A: I think the next few years will be a period of great change in travel content. I certainly don't claim to have a crystal ball, but here are some of the changes I predict we'll begin to see:

We've been making travel content since 2017 and across the industry, much of the travel content produced during that time has been fairly shallow: 500-word articles with titles like "5 Fun Things to Do in ____," pretty Instagram photo posts with generic inspirational quotes, 15-second aesthetic videos of someone waking up to a beautiful view. I would know, because I've made exactly this kind of content over and over again myself!

As the travel content industry reaches a more mature phase of its existence, I think consumers are going to gravitate towards content that goes beyond the surface-level of travel, delves a little deeper into the people and culture of a place, and uses more sophisticated story-telling formats than the typical travel vlog, which tends towards "first we did this, then we did this, and after that we did this."

A couple great examples that I've seen this year are Kara and Nate's profile of Elsie, the sole resident of America's smallest town, and Drew Binsky's video on hyperinflation in Venezuela.

It's not that deeper travel content has never existed before. OG travel bloggers from the late 2000s and early 2010s certainly specialized in longer-form, more detailed content. But much of that style of content fell out of favor over the last few years as Instagram became dominant.

I think we'll see a return to deeper, longer-form content, but it will be dominated by video, not by blog posts.

One of the biggest cultural shifts we've seen in the last couple years is the rising influence of Gen Z and how their outlook and preferences are so vastly different than those of millennials. (It goes far beyond center parts, straight-leg jeans and wired earbuds!)

When it comes to content, Gen Z consumers care less about aesthetics and production quality, and more about the underlying quality of the information, the emotional tenor, and the opportunity for human connection. ⁠And that's going to change what travel content looks like as well.

In the past few years, the millennial aesthetic of curated gloss and perfection has been dominant in travel content: women in wide-brim hats facing a beautiful view, travelers in artfully scrunched wool socks looking out the back of a van at a crystal-clear lake, and of course, women wearing literal ballgowns in wildly inappropriate environments.

But consumers are getting tired of the same-old, same-old. Especially after living through a global pandemic where many of us were faced with stark life-or-death realities, there's a lower tolerance level for anything that seems overly staged or fussy. It's one of the reasons Instagram has been on the decline (despite the momentary resuscitation we're seeing with Reels), while TikTok has been on the rise.

Travel is a visual industry, so aesthetics will always matter. But if you have nothing to say beyond a pretty photo or video, your audience will be notice, and their attention will turn elsewhere. Creators who are able to match the quality of their visuals with depth of information, engaging storytelling and emotional resonance, are the ones who will rise to the top.

Up until recently, family travel creators could post just about any type of content and not worry about algorithms suppressing their posts, or catching criticism from the public. But today, the climate is very different.

After seeing the regulatory pressures that came down on YouTube after the Elsagate fiasco, TikTok has decided to be extremely cautious about content that features kids. Officially, kids are not supposed to appear in any TikTok content whatsoever. Unofficially, it's okay as long as an adult is in frame at all times.

In practice however, TikTok is extremely uneven in how it enforces these policies. Some family creators post videos with nothing but their kids and have no issues, while others (like us) get dinged even when an adult is in the content too. Family creators routinely have content shadowbanned (no FYP views from non-followers) or worse, have content taken down for "minor safety" policy violations, even when there is absolutely nothing inappropriate happening in the video.

To be clear: I think it's a good thing that platforms are taking steps to ensure minor safety. I'd just like to see the policies applied more consistently so that everyone has to play by the same rules.

But it's not just algorithmic changes that family travel creators need to be aware of. In the social media landscape at large, there's a growing backlash against parents who are perceived to be exploiting their children online for their own monetary gain, especially after the scandals surrounding family vloggers like Myka Stauffer and Jordan Cheyenne.

Commentary YouTubers like Smokey Glow and The Dad Challenge Podcast have been very outspoken against family vlogging as a format. And Gen Z viewers, who are hyper-aware of issues around consent, are openly questioning whether it's even possible for children to consent to being in social media content without an awareness or understanding of what the long-term ramifications will be to their lives.

If you're in the family travel space, you need to adapt to these new realities, and be thoughtful when it comes to the content you create. Make sure you're bringing some depth and substance beyond just cute kid videos and photos. There will be less tolerance towards family content that feels like kids are being made to perform for the camera, as well as content that's overly clickbaity or staged. If your content primarily relies on how cute your kids are, you're likely to run into problems down the road.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed that social media platforms have all been pushing short-form video. Earlier this year, the head of Instagram literally declared that Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app.

If you follow my Instagram stories, you'll already know that I am skeptical of Instagram and YouTube's ability to compete with TikTok's dominance in short-form video. But also, that I find the abandonment of still photography extremely short-sighted.

I recently shared a series of photos from our safari in Kenya, and the response from my audience was amazing. To me, it really underscored the fact that people still love photos. There's something incredibly powerful about a still image that captures a single moment in time - especially when it comes to travel.

So my final and boldest prediction is this:

Instagram's abandonment of photography and photographers has left a giant vacuum, and I believe a better social media platform will swoop in and dominate the field of static images.

So moving forward, people will go to YouTube for long-form video, to TikTok for short-form video, and to this new platform for still photos.

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Take care,

Carmen Sognonvi