How to Pull Off an Influencer Trip in 2026

Gone are the days of the over-the-top influencer trip.

Well, kind of. The influencer trip is not dead. This year, brands have shuttled creators to all corners of the world for short stints of content generation, from Mango in Greece and J. Crew tucked away in the Adirondacks, to Tresemmé in Morocco or Paris and Rhode in none other than Rhode Island (the first stop on the brand’s summer tour). Gucci hosted a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it three-person trip to Monaco, while Net-a-Porter teamed up with brands like Khaite and Chloé for European sojourns.

These trips were once structured primarily around big-name, big-reach talent, and often generated as much backlash as they did positive discourse – most recently seen last week, when ChatGPT parent OpenAI hosted its first-ever brand trip and immediately became a lightning rod for criticism for the internet, which shamed the attending creators for aligning with the tech company. For fashion brands in 2026, the trip logic has shifted. These days, more brands are hosting smaller, better curated trips with talent they believe will not just increase their reach, but their cultural clout, too. Scale is no longer the top priority; instead, influencer trips are now designed with a more specific, sticky audience in mind. (There are exceptions, of course, like Alo’s superyacht summer in France.)

Anastasia Karanikolaou (left), Alix Earle (middle), and Jake Shane (right) onboard the Alo yacht.

It’s a reflection of a shifting measure of ROI for influencer and creator trips, experts agree. “The ROI [return on investment] of a brand trip is measured in long-tail advocacy and content efficiency,” says Emily Brown, associate director of strategy at influencer agency Billion Dollar Boy. These days, brands want content that will outlast the trip, and drive brand engagement beyond the creator’s own content.

“Attention and awareness are the main goals,” says Max Stein, owner of Brigade Talent agency. “We still do work with a lot of brands that think sales, conversion, that sort of thing is important. But if someone thinks that an ROI being ‘X’ amount of sales is the most important thing, the trip isn’t necessarily the most effective way to achieve that.” Instead, it’s about building out a brand world, and inviting customers into that world with content that feels less product focused and more experiential. “Doing it that way is a bit of a trend where it’s less ‘brand’ everywhere you look,” Stein adds.

In 2026, brands are rethinking what a trip looks like. Traditionally, these trips have been scheduled down to the minute, with activities, meals and, of course, ample content opportunities filling the days, and little free time to be had. The content ops remain, but this year, the most successful trips include looser itineraries, leaving attendees to their own devices. In keeping with these more relaxed trip parameters, brands are also rethinking how they measure performance, rethinking trips as long-game plays, designed to stick in customers’ brains, rather than simply get in front of as many people as possible. When creators are given more free rein with a brand they have a relationship with, they’re more likely to organically over-deliver, Brown says.

“It feels like there’s this trend where it is a brand trip, but it isn’t so planned,” Stein says. His client, Courtney Grow, went on two trips in quick succession with Reformation and Marine Layer, both of which were produced and paid for by the brands, but weren’t overprescribed. J.Crew CMO Julia Collier takes a similar approach: short, manageable trips that aren’t back to back with programming and tasks. “We keep them short, people don’t get sick of each other, they leave feeling kind of sad that it’s over,” she says. “They’re not looking to leave and be like, ‘Oh god, this was so much work.’”

For Mango, which hosted a group in Athens and Hydra earlier this month, the primary KPI was earned media value (EMV), which measures the overall impact generated across social media, online, and print. ‘Media value’ is becoming a prominent way to calculate the return on influencer trips, Stein says, noting that there are different ways of measuring this (Lefty, for instance, uses EMV, while Launchmetrics uses MIV, or media impact value). “If you can put together a good trip and get a bunch of people, and it’s shared widely and people are reposting it, engaging with it, or writing stories about it, it’s all about media value,” he says.

Mango also looked at the trip’s qualitative impact via social listening tools, assessing how the event resonated with audiences, the sentiment around the content, and whether it became part of the cultural conversation. “The success of these experiences is measured not only by the visibility they generate, but by their ability to strengthen brand affinity, create meaningful advocacy and keep Mango at the center of the cultural conversation,” says brand communications director Santiago Lamer.

