Creating Content for Travel Management Platforms

3 things I’ve learned running a platform about deep travel Publishing One Planet Journey has been a front-row seat to how the travel industry is shifting, and what travellers actually care about. Here are 3 big takeaways I want to share with anyone wanting to understand and reach experience-driven travellers: 1. Emotion > Itinerary People don’t remember schedules, they remember how a place made them feel. The most loved articles in our magazine aren’t the “top 10 things to do” lists. They’re the ones where the writer disappears into the story, where the reader feels like they are walking right beside the author. 🧭 Tip: Don’t sell activities. Sell transformation. 2. Your audience is more discerning than you think Today’s traveller is well-informed, sustainability-aware, and hungry for authenticity. They can smell fluff, greenwashing or generic writing a mile away. 🧭 Tip: Ditch the travel clichés. Speak like a person, not a brochure. 3. Distribution is everything A brilliant story with no visibility does nothing. We’ve seen how partnerships, SEO, and being tapped into the right communities can elevate powerful stories and get them in front of decision-makers and travellers who care. 🧭 Tip: Great content is only step one. Partnering with the right community is just as strategic as solid SEO. If you work in travel and want to create real engagement this is where it starts. 👇 What would you add to the list? #Deeptravel #Travelmarketing #Contentstrategy #Travel #TravelMedia

Your stunning destination video means nothing if AI can't understand it. Here's what most travel brands are missing: AI search isn't just reading text anymore. It's natively multimodal - pulling from video, audio, images, and their transcripts simultaneously. The Multimodal Reality When someone asks AI "What's it like to experience the Northern Lights in Iceland," the system isn't just scanning blog posts. It's analyzing your destination videos, processing audio from your guides, and understanding the emotions in your imagery. Think in Content Clusters Stop creating isolated pieces. Your content strategy needs clusters: that epic drone footage, the audio narration explaining the phenomenon, the guide's transcript, and the written description - all working together to paint the complete picture. The Citation Problem Here's the kicker: Google might reconstruct your beautiful content without citing you if it's not in the format they prefer. Your 4K Northern Lights video could become someone else's AI answer if you don't have the supporting multimodal elements. The Fix Every piece of visual content needs machine-readable companions. Transcripts for videos. Alt text that tells stories. Audio descriptions that capture the experience. Structured data that connects it all. Travel is inherently experiential. Your content strategy should be too. #travelmarketing #multimodal #AIcontent #videomarketing #digitalmarketing

If I were a tour operator… I wouldn’t be creating pages like: “African Safari” or “Solo Safari”. I’d be creating experience-led pages instead. Pages like: 👉 African safari for a first-time solo traveller to Africa 👉 Luxury safari for empty nesters celebrating an anniversary 👉 Family safari for parents travelling with teenagers Why? Because that’s how people actually search now. Search behaviour has become far more specific, driven by intent, experience level, fears, and motivations, not just destinations. There’s a real opportunity to create hyper-personalised content that: ✅ Answers unspoken questions ✅ Reduces uncertainty ✅ Builds trust before the enquiry form is even touched The strategy - If you’re a family travel specialist, don’t try to create content for every traveller type. Go deep on family variations instead: 👉 Families travelling with teenagers 👉 Multi-generation trips with elderly grandparents 👉 Single parents travelling with children 👉 Families travelling with children with special needs That’s where relevance lives. Yes, you could try to cover everything, but that’s when content becomes thin and unfocused. If you know your niche (family, luxury, educational, first-time travellers), you can go much more granular and attract the right enquiries. Not more pages. Better pages. Built around real people, not just keywords. If someone searched for their exact travel scenario, would your website have a page for it? #travelseo #touroperator

Different Luxury Travelers, Different Platforms. If you want to attract diverse profiles of luxury tourists, you need to be present — intentionally — across multiple platforms: ** Instagram: For the aspirational traveler. Visual, emotional, lifestyle-driven. This is where you sell desire, atmosphere, and identity. ** TikTok For the curious, experience-hungry luxury traveler. Here, authenticity, behind-the-scenes moments, and storytelling outperform perfection. ** LinkedIn For executives, HNWI, decision-makers, and investors. This is where you communicate values, vision, leadership, sustainability, and long-term impact. ** Pinterest For planners and dreamers. Moodboards, weddings, honeymoons, slow luxury, and future travel inspiration live here. **Newsletters & long-form content For loyalty, depth, and trust. This is where your brand voice becomes a relationship — not just a showcase. Stop Showing. Start Speaking. Luxury today is not about showing what you have. It’s about communicating: • Who you are • Who you’re for • What kind of journey you’re inviting them into People don’t remember features. They remember how a place made them feel before they even arrived. If your content doesn’t answer: 👉 “This place understands me” 👉 “This is where I belong” 👉 “This experience was designed for someone like me” …then you’re invisible, no matter how beautiful your property is. Luxury brands don’t compete on amenities anymore. They compete on emotion, narrative, and connection. So ask yourself: Are you just present on social media — or are you truly speaking to your future guests? Which luxury traveler are you really trying to attract… and where are you talking to them?

And I’ve said it before, but we’re ending the year, so let’s run it back one more time. Travel advisors, stop mimicking content creators. They get paid to build an audience. You get paid to deliver a transformation. Their goal is engagement. Your goal is conversion. You’re not trying to go viral. You’re trying to get booked. Content creators get paid when the views roll in. You get paid when the right client says yes. Two completely different games. Two completely different outcomes. So if your content strategy looks like a TikTok influencer’s feed, posting trending sounds, travel inspo, or random destination tips, you’re missing the point. That type of content builds awareness, not authority. Here’s what works for us: ***Create content that builds trust, not likes. ***Talk about what it’s like to work with you, not just where you’ve been. ***Address your client’s beliefs, fears, and objections before the discovery call even happens. Because the sales conversation doesn’t start on the call. It starts the moment someone consumes your content. They’re already deciding if you get them. If you can solve their problem. If they trust you enough to handle their once-in-a-lifetime trip. So stop chasing the algorithm. Start building alignment. Your content isn’t supposed to entertain. It’s supposed to educate, shift perspective, and pre-sell. By the time they get on a call with you, they should already feel like a client. That’s the power of strategic content. Stop creating for attention. Start creating for conversion. ******* Hi, I’m Courtnie. I help you elevate your journey whether in life, business, or travel. As the founder of The Biz Huddle, I help experienced travel advisors build profitable and sustainable businesses with strategies, systems, and content that actually sell.

"We don't have a good story to tell." I don't know where travel brands get this idea. Maybe it's a limiting belief. If you know where to look... there is ALWAYS a great story to uncover. You have booking data that shows where people are traveling this year and why. You have customer reviews where people write paragraphs about the best weekend of their life. You have internal trend reports that never made it past a team Slack channel. That's editorial content waiting to happen. When I work with travel and lifestyle brands, one thing I hear over and over is: "Sure, we have data...but we don't really do anything with it." A booking platform sitting on data about the most popular bachelorette party destinations in the country? That's a story that 200+ newsrooms will run. A tourism board with visitor data showing a 40% spike in off-season travel to their region? That's a trend piece editors are hungry for. The content just needs to be sifted through and molded: - Reframed from internal report to editorial narrative - Written to the standards that newsroom editors expect - Distributed through a wire that gets it in front of the right publishers That's the part most brands don't have in-house. The editorial translation layer (someone who knows how to turn what you already know into something a newsroom will actually publish). If you've got data collecting dust in a dashboard or a 2023 blog post that got only a couple hundred views... You can turn that data into stories and content worthy of syndication.