My mantra is "Now What?" It's all getting too bizarre for me.
Social media posts by A.I.-created travel avatars cost far less to produce, yet look and sound real. Human influencers worry they’re being elbowed out.
By Julie Weed
Dec. 9, 2025 - NY Times
Radhika’s thick black hair falls in artfully imperfect waves below her shoulders, the misty hills of northeastern India providing the backdrop to her series of Instagram posts. The young influencer, whose skin looks impossibly flawless, perches at a wooden table at a cafe showing off her lunch, a bowl of saffron-colored noodles, to her nearly 7,500 followers. She rhapsodizes about the fiery chutneys, spices and bamboo handicrafts of the region.
But Radhika can’t taste those fiery chutneys, smell the spices or buy any souvenirs. And oddly, the person behind her seems to have her head on backward. Radhika is a product of artificial intelligence.
Travel companies, tourism boards and other businesses are turning to A.I.-created influencers like Radhika to lower costs, control messaging and create content more quickly, and human influencers fear they’re being elbowed out.
These Travel Influencers Don’t Want Freebies. They’re A.I.
Greg
Quick and Dirty
Radhika’s thick black hair falls in artfully imperfect waves below her shoulders, the misty hills of northeastern India providing the backdrop to her series of Instagram posts. The young influencer, whose skin looks impossibly flawless, perches at a wooden table at a cafe showing off her lunch, a bowl of saffron-colored noodles, to her nearly 7,500 followers. She rhapsodizes about the fiery chutneys, spices and bamboo handicrafts of the region.
But Radhika can’t taste those fiery chutneys, smell the spices or buy any souvenirs. And oddly, the person behind her seems to have her head on backward. Radhika is a product of artificial intelligence.
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Radhika appears to have impossibly flawless skin in posts promoting destinations in India.Credit...Collective Artists Network
Travel companies, tourism boards and other businesses are turning to A.I.-created influencers like Radhika to lower costs, control messaging and create content more quickly, and human influencers fear they’re being elbowed out.
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Influencers, who typically amass social media followers with fabulous photos and videos of destinations, have become critical to the travel industry. According to Expedia’s 2025 Traveler Value Index, 73 percent of consumers say an influencer’s recommendation has helped them choose a destination, a hotel or another element of a trip. For responders under 40, that number increases to 84 percent.
Companies and destinations have showered top influencers with money and freebies. “It can be incredibly lucrative to be a major influencer,” said Steve Morris, the founder of the marketing agency New Media, who works with travel brands in the United States, Europe and Asia. “And travel is one of the most profitable categories.” A single post can earn $100,000 or more, he said.
That may be why a 2023 Morning Consult report stated that 57 percent of young people ages 13 to 26 said they would become an influencer if given the opportunity.
Blurring Reality
Large travel organizations appear to favor beautiful young women for their A.I. avatars — there seem to be few, if any, men — and they often blur the line between the digital and real worlds.
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Sama, Qatar Airways’ A.I. flight attendant, who represents the airline on its website as well as on social media, wears her onyx hair in a neat bun when she appears in her burgundy uniform, and more casually when she’s “off-duty” in her Instagram feed.
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Sama, an A.I.-created flight attendant, promotes Qatar Airways on social media as well as assists travelers on the carrier’s website. Her emoji-adorned Instagram posts resemble those of human influencers.Credit...Qatar Airways
She looks strikingly lifelike, if a bit too face-tuned. Sometimes she posts to her 328,000 followers as if she is a person, appearing to converse with a real couple aboard a plane and asking if they had remembered to bring her a souvenir magnet from Tanzania. Or she writes emoji-peppered posts that make it seem as if she has had actual experiences: “My camera roll after a 48-hour layover in Hanoi. Scooters, street food, and sunsets — this city has my heart.”
Other times she acts like a digital persona, saying in one post, “As a virtual cabin crew, I have never been a child.”
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Emma, the German National Tourist Board’s “digital storyteller,” promotes the German wine country, among other destinations, to more than 29,000 Instagram followers.Credit...G.N.T.B.
