Skift Creator Summit: Five Decisions in the Room

Presented by Meta North Javits Center, NYC · Sept 22, 2026 Skift Creator Summit 2026 · Pre-Read Creators are here to stay. Brands have to decide what to build around them. Creators now run production studios that drive brand storytelling, customer acquisition, booking behavior, and loyalty. The travel industry knows creators matter. The question is: how should brands build a system around them? Each session at Skift Creator Summit is built around a consequential decision that top travel leaders are currently facing. Yet, similar tensions will lead to different decisions. CMOs, heads of brand and performance, creator-economy operators, and platform executives with budget authority and accountability for outcomes may answer questions in ways that contradict each other. The purpose of the Summit environment is to surface this friction and challenge preconceived assumptions. “Creators are becoming a genuine distribution channel that doesn’t run through Google or emerging AI intermediaries.” — Rafat Ali, CEO & Founder, Skift Skift Creator Summit: North Javits Center, NYC, September 22 Attendance is by application and limited to 50–75 seats, reviewed for role and fit. Apply to attend The agenda The Five Decisions Decision 01Reach vs. Depth: How Do You Match Brand, Platform, and Creators at Scale?→ Decision 02Brand vs. Performance: How Do You Define and Measure a Creator Program?→ Decision 03Trust and Scale: How Much Story Control Should Brands Hand to Creators?→ Decision 04Own vs. Rent: Build a Network, Partner Through an Agency, or Stay Platform-Dependent?→ Decision 05Content vs. Conversion: Which Creators Are Actually Closing Trips?→ Reach vs. Depth: How Do You Match Brand, Platform, and Creators at Scale? Brands are moving away from reach for its own sake toward creators who convert, regardless of audience size. [3] The harder part is matching the right creator to the right brand and audience at the speed social demands, across platforms whose algorithms and commerce features change quarter to quarter. Discovery now starts in the social feed for 36% of travelers. [1] A reach strategy can fill the top of the funnel fast, but also dilute trust. A depth strategy compounds credibility slowly and resists scale. Solving this problem with repeatability separates a campaign from an operating system. Only 8% of brands rank follower count as the top factor in choosing a creator [2], and creators with under 20,000 followers take nearly half of U.S. influencer spend, up from under 20% in 2021. [3] The Decisions Being Made Right Now What are the best approaches for matching brand, platform, and creator at scale? How are our strategies evolving social overlaps with AI and commerce? Where does reach still earn its budget alongside building for depth and community? What to Discuss in the Room Virgin Voyages’ Nathan Rosenberg perspective on how a cruise brand finds, matches, and scales creator partnerships across platforms. Where IHG’s Connor Smith thinks a global hotel company should strike a balance between reach and depth. Brand vs. Performance: How Do You Define and Measure a Creator Program? Creator work now spans three functions: production, reach, and commerce. Most brands include each in a different budget, if they count it at all. Without cross-channel measurement that ties brand and performance marketing together, creator programs remain easy to fund as experiments but hard to defend as line items. The programs that survive budget scrutiny in 2027 will be able to define success across each of these functions, giving them license to scale. Travel companies need to understand the value of the whole creator program across branding and performance. Social media drives more than $100 billion in travel demand, but tracking the ROI to credit creators with that demand isn’t always clear. [4] The measurement gap explains why most creator budgets are still in the “experimental” column. The Decisions Being Made Right Now How are travel brands defining their programs and tracking metrics as they experiment with creators? What measurement framework can we build that captures brand lift and conversion in one view? Which metrics justify scaling a program past the experiment phase, and how are brands following through on creator partnerships that work? What to Discuss in the Room How Expedia’s Mallory Kuenzi sets clear objectives and tracks performance metrics across the different brands she oversees. How Matador Network’s Ross Borden sees brands across travel measuring the impact of their creator campaigns, and also what he feels they are getting wrong. How Meta’s Sanjay Bhatia says brands can actually prove a creator program is working, and what it takes to attribute a booking back to a specific piece of content. Trust and Scale: How Much Story Control Should Brands Hand to Creators? Creator trust isn’t free, and it doesn’t belong to the brand. It’s built over years by a creator making independent, credible calls about what to say and show — the same asset a brand is paying to borrow. The tension is structural: a brand needs a creator to deliver a specific message, but the creator’s content only works because the message doesn’t sound like the brand wrote it. Briefs that build in more approvals, more brand talking points, and more control levers dilute the authenticity brands are paying for. Creators working across several brand