20 Australian travel influencers driving tourism campaigns in 2026

When Australians scroll Instagram or TikTok dreaming about their next holiday, it’s often a travel influencer—not a travel agent—who sparks their wanderlust. Their authentic stories turn destinations into must-visit experiences.

For travel, tourism and lifestyle brands, partnering with the right creators is key to building trust, boosting engagement and driving bookings. But finding influencers who genuinely connect with your target audience requires strategy.

Keep reading to discover 20 top Australian travel influencers and learn how to find, vet and partner with creators for measurable influencer marketing impact.

Why Australian travel influencers are vital for your marketing strategy

Authentic travel influencers guide Australian audiences from daydreaming about their next adventure to booking it. Their power lies in trust: Research shows that 64% of social users are more willing to buy from brands that partner with influencers they like. Why? Because these creators craft relatable narratives through immersive TikTok vlogs, stunning Instagram visuals and detailed blog reviews.

This insight is especially compelling since nearly every traveller (95%) checks reviews before booking. Partnering with trusted voices allows travel brands to showcase solo adventures, family road trips or romantic getaways authentically. And because top travel influencers often boast high engagement rates, their audiences are primed to hear about your brand. In short, collaborating with Australian travel creators isn’t just beneficial, it’s essential for connecting with modern travellers.

Solo Australian travel influencers

1. Gab Scanu (@gabscanu)

• Instagram: 539k
• YouTube: 61.1k
• TikTok: 60.8k

Known as Australia’s drone photography pioneer, Gab transforms landscapes into cinematic art. His aerial shots blend luxury and adventure, making him ideal for brands wanting bold, elevated destination showcases. Gab often partners with eco-tourism campaigns, promoting responsible travel while maintaining high engagement.

Source: Instagram

2. Hayley Hunter (@haylsa)

• Instagram: 512.8k
• TikTok: 430.7k
• YouTube: 72.4k

Hayley Hunter (Haylsa) captivates with sun-drenched visuals—think turquoise seas and golden light. From Bali escapes to sustainable local trips around Australia, her content inspires wanderlust while her popular Lightroom presets add extra value. She’s a perfect fit for travel brands, resorts and tourism boards aiming for aspirational content.

Source: Instagram

3. Jorden Tually (@jordentually)

• Instagram: 482.9k
• YouTube: 2.6M
• TikTok: 3.7M

Often called the #1 Australian travel content creator, Jorden excels in solo adventure photography and detailed guides for independent travellers. He connects with his highly engaged audience by sharing itineraries and budget tips across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, which makes him ideal for travel tech, photography gear and off-the-beaten-path experience campaigns.

Source: Instagram

4. Em Lethlean (@em.leth)

• Instagram: 134.9k
• TikTok: 61.8k
• Facebook: 127k

Em Lethlean connects with the wild through fishing, boating and camping adventures. With over 130k Instagram followers, her gritty, unpolished visuals offer a refreshing take on the outdoors that’s perfect for outdoor gear, marine and adventure travel brands.

Source: Instagram

5. Elise McLean (@elises.traveldiary)

• Instagram: 83.4k
• Facebook: 13.3k

Melbourne-based Elise turns misty forests, hidden waterfalls and road trips into heartfelt, immersive stories. Having partnered with Lonely Planet and Visit Victoria, her authentic “average explorer” vibe resonates well for tourism boards, adventure gear brands and regional travel campaigns.

Source: Instagram

6. Tiffany Lawrence (@_tiffanylawrence)

• Instagram: 29.9k
• YouTube: 15.4k

Queensland-based Tiffany focuses on 4×4 exploration, camping and coastal road trips. Her authentic, unfiltered content and travel guides on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube connect with outdoor enthusiasts and solo travellers keen on immersive experiences.

Source: Instagram

7. Lachie Meiss (@meissymate)

• Instagram: 29.8k
• TikTok: 10.5k

Lachie Meiss shares rugged landscapes and off-road adventures across Australia. His content appeals strongly to adventure seekers and 4×4 enthusiasts. Collaborations with brands like Custom Cords highlight his influence within the overlanding community.

Source: Instagram

8. Mark Fitz (@_markfitz)

• Instagram: 106.6k
• Facebook: 18.4k

Mark Fitz is an award-winning wildlife and travel photographer creating cinematic, scroll-stopping content. Brands partner with him to reach engaged travel and nature enthusiasts through high-quality visuals of beautiful places. His experience with Tourism Australia, Tourism Queensland and global campaigns adds extra credibility and reach.

Source: Instagram

Family travel influencers

9. Justin and Bec Lorrimer (@tripinavan)

• Instagram: 259.5k
• Facebook: 242.9k
• YouTube: 196k

Justin and Bec share family road trips across Australia, offering practical tips for travelling with children, accommodation reviews and activity ideas on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Their blend of humour and actionable guidance builds trust with family audiences.