The German National Tourist Board’s “digital storyteller,” Emma, has shoulder-length blond hair and wears casual clothing, like an oversize sweater. She promotes destinations like the German wine country on social media, including Instagram, where she has 29,600 followers. In one post, she carries two buckets of green grapes, writing, “There I was, clippers in one hand, a full bucket in the other.”
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Comments on A.I. influencers’ accounts range from heart emojis and words of affirmation to attempts to “out” them as A.I. Some people don’t seem to realize, or perhaps care, that the digital influencers are not real, with some followers posting suggestive comments like “from behind I see you very beautiful” on an A.I.-generated photo of Sama, the virtual flight attendant, boarding a plane.
Fear of Being Replaced
Human influencers, especially those just getting a foothold, are starting to worry. Jen Ruiz, a lawyer turned solo travel expert who posts to nearly 50,000 followers under the Instagram handle Jen on a Jet Plane, said the rise of A.I. influencers had caused an uproar among content creators “who feel they’re being replaced.” To make matters worse, she said, it’s by “an entity that doesn’t share their passion or experience.”
A.I. influencers will take audience share, sponsorships and ad revenue from human influencers, said Aida Mollenkamp, who shares her travel and food experiences with 34,000 followers on Instagram. “They’ll compete for the same attention spans, and in some cases, they already are,” she added.
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Christiana Ballayan, a lifestyle influencer with more than five million followers, said she had seen brands cut back on perks and pay over the last year.Credit...Jonathan Zizzo for The New York Times
The shift is also starting to affect more established influencers with huge numbers of followers. Christiana Ballayan, a lifestyle influencer who posts as kristline__ to more than five million combined followers on TikTok and Instagram, said she had experienced a decrease in available paid work from brands. Just a year ago, she said, hotels wanting to show off luxury experiences might cover creators’ flights, rooms and a lot of extras, along with paying for their work. Now, “they might pay for the room and say, ‘That’s what you get,’” Ms. Ballayan said. “They have another advertising option: A.I.”
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Cheaper Than Live Talent
Mr. Morris of New Media has seen a substantial increase in spending on A.I.-generated photos, captions and social media avatars by hotel and other travel clients in the United States, Europe and Asia. About half the businesses he works with are experimenting with using A.I. for marketing, he said, and he expects more to follow suit. Those using the new technology are currently devoting about 20 to 30 percent of their marketing budget to it, he added.
Creating a travel avatar, say a local guide, with some basic customization can cost $500 to $2,000 with the help of an A.I. avatar library like Hey Gen. A set of A.I.-generated imagery and video — showing a hotel in different seasons, for example — costs the same. A “fully synthetic character,” an avatar created from scratch with a unique visual design, personality, voice and mannerisms costs $5,000 to $10,000, or up to $15,000 if the A.I. is constantly learning and updating, Mr. Morris said. Such advanced digital personas might be used as social media personalities with dedicated Instagram or TikTok accounts.
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Despite making a large investment in Sama, Qatar Airways said it was not planning to use fewer human influencers.Credit...Qatar Airways
Using an avatar and A.I.-generated imagery together, instead of hiring live talent and a traveling production crew, can significantly reduce the time and cost of producing an online marketing campaign, Mr. Morris said.
Despite its investment in creating Sama, Qatar Airways says it does not plan to use fewer human influencers. “It is not about choosing between humans or A.I.; it is about using both together to make our brand more accessible and more intuitive for travelers,” said Babar Rahman, senior vice president for marketing and corporate communications at Qatar Airways.
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As technology advances, A.I.-created travel bots and influencers are likely to become agentic (a term that describes a system that can take an action on its own), said Ari Adnan Cibari, founder at the marketing and technology consultancy AtlasPerk. That could mean an A.I. influencer could, for example, help followers book travel arrangements or make dinner reservations.
And while viewers may value the feeling that human travelers are sharing their unvarnished adventures and opinions, the A.I. avatars’ lack of authenticity will soon be harder to detect. “The colors, the detail — they are already insanely good,” Mr. Cibari said. “It can already be impossible to tell the difference.”
All this leaves some travelers, like Taliesen Black-Brown, 28, a filmmaker from Seattle, feeling even less trusting of what they see online. Social media, he said, already felt “fake and vapid.” Now, he added, “this stuff is even more inauthentic because it’s not even connected to someone’s real life experience.”