Q: I know that many hotel collabs are unpaid and instead, the hotel just comps the creator. But what are the travel projects that actually pay cash?
A: Being paid to travel can and does happen, but as you point out, many types of travel projects just don't have budgets. So which are the ones that do? Here's a breakdown of what types of projects do and don't pay with destination marketing organizations, hotels and resorts, and airlines and cruise lines.
1. Destination Marketing Organizations (DMO’s)
This is probably the biggest category of paid travel. DMO is an umbrella term that refers to all the organizations that are in charge of driving travel to a specific destination. If it’s for a country or a state, it’s often called a tourism board or a tourism authority. If it’s for a particular city or town here in the United States, it might be called a CVB, or Convention and Visitors Bureau.
I’ll use the term tourism board to refer to all of these from here on out, just for the sake of simplicity.
Tourism boards will often invite travel creators to come experience their destination. They’ll put together a whole itinerary that highlights different attractions and experiences, and the tourism board will make all of the arrangements. All the expenses will be covered by the tourism board, and on top of that, they’ll also pay the creator a fee in exchange for the creator publishing a specific set of content deliverables on their social media platforms. The tourism board will usually also include usage rights to some or all of the content for a certain period of time.
All that said, while many tourism boards do have a budget to pay creators, many of them do not. Some tourism boards will only cover the costs associated with hosting the trip, but they won’t actually pay a fee.
And some tourism boards may only cover part of the expenses. For example, some may expect a creator to cover their own airfare to get to the destination, but once they’re there, the tourism board will cover everything else. Or sometimes, they’ll only cover costs for the main creator, but not for their photographer, significant other, or family members.
And sometimes, tourism boards will allocate their paid budget for more prominent creators with larger audiences. When it comes to working with creators with smaller audiences, they won’t pay anything. It really just depends on the internal dynamics of that particular tourism board.
2. Hotels and Resorts
A lot of hotel projects just don’t pay. If it’s a standard partnership or collaboration where the hotel is comping the creator for a certain number of nights and in exchange, that creator publishes a specific set of content deliverables, that’s called a hosted stay and it often doesn’t pay. It’s just done on a trade or barter basis.
Now, our family has done many paid projects with hotels over the years, but these are usually not just your standard collaborations. There’s almost always more involved, which is why there’s a budget associated with them.
Here are a few examples of what might be expected if a hotel pays for a creator’s services:
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Extensive Usage Rights: If a hotel is looking to have very extensive usage rights of your images, that would involve a budget. For unpaid projects, we’ll typically allow the hotel to repost our photos on their organic social media channels for up to six months, but if they want to use the images for anything else, like to run ads, put on a billboard or publish in their marketing materials, they’ll pay for those usage rights.
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Corporate-Level Campaigns: We’ve also done many projects where there’s a budget because the parent company is doing a big marketing push across all their brands. For example, let’s say Marriott is doing a big sale across all of its hotel brands. They might run an influencer campaign where they hire creators to stay at each of their hotel brands, create content there, and all the posts are pushing this big, annual sale. Since it’s a corporate-level marketing push, it would have a budget.
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Production Projects: We’ve also done many paid projects where we’re the "talent." So let’s say a hotel needs to shoot some new photos or videos for marketing purposes. Instead of hiring traditional models, sometimes hotels will hire creators instead. The creator doesn’t have to actually create the content, because the hotel would hire their own photographer and/or videographer to capture it. The creator is literally being paid just to be in the images. Sometimes these projects will also mix in some content creation or posting on the creator’s own channels, but it’s mainly the on-camera talent portion that makes it a paid project.
4. Airlines, Cruise Lines, & Other Travel Brands
When it comes to these, it’s very similar to how it works with hotels and resorts. There are a lot of unpaid opportunities, where your travel is comped and there are some paid projects, but those tend to involve very specific initiatives that have a budget.
So as you can see, it’s definitely possible to get paid to travel, but expect to put in at least a couple of years of work before you start seeing some of those paid opportunities. The reality is that a lot of work in the travel industry still happens on an unpaid or barter basis, so be aware of that.
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Take care,
Carmen Sognonvi