relationships at once are feeling this squeeze, and they have to decide how much of each brand’s story they can take on without diluting their own. Creators now rank as consumers’ single most-trusted content source, ahead of social ads and celebrities. [5] The Decisions Being Made Right Now How much narrative and creative control are we willing to give up to keep a creator’s credibility intact? What does a genuinely trusted creator relationship look like, versus one that’s just rented for a campaign? Where does a creator’s own voice end and the brand’s message begin, and who decides? What to Discuss in the Room How Oneika Raymond, working across multiple brand ambassadorships including Expedia and Marriott Bonvoy, protects her own credibility with her audience while still delivering what each brand needs from her. How Matador Network’s Ross Borden drives brand-creator storytelling and distribution that strikes the right tone and tells stories that consumers want to watch. Own vs. Rent: Build a Network, Partner Through an Agency, or Stay Platform-Dependent? A one-off sponsored post buys a week of reach. An ongoing, collaborative relationship, where a creator understands the brand well enough to keep showing up for it, compounds trust, lowers the cost of each new asset, and turns a vendor into a partner. Travel industry partnerships currently span a wide array of experiments: Some brands are still doing one-off deals and testing the waters. If these strike gold, they may not know how to repeat that success. Other brands are building broader creator relationships and even academies, generating longer-term relationships that foster real community around the brand. 57% of younger travelers name social media as a top planning source. [1] The question is which parts of the creator engine to own, which to partner on, and which space to “rent.” The Decisions Being Made Right Now When should brands build a proprietary creator network, work through an agency-publisher hybrid, or run ambassadors in-house? Which parts of the creator relationship and data do travel brands need to own outright? How do brands learn from their failures, and what is the right approach to follow through and build a deeper relationship when a campaign is successful? What to Discuss in the Room Where Fora’s Evan Frank sees advisors owning the entire booking funnel, not just the content, inside Fora’s own platform. How CrowdRiff’s Dan Holowack describes which parts of an always-on creator operation brands need to own, and where shared infrastructure can make scale possible. Content vs. Conversion: Which Creators Are Actually Closing Trips? A creator can take a traveler from points A to Z across the customer journey without touching a brand’s platform. Low-consideration trips — a weekend flight, a festival add-on — can close inside a single video. High-consideration trips can use content that holds a traveler’s attention across weeks of planning and comparison. These two approaches work hand in hand, but the investment in each is very different. Brands need to focus on the last mile, otherwise they’ll yield revenue to whoever owns the last click. The challenge is identifying which creators close trips, measuring the close, and paying for it. near zero compared to the opportunity, according to Skift Research. [4] This massive gap between social-inspired demand and social bookings is the space where influence can become revenue. The Decisions Being Made Right Now Where does influence end and the transaction begin in our funnel? Past reach, relevance, and resonance, what does it actually take to prove revenue? Which metric actually proves a creator closed a trip, versus just influenced one? What to Discuss in the Room How Virgin Voyages’ Nathan Rosenberg shapes content and creators that truly showcase the experience of what it’s like to be on a cruise, inspiring travelers to book. How Expedia’s Mallory Kuenzi uses the revenue leg of the 4Rs framework, tracked through affiliate links and promo codes, to prove a creator’s booking impact. What You Will Leave With The creator economy is now core marketing infrastructure, but it remains unproven at scale. The next few years are a pivotal moment for brand and consumer trust. Most companies are still funding creator work as a series of campaigns. The ones building systems around it are making different calls on matching, measurement, trust, ownership, and commerce. By the end of this summit, you should understand where creator partnerships drive durable value for your business and where they do not. You came in knowing creators move travelers. Leave knowing which decision to make first. Apply to attend Sources [1]Skift Research, “Global Traveler Mindset and Trends 2026”: research.skift.com/reports/global-traveler-mindset-and-trends-2026/ [2]CreatorIQ, “The State of Creator Marketing”: creatoriq.com/hubfs/…/CreatorIQ-StateofCreatorMarketing2025-2026.pdf [3]eMarketer, cited by Skift, “Travel’s Creator Economy Doesn’t Need a Million Followers. It Needs Proof It Converts.”: skift.com/2026/07/16/small-content-creators-marketing-spend-travel/ [4]Skift Research, “Social Commerce in Travel: Opportunities and Consumer Trends”: research.skift.com/reports/social-commerce-in-travel-opportunities-and-consumer-trends/ [5]Medill Spiegel Research Center, “Creator Marketing 2026: New Research” https://spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu/creator-marketing-2026/