Moya Mawhinney and Stephanie Broek attend the Mango Slow Summer brand trip.

As trips become more fluid, some brands are rethinking how to tap into influencer travel content altogether. New AI smart mirror company Swan Beauty was behind one of the year’s most talked-about trips — but the company didn’t plan it. Taking things a step further than light programming, the brand decided to sponsor Brigette Pheloung’s (@acquired.style) bachelorette trip, generating major discourse online.

“Rather than creating a standalone influencer trip, we wanted to become part of a story people were already invested in and excited to watch,” says founder and CEO Colby Mitchell on the decision not to curate Swan’s own trip. This was a win, in Mitchell’s view, and a key learning for future trips. “One of my biggest takeaways is that people respond to participation more than traditional promotion. They don’t just want to see a product, they want to see how it fits into real life,” she says. “That’s what creates trust and long-term brand loyalty.”

Swan Beauty looked at what Mitchell calls the “quality of engagement” as much as the reach: “How much organic content came out of the weekend? And does Swan Beauty feel like a natural extension of the story rather than a traditional placement?” Swan also tracked the ripple effect of people searching for the brand after the trip wrapped.

Rather than thinking about attendees as select individuals who align with their brand, businesses are shifting focus to group dynamics and thinking about how talent will gel and work together. Many are framing influencer trips as ‘friend trips’. “We carefully curate a group that feels more like a circle of friends than a guest list,” says Net-a-Porter’s chief brand and customer officer Claudia Plant, who’s worked on trips including Khaite, Chloé, Emilia Wickstead, Manolo Blahnik, Carolina Herrera and Aquazzura this summer, each with a tightly curated group of attendees. Mango’s Lamer wanted the trip to feel like a “​​gathering of friends”. Gucci hosted multihyphenate creators and friends Julia Sarr-Jamois, Tish Weinstock and Julia Hobbs (all of whom contribute to British Vogue) in Monaco. Meanwhile, Marine Layer invited creator Courtney Grow to curate her own invite list for a recent trip to Formentera.

“It wasn’t just like, ‘Get 20 people that don’t know each other with the biggest social followings together.’ It was very much, ‘Let’s have Courtney curate a group of people that she thinks would like each other and enjoy the trip,’” says Stein, who represents Grow. Attendees included influencers Jake Musser and Lilly Sisto, alongside Ghia founder Melanie Masarin.

For J.Crew’s Collier, the potential for attendees to cultivate friendships is one of the most important factors. “People arrive, some of them know each other and some of them don’t, but they become fast friends,” she says. “We’re so particular about who we put on these trips — we really think about the group dynamic and things people have in common.” That said, she’s also conscious of diversifying enough that all attendees aren’t targeting the same audience. Lamer takes a similar approach, looking for talent from different backgrounds that he expects to get along. “That group fit is key, because they spend a lot of time together sharing an experience. When the chemistry is right, the content feels more natural and the brand story comes through more strongly,” he says, meaning better content.

Collier likens trip content to a reality show. “It’s entertainment,” she says. “The reason we pay so much attention to the authentic relationships between those attending is because it’s entertaining.” She likens the output to short, snappy episodic content that viewers become invested in.

Even Alo, which went big with star power on its yacht with Kylie Jenner and Alix Earle on-deck, created a friends trip vibe when it brought together Earle, Jake Shane and Stassie Karanikolaou. This re-upped focus on friendships — whether existing or potential — also results in a cross-pollination. Earle, Shane and Karanikolaou appeared in each other’s content, spreading the message further. This was why Swan’s Mitchell was keen to tap into Pheloung’s bachelorette trip, despite only officially partnering with Pheloung and her twin sister, Danielle. “What makes her audience special is that they don’t just follow Brigette, they follow the entire friend group. You get to experience the same weekend through everyone’s eyes,” she says, noting that many of the other guests wound up posting product organically.