SF Travel × Veel: How Creators Are Becoming the Voice of Destination Marketing

Travelers trust creators more than ads now, so SF Travel partnered with Veel to connect local creators directly with SF hotels, restaurants, and attractions - easy applications, guaranteed pay, no cold-pitching.
For most of the last century, destination marketing has looked the same everywhere, with glossy brochures, sweeping drone footage, a tourism board's polished tagline promising "adventure" or "magic". Cities and countries have spent billions convincing travelers to visit not by telling them the truth, but by selling them a postcard.

But something has quietly shifted. Ask a 22-year-old planning their next trip where they got the idea from, and odds are it wasn't a tourism ad. It was a 15-second clip on their For You page. Someone's actual weekend in a city they'd never thought about, filmed on a phone, no script, no soundtrack license, no marketing department involved. And it worked better than the ad ever could.

The "front door" to a destination travel is no longer a tourism board's website or a billboard. It's a creator's feed. Someone deciding whether to visit a city or cafes or a restaurant is far more likely to trust a stranger's honest 60-second video than a brand's perfectly lit campaign. And destination marketing organizations (DMOs), the organizations built to promote cities and regions, are starting to realize it.

In this blog, we will explore that shift, how creators went from being an afterthought in travel marketing to becoming its most trusted voice, and what that means for both the destinations trying to be discovered and the creators doing the discovering.

The Trust Shift: Why Travelers Believe Creators More Than Brands

Brands were doing the entire advertisement the wrong way. They thought people wanted to be sold beautifully. Turns out, people just want someone who isn't lying about their experience. People trust word of mouth and user-generated content way more than they trust a brand's own ads. That's not a small shift but a full trust migration, from boardroom-approved UGC campaigns to some random person's shaky phone video.

The performance numbers make it even harder to argue with. Content made by real users tends to pull in almost seven times the engagement of stuff brands make themselves. When that same content gets used in paid ads, it beats studio shot creativity too. Brands aren't hopping on the creator train because it's trendy. They are doing it because tossing UGC into social ads has been shown to cut cost per click roughly in half. 

Nowhere is this more obvious than in travel. Younger travelers have basically rewritten the rulebook on how a trip even gets planned. Social media and UGC now shape most of what Millennials decide when booking, and for Gen Z, the whole discovery process has moved almost entirely off the traditional stuff. TikTok is now the go-to spot for travel inspiration, even ahead of Instagram. A huge chunk of Gen Z and Millennial travelers say they actively hunt down a specific food item mid-trip purely because they saw it blow up online. Try replicating that with a tourism commercial. Nobody's booking a flight because of a bread bowl in a 30-second ad. But people absolutely have booked flights because of a bread bowl in someone's video.

Destinations that lean into it see it pay off, and one such example is Singapore. When Singapore's tourism board wanted to boost awareness abroad, they didn't build another glossy campaign. They had over 1,500 creators make content around the hashtag #MadeInSingapore, then boosted the best of it. The results were 95 million views and 24 million unique people reached in about a month. Not because Singapore suddenly got better ads. Because it got better storytellers.

A lot of travelers admit some travel businesses have wronged them before. An overedited hotel photo, a "hidden local gem" packed with tourists, and a nineteen-dollar latte; polished ads have started becoming a little suspicious. In the same vein, a creator filming on a shaky phone with zero script feels more trustworthy.

This is exactly the issue destination marketing organizations are starting to catch onto. San Francisco Travel is a great example of an organization already thinking this way. As the official organization behind promoting SF as a destination, their whole job is getting people to actually visit, which means partnering with the city's hotels, restaurants, and attractions to get the word out. It's why the partnership between SF Travel and Veel makes so much sense. Veel connects those same local SF businesses, hotels, restaurants, and beyond directly with creators who can tell their story the way travelers actually want to hear it now. 

More than partnership: What it means for Creators

Brands, especially local ones like hotels and restaurants, want creators from their own locality. They know it works better than ads at this point. But most of them have no idea how to actually find the right creator, agree on fair terms, pay them without a headache, and figure out who owns the content afterward. That whole process is messy, and it's usually why a brand just gives up and goes back to running the same old ad. This partnership fixes that part. Discovery, negotiation, payment, rights- all of it gets easier for the brands that need it most.

But the bigger deal here is what it opens up for creators.

Once SF businesses start joining Veel, you're not just getting access to one hotel or one restaurant hoping to work with you. You're getting access to a whole ecosystem. Hotels, restaurants, tours, attractions, all in one place, all looking for the same thing you're already good at making.

And it's not just one-off work either. Cities like San Francisco run on cycles. Event season, new restaurant openings, tourist high seasons, holiday pushes. That means the work doesn't stop after one campaign. It can turn into something recurring, which is honestly what most creators actually want instead of chasing a new brand every single month.

If you're based in SF, or you just know the city well, this is basically built for you. You already know which neighborhoods photograph well, which spots are overrated, and which ones actually deserve the hype. That local knowledge is an edge most creators in other cities simply don't have, and it means less competition fighting for the same shot.

It's also a solid way to build out your portfolio in a specific direction. Travel and hospitality content performs well, brands in this space pay well, and having a few strong SF-based collabs under your belt makes you a much easier choice the next time a bigger brand is scouting.

Getting started is simple. Hop on Veel, browse the live campaigns, and apply to the ones that fit your style. No cold pitching, no chasing brands down.

The door is already open

The front door to a destination used to be a billboard. Now it's a creator's feed and San Francisco is one of the first cities building the systems that actually take that seriously. SF Travel's businesses joining Veel isn't a one-off promotion. It's a bet on what destination marketing looks like from here: real people, telling real stories, getting paid properly for it.

For creators, that bet works in your favor. The work is already there with SF's hotels, restaurants, and tour operators needing exactly what you make, and most of them have just been waiting for an easier way to find you.

That's really what Veel is built for. It's the layer that makes this whole shift usable as a place where local businesses list what they need, creators apply without the cold-pitch grind, and the messy parts of negotiating, getting paid, sorting out rights, are already handled before you even start filming.

Apply to a campaign on Veel, and see where it takes you.

Download the app today if you haven't!