmentation creates frustration for both travel content creators, who struggle to make a full-time living, and travel brands, which are unable to justify increased investment without measurable returns. “Creators have audiences and content, and there’s just not a good way to put those two groups together, even though both have what the other wants,” Tony explains, pinpointing the market gap his platform addresses.

How Videreo Works: Creating Searchable Creator Storefronts

Videreo’s technology, developed with co-founder Adrian Villabruna (a former Amazon machine learning specialist), turns existing creator content into valuable sales channels with minimal effort from creators.

Adrian Villabruna

“What we do at Videreo is we take content creators’ videos—so travel influencers or travel content creators—the videos that they’ve already shot across their career as a creator,” Tony explains. “Your average creator might have 200 videos already published to Instagram or TikTok from their travels across multiple countries. And we take that entire library and use AI to firstly plot those videos onto a map so that the person using Videreo can search for it.”

The process is straightforward: creators connect their social media account (currently Instagram, with TikTok integration paused pending regulatory developments in the U.S.), and within five minutes, Videreo creates a complete storefront.

The AI doesn’t just map content geographically—it analyzes the content within each video to match relevant travel products. “If the video is someone in Paris, we can see the Eiffel Tower in the background, and they’re at a bakery eating a croissant, then our AI will go in and choose a product where there might be a food tour which stops at the best croissant shop in Paris,” says Tony.

This matching creates direct value for all three stakeholders in the ecosystem:

• Travelers can search all of a creator’s content by destination, finding relevant videos and bookable experiences for their upcoming trips.
  
• Creators can place their Videreo storefront link in their bio, providing value to followers while earning commissions on bookings.
  
• Travel Brands receive qualified leads with clear attribution to specific creators.

Why Now: Three Key Factors

Videreo’s timing aligns with three key developments that make its business model viable today when it wasn’t possible before:

1. Social Media’s Role in Travel Planning: “It’s now recognized in travel that 75% of travel journeys start on social media,” Tony notes, pointing to a change in how people discover travel options that makes creator content more valuable.
   
2. AI Technology Capabilities: “Before AI would have been so manual that the unit economics wouldn’t work,” Tony explains. “Whereas now AI can basically watch videos, look at the descriptions in the product content, and match those together really well and instantaneously.”
   
3. Social Commerce Adoption: While newer to travel, social commerce has shown results in other industries. “Fashion has already been doing what we’re doing now with Videreo for five or six years,” Tony points out, referencing LTK’s success in creating over 200 creator millionaires.

The combination of these factors creates what Tony calls “the opportune time to attack this problem,” with Videreo aiming to use changing consumer behavior, technological capabilities, and established business models from adjacent industries.

Solving the ROI Challenge in Creator Marketing

At the core of Videreo’s value proposition is solving the attribution problem that has limited investment in creator marketing. Tony’s own experience running marketing budget meetings at Intrepid’s Urban Adventures illustrates this challenge.

“I would have a marketing meeting every quarter and I’d have two sides of my marketing team come in and pitch for the budget,” he recalls. “One would be the performance marketing team that works with Google and Meta and buys ads. And they have a number. They can come in and say, ‘We have a blended return on ad spend number of 2.3. You give me the $100,000, I’ll give you back $230,000 in sales guarantee.'”

Meanwhile, brand teams working with creators struggled to demonstrate similar ROI: “On the other side, you have the brand team come in and they would say, ‘You know, we have these incredible ideas. We’re going to match our brand up with these incredible people. They’re going to create this awesome content.’ And as the person who has to sign off on the budget, you’re thinking, ‘What about our goals? What about the sales goals that we need to achieve?'”

The result? “80-90% of my budget went to the guys who came in with a number,” Tony admits.

Videreo aims to give brand teams their own number: Return on Influencer Spend (ROIS). When creators drive bookings through their Videreo storefronts, brands can directly attribute those sales to specific creators, justifying further investment in this channel.

Outside direct sales, Videreo also measures and rewards creators for store traffic and click-throughs to travel brands, recognizing the value created at each stage of the funnel.

Building a More Responsible Travel Ecosystem

Drawing on Tony’s background with Intrepid Travel, a pioneer in responsible tourism, Videreo prioritizes partnerships with companies committed to positive community impact.

“The partners that we’ve brought on initially to Videreo are companies that fit within this ethos,” Tony explains. “We work with companies like my old company, Intrepid Travel, G Adventures, Exodus, companies that have a mandate out there already that the way they want to operate is to benefit the communities in which the travel takes place.”

This commitment extends to smaller, local operators as well. “A lot of the efforts in my day-to-day work these days are finding the companies that are native to the destination in which they operate, but are looking to attract a global market to their nascent brand,” he says.

By connecting these responsible operators with creators who share similar values, Videreo aims to create “a world where freelancers, freelance creators are a dominant sales force in a better version of the travel industry.”

Early Validation and Industry Response

While Videreo is still in its early stages, having launched just six months ago, Tony points to examples that validate its potential. One story that inspired Videreo’s creation involves a creator, Sonia Ambika (@solotravelingsonia), who drove more than half a million dollars in sales to hotel brand Arlo with a relatively modest following of around 18,000.

However, this success story also exposed an industry problem: despite generating this large amount of revenue, Sonia was compensated with hotel credits rather than cash commissions. “This is still where the travel industry is at and what they think is still okay. And this is what we’re trying to break,” Tony explains.

As Tony notes, major companies like Expedia are exploring similar concepts with their own invite-only creator storefront program, which he sees as validation for Videreo’s model. Another company, Unravel, has recently raised funding for a concept that utilizes videos to increase travel product sales, further confirming market interest.

Current Traction and Future Plans

Videreo currently works with 220 handpicked creators and has built a database of 350,000 travel products. The company aims to grow to 3,000 creators by the end of the year while adding 200 more responsible travel brands.

The technology is also advancing, with new features being developed. “Right now, we’re actually building out an AI chat functionality that will act as a digital twin for the creator,” Tony shares, explaining how this will help travelers interact with creator content more naturally.

As noted in industry publication Skift’s annual trend report, “influencers are the new power brokers in travel.” Videreo is working to establish itself in this emerging market, with Tony envisioning a future where a “video-first, creator-driven online travel agency can be as big as the current agencies that were built at the start of the Web2 or Internet boom.”

Currently raising a pre-seed funding round, Videreo plans to use the next 12 months to find product-market fit and scale its solution for creators and brands alike.

Creating a Fairer System for Creators

At its core, Videreo aims to professionalize the way travel creators are valued and compensated. “We want to create a world of fairness where reward for your efforts for what you’ve achieved is paid fairly so you can live,” Tony emphasizes.

The platform seeks to shift the perception of creator work from a hobby or passion project to a recognized professional service deserving fair compensation. As Tony points out, “If you didn’t have a content creator to go out and do that for you, how else would you achieve that? You would hire a video production company, you would send them out there, pay for them to go out there, and you would pay them for that work.”

For brands starting to work with creators, Tony offers straightforward advice: “Really understand the value that’s being created and have a mindset that you need to pay for that value if you want to have a long relationship with creators.”

As social media assumes a greater role in travel planning, Videreo is building the infrastructure to connect creators, brands, and travelers in a system that benefits all parties. “It’s not about a bad thing,” Tony concludes. “It’s actually a great thing. There’s an opportunity here for everybody to have better businesses, better lives, and happier customers.”