Fans, Pilgrims, and Roots Seekers: How Identity-Driven Travel Is Rewriting Tourism Marketing

Outdoor brand and destination marketers seeking proof that experiential travel is the dominant mode of our era need only look at what happened in Spain in 2024. That year, the Camino de Santiago logged a record 499,242 pilgrims walking for weeks across the country.

This is a perfect example of how the traveler’s sense of self drives where they go. They’re not just going somewhere, they are going as someone. But what does this mean for marketers today?

What Identity-Driven Travel Actually Means for Marketers

A marketer who understands how identity now motivates travel is on the right track. Instead of asking who visits the destination, you ask who their visitors are when they arrive.

Understanding the difference can guide the channels and the creative that resonate with the on-site experience. In our strategic brief, Winning the Experience-Driven Consumer, available here, we discuss the philosophical differences between destination-based and experiential travel, as well as practical steps you can take to find and convert high-value audiences.

Why Set-Jetting Works

Another way to understand how identity-based travel has reshaped travel marketing is to learn why some trends take hold.

For example, the set-jetting travel trend works because the emotional connection between a traveler and the destination is established long before a consumer even considers booking a flight.

A 2024 Expedia survey backs this up, finding that 53% of travelers have researched or booked a trip after seeing a destination on screen. Set-jetting travelers who head to these locations stay longer, spend more per trip, and arrive with a prebuilt emotional connection to the destination, an ideal starting point for any marketer.

Programmable Moments Drive Visitation

Event-driven marketing is also heavily identity-driven. However, events are also an opportunity, because they are programmable moments. According to American Express, 60% of global travelers planned at least one event-driven trip in 2025, covering everything from music and sports to concerts and celestial events. All very programmable moments.

Marketers don’t have to overthink this. Programmable moments drive visitation, so a destination without a calendar is a destination without a reason to book right now. Evaluate your programming calendar against actual consumer travel motivations to identify opportunities to drive visitation.

Faith-Based Travel: A Missed Opportunity?

A potential missed opportunity is the faith-based travel market, as most outdoor and hospitality brands lack a strategy for it. This is a massive missed opportunity. And what a missed opportunity it could be. The global religious tourism market was valued at $286.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $671.9 billion by 2030, representing a 15.6% projected CAGR.

Faith-based travelers are highly motivated, often travel in groups, have above-average dwell times, and are more likely to return if the experience meets their expectations. The 20 to 40 age bracket is growing at a 16.5% CAGR. This is not a senior-citizen niche; it’s a growth market that’s routinely overlooked.

The DNA Testing Boom Leads to Travel

Nothing is more identity-focused than DNA testing, and the boom in people discovering their origins has led to tens of millions wanting to travel to the places their families came from.

Ireland, Italy, Scotland, Poland, and several African nations have developed dedicated diaspora tourism programs based on this insight to capture the genealogy travel trend.

However, all destinations can build programming and content around ancestry and court visitors with enormous emotional investment before they ever book.

A TikTok Community Becomes a Travel Trend

The BookTok travel trend in 2025 shows exactly how digital communities translate into physical travel. TikTok’s BookTok and other niche identity communities tend to create predictable travel behavior.

Fans will gladly cross continents to stand inside a library associated with a beloved fictional world or walk the streets that inspired their favorite author. Destinations and brands with genuine literary connections but aren’t capitalizing on this trend are leaving motivated, engaged visitors on the table.

The Traveler Knows Who They Are

Each one of these categories is a different expression of the same thing. The traveler knows who they are, and they want their trip to reflect that identity. For marketers, this means the entry point into these segments is not a feature or an amenity. It is an honest answer to the question of whose identity this place helps someone express.

We built a free Brand Grader that scores your website and marketing content against the factors that matter most to experience-driven consumers. It takes about five minutes and gives you a specific benchmark plus recommendations. You can find it here.