2026
Why 73% of Travelers Book Based on Creator Recommendations And What Adventure Brands Should Do About It
The majority of your future customers are making decisions based on what creators tell them, and the only question is whether those creators are talking about you or someone else.
Kayla G
Founder of Iguana
Why 73% of Travelers Book Based on Creator Recommendations And What Adventure Brands Should Do About It
There is a number that every adventure brand and outdoor experience business needs to sit with for a moment.
Seventy-three percent.
That is the percentage of travelers who say a creator recommendation has influenced a booking decision, according to Expedia Group's 2025 Traveler Value Index, a survey of over 11,000 respondents across 11 markets. Nearly three in four people who book travel experiences are being influenced by creators before they ever find your website, read your reviews, or open your email campaign.
It is not that creators are a nice marketing channel to consider. It is not that social media is growing in importance and brands should probably pay more attention to it. It is that the majority of your future customers are making decisions based on what creators tell them, right now, today, and the only question is whether those creators are talking about you or about someone else.
This post is about what that number really means, why it is happening, and what adventure brands can actually do about it before the window to move first in their category closes.
Where This Number Comes From and Why It Is Only Going in One Direction
The 73% figure comes from Expedia Group's 2025 Traveler Value Index, one of the most comprehensive annual studies of travel consumer behavior in the world. But the more striking data point in that same report is not the 73%. It is the trajectory behind it.
In 2022, 35% of travelers said they found trip ideas on social platforms. By 2025, that number had risen to 61%. In three years, social discovery nearly doubled. That is not a trend that flattens. That is a structural shift in consumer behavior driven by platform design, generational change, and a fundamental rewiring of how people research and validate decisions before spending money.
The platforms themselves are engineering this outcome. TikTok's algorithm surfaces content based on interest signals, not social connections, which means a freediving video from a creator your future customer has never heard of can reach them at exactly the moment they are thinking about their next trip. Instagram Reels does the same. YouTube's recommendation engine has been doing it for over a decade. The platforms have turned creator content into the most efficient discovery mechanism in the history of travel marketing and most adventure brands are almost entirely absent from it.
This matters especially for the adventure and outdoor category because the purchase decision for an experience is fundamentally different from the purchase decision for a product. When someone is deciding whether to book a surf camp in Costa Rica, a liveaboard dive trip in Belize, or a guided freediving course in the Bahamas, they are not evaluating features and specifications. They are trying to answer one question: what will it actually feel like to be there? And no amount of professional photography, polished website copy, or five-star TripAdvisor reviews answers that question as effectively as watching a real person, someone they already follow and trust, living that exact experience on screen.
Creator content is the closest thing to a trusted friend's recommendation that scales. And at 73%, the data confirms that travelers are treating it exactly that way.
The Trust Gap That Creator Content Closes
To understand why this number is so significant for adventure brands specifically, you have to understand the trust gap that exists between a brand and a potential customer who has never heard of them.
When someone lands on your website for the first time, they are a stranger looking at marketing materials produced by the people trying to sell them something. Every photo is chosen to make the experience look its best. Every testimonial is curated. Every piece of copy is optimized for conversion. The visitor knows this. And that knowledge creates a subconscious skepticism that even the most beautifully designed website cannot fully overcome.
Creator content operates in a completely different trust register. When someone watches a creator they follow spend a day at your resort, struggling through their first freedive attempt, laughing with the instructors, capturing the moment they finally make it to thirty meters, that content carries a completely different emotional weight than anything your marketing team could produce. It is unscripted. It is imperfect. It is real. And because the viewer already has a relationship with that creator built on weeks or months or years of content, they extend that trust to the experience being shown.
This is what researchers call parasocial trust, the psychological bond that forms between an audience and a creator over time. It is not the same as celebrity endorsement, where the audience knows the person is paid to say nice things. Niche creators in the adventure and outdoor space have built their audiences by being genuinely passionate about the activity, sharing honest experiences, and creating content that serves their community first. When that creator shows up at your resort and produces authentic content about their experience, their audience does not see an ad. They see a recommendation from someone they trust.
A peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Communication modeling travel influencers on TikTok found that attitude toward the influencer acts as a mediator that predicts behavioral intention, including trip planning. In plain language, people who trust the creator are more likely to book the trip the creator is talking about. The mechanism is not reach. It is trust at scale.
What 73% Actually Means for Your Booking Numbers
Let me bring this back to the specific commercial reality for adventure brands, because the abstract argument is less useful than the concrete one.
If 73% of travelers are influenced by creator recommendations, and your category is adventure travel and outdoor experiences, a category that Expedia's research shows is disproportionately driven by social discovery, then you are operating in a market where the majority of purchase decisions are being influenced by a channel you are likely not investing in.
That means every month you are not in the creator ecosystem is a month your future customers are being recommended toward someone else. It means every shoulder season gap you are trying to fill with paid ads is competing against organic creator content that your competitors may be generating, content that the algorithm serves for free to audiences who are already interested in exactly what you offer.
The math on creator content is also structurally different from paid advertising. A paid ad runs while you are paying for it and stops the moment you stop. Creator content lives on the platform indefinitely. A short-form video posted by a creator who spent a day at your resort can continue generating views, profile visits, and booking inquiries for months after it was posted, with zero additional spend. The content compounds. The ads do not.
And the conversion quality is different too. Someone who books after seeing a paid ad targeting them with your offer has been pushed toward a decision. Someone who books after watching a creator they trust spend a full day at your property has been pulled toward a decision by something that felt like a recommendation rather than an advertisement. That customer arrives with higher expectations set more accurately, lower likelihood of disappointment, and higher likelihood of generating their own user content, continuing the cycle.
If you run an adventure brand or any outdoor experience business and you want to understand what this looks like specifically for your property and your season, reach out at hello@iguanagrowth.com.