 

Source: Instagram

10. Jack and Amy Bell (@_the_bell_family)

• Instagram: 91.3k
• YouTube: 10.1k
• Facebook: 7.6k

Jack, Amy and their three children explore Australia off-grid in their 4×4 and caravan. As ambassadors for Lotus Trooper, their content features gear reviews and family travel tips, connecting with audiences interested in overlanding and family adventures.

Source: Instagram

11. Evie (@mumpacktravel)

• Instagram: 131.4k
• Facebook: 27.3k
• TikTok: 1.1k

Evie and her daughter Emmie have explored the world together since 2015. Initially a year-long trip, their adventure spanned 2.5 years across Asia, Europe and beyond. Now based in Australia, they continue inspiring families through their blog and social channels.

Source: Instagram

12. The Blonde Nomads (@theblondenomads)

• Instagram: 38.1k
• Facebook: 28.9k
• YouTube: 2k

Rob, Tracy, Marli and Ziggy embraced life on the road after their first child was born. Their blog and social media inspire families to explore together. Eco-conscious brands can particularly benefit from their engaged audience.

Source: Instagram

13. Wanderlust Storytellers (@wanderluststorytellers)

• Instagram: 41.2k
• Facebook: 2.8k
• YouTube: 3.8k

Jolene and Andrzej Ejmont have been traveling with their kids and educating families on planning stress-free trips and saving money since 2015. Their blog is a go-to resource for family travel tips, destination guides and gear reviews. They’ve been featured by National Geographic, The Washington Post and Queensland.com.

Source: Instagram

14. The Feel Good Family (@thefeelgoodfamily_)

• Instagram: 15.5k
• Facebook: 21.6k
• YouTube: 66.9k

Paul, Katie and their son Jasper started a full-time Australian road trip in 2019. They document their journey via weekly YouTube episodes, a podcast and a blog, covering travel destinations, gear and tips to inspire others to explore Australia.

Source: Instagram

Couples travel influencers

15. Nicholas and Helmi (@nickandhelmi)

• Instagram: 148.2k
• TikTok: 141.3k
• YouTube: 124k

Based in Sydney, Nick and Helmi transitioned from maintaining corporate careers to creating high-quality cinematic travel and food guides. Their content offers immersive experiences across Asia and Australia, providing travelers with insightful tips and culinary adventures.

Source: Instagram

16. Alex and James Lock (@twosometravellers)

• Instagram: 401.8k
• YouTube: 41.4k
• Facebook: 142.2k
• TikTok: 112.4k

James and Alex have explored the world together since 2014. They share cinematic videos, detailed itineraries and practical tips to inspire adventure. Using Instagram, YouTube and their travel blog, they showcase unique travel experiences and hidden gems.

Source: Instagram

17. Kate and Olly (@kotravellers)

• Instagram: 289.2k
• TikTok: 195.5k

Kate and Olly showcase domestic and international adventures, offering itinerary tips and destination guides. Their photography-rich Instagram account and blog are ideal for brands promoting luxury hotels, romantic excursions and cultural experiences to an engaged audience.

Source: Instagram

18. Alesha Bradford and Jarryd Salem (@nomadasaurus)

• Instagram: 83.1k
• YouTube: 7.9k
• Facebook: 50.8k

Alesha and Jarryd have run NOMADasaurus, one of Australia’s top adventure travel and photography blogs since 2008. They share compelling stories and stunning visuals from remote treks to cultural explorations and are also Sony Australia ambassadors.

Source: Instagram

19. Lochie and Kaylah (@wishyouwerehere_aus)

• Instagram: 65.5k
• TikTok: 4.8k

Lochie and Kaylah have travelled Australia for over four years in their Troopy, ‘Bessie.’ Their platform, Wish You Were Here Australia, documents their off-grid adventures through stunning travel photography and videography, inspiring exploration of remote landscapes.

Source: Instagram

20. Katrina and Erol (@thetravellingkangaroos)

• Instagram: 55.4k
• Facebook: 25.9k

Katrina and Erol have travelled to over 40 countries, sharing destination guides, travel tips and personal stories on their blog, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. They’ve also hosted group trips, offering a unique opportunity for their audience to join them on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Source: Instagram

How to find the right Australian travel influencers

Finding impactful travel influencers requires more than scrolling hashtags. You need to make sure their audience aligns with your target traveller profile and their content demonstrates consistent engagement. More importantly, their values should match your brand.

A structured approach, supported by tools like Sprout’s Influencer Marketing platform, transforms this process from guesswork into a measurable strategy.

