Travel Brands Can Win the Inspiration Window with Premium Content

Most travel advertising is built around someone who already knows they want to go somewhere. The keyword is purchased, the booking funnel begins. That’s a reasonable place to put your ad spend. It’s just not the only place — and may not be the most important one, given that this is a category where the purchase decision often takes shape well before anyone begins comparing flight prices.

Think about the last trip you took. Did you decide on your destination because of meticulous research, or was it because something sparked the desire to go there? Maybe you were binge-watching a reality show about a yacht threading through the Amalfi Coast, and forty minutes later it was on your list of dream destinations. Perhaps you were watching a show set in Fiji with friends, and by the time the credits rolled, you’d all independently decided on where your next group trip will be. Those moments don’t register in a performance report or show up in attribution, but they’re crucial to the purchasing journey for this industry, because they turn a place seen on screen into a destination someone needs to see to believe.

That’s the inspiration window. Travel brands who show up in the premium content that sparks this kind of wanderlust can put themselves into the early consideration set, so that once inspiration turns into action, their names are the ones customers remember.

The Behavior

The right question for travel advertisers isn’t only “who is in market right now?” It’s also “who is in the inspiration window that puts them in market three months from now?” One of the more reliable ways to reach those viewers is through premium content that features the experiences they want for themselves.

The data on this is clear. According to Expedia’s 2024 Unpack report, drawn from a survey of 20,000 travelers, more than half say they’ve researched or booked a trip to a destination after seeing it on a TV show or movie, and one in four say TV shows and films are now more influential on their travel decisions than they were before. Expedia found that TV shows outrank Instagram, TikTok, and podcasts as sources of travel inspiration. It’s a trend the industry has named “set-jetting,” and it’s been growing year over year.

What that means for advertisers is that a viewer spending hours with shows set in foreign countries, aboard luxury vessels, or inside cultures different from their own is already in a travel-forward headspace. Research from Amazon Ads and Kantar found that prospective travelers watching Prime Video are 22% more likely to engage with content about a desired destination six months before a trip, a meaningful signal that the inspiration phase opens a long window of receptivity well before any booking intent registers in search data.

Premium content also carries strong co-viewing dynamics, which matters for a specific reason tied to how travel decisions actually get made. According to a report on CTV co-viewing from MNTN Research, HBO Max (home to travel-related programming like 90 Day Fiancé and Diners, Drive-ins and Dives) ranks among the platforms with the highest co-viewing rates, and Nielsen data finds that Americans watch TV with at least one other person 47% of the time. Most trips get planned with someone else, and the content generating destination inspiration tends to be watched with the same people who will eventually share the trip. When a couple or friend group is watching together and someone points at the screen and says “we have to go there,” the impression doesn’t land on one viewer — it lands on two or four, all in the same aspirational moment.

Travel-forward content spans a variety of TV genres, and the three types below are built for both dynamics: the individual inspiration phase and the shared decision moment.

Relationship Reality

What it is: Shows like 90 Day Fiancé and Love Island, where viewers watch relationships take shape against international settings and dream-destination backdrops.

The viewer posture: This audience spends hours immersed in international settings, sometimes long enough to imagine what it’s actually like to live there, other times just long enough to fall for the backdrop itself. Whether it’s a courtship playing out in a specific city or a villa romance set against a coastline built for aspiration, this kind of programming builds genuine familiarity with a place over a season. By the finale, viewers have watched someone weigh a life in a specific country or fall for someone in a location engineered for desire — the kind of destination familiarity that could take a travel brand months of paid media to build on its own.

Why it works for travel: This audience is globally curious by definition, and that curiosity doesn’t stop when the credits roll. Travel brands reaching them are showing up in a context where destinations, whether a country abroad or a villa built for romance, are already charged with emotion and possibility. For international hotel groups and destination-focused tour operators, this is an audience already doing the mental work of imagining themselves somewhere else.

Travel Reality

What it is: Shows like Below Deck and Summer House, where the destination is as much a character as the cast.

The viewer posture: In travel programming, the setting tends to do as much work as what happens there. A yacht threads through the Mediterranean; a group of friends piles into a shared house every weekend, both of which feature locations that shape the drama, the excursions, and the aspirational texture of the season. Viewers absorb these places over time, developing familiarity with a destination: what it looks like, what it costs, what kind of person goes there. Eventually the location itself becomes an object of desire, from a coastline halfway around the world to a getaway a few hours from home.

Why it works for travel: Luxury travel brands and cruise lines have an obvious home in the international side of this genre, but domestic hospitality and short-haul travel brands have just as strong a case with content closer to home. This audience skews toward experiential spending over transactional travel: the trip that becomes a story carries more appeal than the optimized itinerary. Premium travel accessories and financial products tied to big-ticket purchases both have a natural entry point in a viewing environment built around aspiration and escape. And because much of this content is watched in groups, a single placement has the potential to reach multiple viewers in the same aspirational moment.

Food Shows

What it is: Shows like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and No Reservations, where hosts travel from city to city, or country to country, chasing the food locals swear by.

The viewer posture: Eating your way through a place has become its own reason to travel, and this is where that appetite gets built. A diner in a small American town, a night market on the other side of the world — these hosts travel with genuine excitement for where they are, turning every stop into a reason to go find it yourself. That appetite shows up in the data on both ends: a BookRetreats analysis of Skyscanner data found that nearly half of US travelers in 2024 picked their destinations specifically to dine at a particular restaurant, and in 2026, 31% of travelers reported plans to explore regional grocery stores and markets abroad, the same instinct that sends viewers wandering through a street food stall on the other side of the world. Viewers come away with opinions about specific cities and regional food cultures, making them an engaged audience for both domestic travel brands and international tourism boards.

Why it works for travel: Domestic and international travel advertisers alike sometimes overlook food-forward content because it doesn’t carry the visual shorthand of travel programming: no sweeping drone shots, no destination title cards. But the viewer posture is essentially that of someone flipping through a travel magazine, absorbing places and developing opinions about where to go next. Airlines, tourism boards, and hospitality brands all have a strong case for showing up in content that’s actively building desire for the places it covers, from the next continent to the next state over.

The Play

Travel advertisers with campaign windows tied to peak booking seasons (January through March for summer travel, September for holiday planning) should treat the months before those windows as high-value placement time. The inspiration phase precedes the booking window, often by weeks or months. The same content-inspired travelers who engage early with destination content are the ones more likely to book ahead of schedule, as the Amazon Ads and Kantar data above shows. Those are people in the consideration phase, already developing the familiarity that will determine which brands they remember when they’re ready to book.

That familiarity is what premium content on Performance TV generates. It builds the emotional association and brand recognition with travelers that makes an impression more likely to convert once intent turns into action.