New tour operators sales "tool": Travel Influencers become increasingly important

The Travel Influencer phenomenon plays an increasingly important role in tourism. The term usually describes young people who use social networks for advertise tourist providers.

Its mission is to brand management and the development of new target groups. This happens in the form of blogs, photos or videos. Clients are tour operators, tourist offices, airlines and travel agency organizations.

Trustworthy influencers 

TUI tour operator has 15,000 followers in Instagram as part of the "My TUI" project. Hanoverians have been working together with bloggers and built long-term relationships with Instagramers and YouTubers. DER Touristik is also active and led last year a blogger journey with ten influencers.

Social media experts at TUI are of the view that opinions of peers or of influencers are much more trustworthy than a catalog text or an organizer.

Many travel agencies have yet to grasp this trend to a large extent. That is why Thomas Cook and Touristik Vertriebsgesellschaft (TVG) encourage their travel agents to turn into influencers.

TVG has a "Travel Hot" concept launched on Info Traveling always handled by a media team, different from the traditional advertising content organizer, in order to attract the customer.

Workshops and trainee camps

Also, workshops with filmmakers, actors and Youtube stars are hosted as part of conferences and seminars.

Thomas Cook social media issues are addressed by trainee camps. Since 2014, there is also an online business camp, which will deal exclusively with Facebook, Instagram and Youtube. In addition, Instagram trained travel agents organize photo info trips.

TVG has also been doing this with remarkable success: "We have reached almost 200,000 people through our youth travel blogs and Youtube videos. A public that we had no previous contact with," Managing Director Birgit Aust sums up.

In conclusion, continuous online presence bears fruit with regard to booking numbers and will continue to do so.