Watch out, Google: TikTok wants to be a “discovery engine” for travelers

We recently wrote about how Southwest Airlines sees enough travel traffic on TikTok to put the platform at the center of its latest ad campaign, with a direct portal for users to buy tickets to popular destinations like Chicago, New Orleans, and Hawaii. We theorized this trend–Gen Z using TikTok to look for travel–will help TikTok further cut into Google‘s search traffic…and it looks like TikTok thinks the same thing.

The platform’s Director of Travel, Tech, and Telcom, Danielle Johnson, just told Skift it sees itself as a “discovery engine” that “sparks interest in new destinations and drives visits.”

The reason it’s become that engine? At least on the marketing side, “[t]he ability to have a two-way conversation–where brands showcase their content and users engage, interact, comment, and share their snapshots–creates a much deeper and richer relationship than what you typically find in travel guides and 30-second commercials,” Johnson says. That’s on top of the millions of user-generated videos where people organically show off their latest destinations.

TikTok also has some data to show the scale of engagement that piqued Southwest Airlines’ interest: 83% of users say TikTok gets them interested in visiting destinations they hadn’t previously considered, while 60% said they actually went ahead and visited new places because they discovered them through travel content on TikTok. (To be clear, some of those “new places” might not be full-scale, long-distance trips, and might instead be visits to local destinations like restaurants and museums–but that’s a whole other area where TikTok is taking search volume from Google.)

Users aren’t just stumbling across travel content, either: Johnson told Skift 67% of users have purposefully searched the platform for travel experiences. And because TikTok’s For You algorithm is so adept at picking up on what viewers want to see, when it recognizes a user is interested in a specific place, or even in travel as a broad topic, it starts serving them video suggestions for where to go.

“What I find most fascinating about discovery on TikTok is how it combines immersive storytelling and visual entertainment, similar to traditional media and online videos, with the personalized ‘For You’ feed that brings diverse communities and topics to life,” Johnson said.

One interesting point she made is that, while Gen Z is driving a lot of the trendy travel fever these days on both the creator and viewer sides, TikTok users who are 45 and older actually watch more travel content per day, on average, than their younger counterparts.

“A fascinating trend among this older group is ‘destination dupes,’ where they explore new, similar experiences to places they’ve already visited, like substituting Italy with Croatia,” Johnson said.

She didn’t go into why travel content might be a bigger hit with older viewers, but maybe it’s got something to do with financial differences. Middle-aged folks tend to have more money to splash on vacations, while older Gen Z is still scrapping to get their first jobs with newly acquired college debt hanging round their shoulders.

It’s clear from Johnson’s comments that TikTok not only recognizes itself as a competitor for Google and other search engines, but wants to push that competition. And it wants to do that in more niches than travel–see its new feature Spotlight, where it’s selling movie tickets by integrating one-tap buying for local showtimes with all content about new movies from partnered Hollywood studios.