Define your goals and ideal creator profile

Before searching, clarify your campaign objectives. Are you aiming for broad awareness, niche engagement or direct bookings? Define your ideal traveller persona. Then, consider the influencer profile that best aligns:

• Niche: Solo adventure, luxury travel, budget backpacking or eco-tourism
• Network focus: Visually driven Instagrammers, long-form YouTube storytellers or trend-savvy TikTok creators
• Content style: Cinematic drone footage, authentic vlogs or practical blog guides
• Values alignment: Sustainability, accessibility or other values important to your brand

This approach ensures your search is targeted and efficient.

Go beyond follower counts to vet true influence

A high follower count looks impressive, but it’s not a business metric. It doesn’t guarantee the audience is real, engaged or aligned with your brand.

Engagement, including Likes, comments, shares and saves, proves an audience is actually listening. Vetting engagement quality is crucial because it separates popular creators from influential ones. You’re not investing in followers, you’re investing in a creator’s ability to drive action.

You need data to see the full picture. The Sprout Social Influencer Marketing platform provides automated scores to speed this up and protect your brand:

• Brand Fit Score: Analyse a creator’s profile, content and audience to automatically assess their relevance to your brand. This score saves you hours of manual review by surfacing creators who are a strong match for your niche and values.
• Brand Safety Score: Review a creator’s post history for problematic language, sensitive topics or spammy behavior that could pose a reputational risk. This automated check is vital for ensuring your partnerships are built on a foundation of trust.

Analyse creator analytics to predict campaign ROI

Past performance is the best predictor of future success. But you need more than just a creator’s public-facing metrics. Sprout’s Influencer Marketing platform provides a deep-dive analytics section for each creator profile.

Once a creator connects their account, you get access to authenticated, private data, including:

• Impressions and reach: See the true visibility of their content, not just follower counts.
• Engagement rate by post type: Understand if their Reels, carousels or static posts perform better.
• Audience data: Get granular demographic details on followers’ locations (like specific Australian cities), age and gender to ensure alignment with your target audience.
• Historical performance: Track their content’s success over time to spot trends and consistency.

This data moves you from “I hope this works” to “I expect this to work” by helping you select the partners most likely to drive measurable results for your travel brand.

Streamline shortlisting and collaboration

Once you identify promising influencers, use a centralised platform to manage shortlists, share profiles with stakeholders for review and initiate outreach. The Sprout Social Influencer Marketing platform includes collaboration workflows to efficiently manage communication, contracts and content approvals.

Customisable workflows allow you to tailor the process, ensuring steps like influencer review fit seamlessly into your team’s operations. Connecting creators’ social accounts provides direct access to real-time performance data, simplifying reporting and analysis.

Build long-term trust with ethical, ACCC-compliant partnerships

Trust is your most valuable asset in influencer marketing. When working with Australian influencers, you must follow Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) guidelines. Non-compliant posts can quickly undermine the authenticity you gain by partnering with a creator.

This isn’t just about avoiding fines—it’s about protecting your brand’s reputation and showing your audience your partnerships are transparent. Audiences appreciate honesty, and ethical collaboration is the foundation of credible, long-term influence. The Australian Influencer Marketing Council (AiMCO) also provides ethical standards to guide this.

Prioritise transparency with upfront disclosure

Audiences are savvy and can spot buried disclosures easily. The ACCC requires paid partnerships to be clearly and immediately identifiable. This means using unambiguous hashtags like #ad or “Paid Partnership with [Brand]” above the fold, in the first few lines of a caption or as clear, persistent text on a video.

Hiding a disclosure in a sea of hashtags or at the end of a caption doesn’t just violate guidelines, it tells your audience you’re trying to hide something, which erodes the very trust you’re trying to build.

Champion authenticity over exaggeration

The power of an influencer is their personal perspective. Don’t ask them to compromise it with claims your brand wouldn’t make itself. All promotional content must be truthful and verifiable.

Encourage creators to frame their opinions personally (e.g., “This was one of my favourite hotel stays”) rather than stating subjective claims as fact (e.g., “This is the best hotel in Australia”). This approach maintains authenticity, sets realistic audience expectations and ensures you stay compliant.

Formalise expectations with clear agreements

Assumptions are the enemy of successful marketing campaigns. A formal, written influencer contract is non-negotiable and protects both you and the creator.

Your agreement should clearly outline all expectations:

• Scope of work
• Content deliverables (formats, number of posts, etc.)
• Campaign timelines
• Payment terms
• Content usage rights
• Specific ACCC disclosure requirements

Documenting everything provides accountability and aligns performance metrics with your campaign goals from day one.

Measure the impact of your travel influencer partnerships

Want to launch a successful influencer campaign? You need to show business results. Measuring your partnerships is how you demonstrate marketing’s impact, secure future budget and refine your strategy. It’s the key to moving from hoping for results to knowing what works.

To prove impact, define what success looks like before you launch. This vital first step prevents chasing vanity metrics, like follower counts, and focuses your team on outcomes that matter, like driving bookings or destination awareness.

Align your KPIs with the travel marketing funnel

Aligning your KPIs with your travel marketing funnel is the clearest way to measure success. It ensures you’re measuring the right metrics to see how your campaign moves audiences from inspiration to action.

Here are some KPIs to monitor at each stage of the funnel:

• Awareness: Are you reaching new travellers? Track reach, impressions and brand mentions. This reveals the total visibility of your destination or travel brand and how far your message is spreading.
• Consideration: Is the content resonating? Monitor engagement (likes, comments, shares, saves) and click-through rates (CTR). High engagement signals that the audience finds the content valuable, while CTRs show they are actively seeking more information.
• Conversion: Are you driving bookings? Measure leads generated, promo code usage or direct bookings. This is the most direct link from influencer content to revenue.

Track performance to understand audience behaviour

Your metrics should tell a story about what your audience does after seeing a post. Are they just scrolling, or are they taking the next step? Connecting content performance to tangible audience behavior shows your strategy is working, monitors progress against influencer marketing KPIs and justifies your investment.

This means tracking actions that signal true intent, such as:

• Clicks: A click isn’t just a click; it’s a clear sign of active interest. It shows the creator’s content was compelling enough to make someone pause and seek more information.
• Website traffic: This metric indicates you’re successfully moving an audience from a “rented” platform (social media) to an “owned” one (your website), which allows you to control the narrative and capture leads.
• Bookings or sign-ups: These are the ultimate proof of impact. Tracking direct conversions, like holiday bookings or newsletter sign-ups, ties your influencer campaign directly to business revenue.

This level of analysis is hard to do manually, making a unified analytics dashboard essential for seeing the complete picture. Sprout Social lets you bring all your performance data together to monitor which content formats (e.g., Reels vs. carousels) resonate and which creators drive the most valuable actions.

To get this clarity, you need a reliable tracking method. For example, using UTM parameters on your campaign links allows you to attribute website traffic and conversions directly back to a specific influencer. This gives you undeniable proof of their impact and helps you identify your most valuable partners for future campaigns.

Evaluate true ROI beyond clicks and follows

True influencer ROI goes beyond immediate conversions. To understand the full value of your partnerships, you need to analyse metrics that reflect brand health and cost-efficiency.

Here are some key metrics for evaluating performance and brand impact:

• Earned media value (EMV): This is the monetary value of the organic engagement (likes, shares, comments) your influencer content receives. It answers: What would you have paid for this level of reach and interaction through traditional digital advertising?
• Cost per engagement (CPE): This metric calculates exactly how much you paid for each meaningful interaction. It’s a powerful way to compare the cost-efficiency of different influencers against each other and against your other marketing channels.
• Brand advocacy and social proof: This is the long-term, qualitative impact. Campaigns that generate positive user-generated content or sustained, authentic brand mentions build lasting social proof and credibility that traditional ads can’t replicate.

Turn your travel influencer strategy into measurable success

Effective travel influencer marketing starts with strategic partnerships—finding creators whose audience and values align with your brand. Whether you’re targeting family adventures or solo escapes, niche expertise ensures your message resonates.

How you collaborate is equally important. Ethical, transparent partnerships guided by ACCC and AiMCO standards build credibility. Measuring what matters with unified analytics reveals which partnerships drive tangible results, proving ROI and informing future campaigns for sustained growth.

See how Sprout Influencer Marketing connects data, creators and strategy to turn campaigns into measurable growth. Book a free demo today.

FAQs about Australian travel influencers

Who are the top Australian travel influencers in 2026?

The leading Australian travel influencers in 2026 include Gab Scanu, Jorden Tually, Em Lethlean, Tiffany Lawrence, KoTravellers, NOMADasaurus and The Travelling Kangaroos.

These creators cover solo, couple, family and adventure travel niches. Each produces high-quality, authentic content that resonates with audiences across Australia and New Zealand, inspiring travel decisions and strengthening brand credibility.

How much should I budget for Australian travel influencer partnerships?

Influencer marketing costs vary by reach, engagement and content type:

• Micro-influencers (10k–50k followers): Typically charge $300–$2,000 per post
• Macro-influencers (100k+ followers): Can range from $3,000–$20,000+ per campaign

Additional costs may include travel, production, editing and usage rights.

To budget effectively, align your spend with campaign objectives, like awareness, conversions or long-term advocacy, and measure performance beyond vanity metrics.

What are common mistakes when working with travel influencers?

The most common mistakes when working with Australian travel influencers include:

• Poor audience alignment: Choosing influencers based on follower count instead of relevance
• Lack of compliance: Overlooking ACCC disclosure requirements, which can damage brand trust
• Undefined objectives: Not setting KPIs or success metrics up front
• No data review: Failing to analyse past content performance or engagement quality

To avoid these mistakes, vet creators carefully, document expectations in written agreements and track results using social data and performance insights.