TikTok’s new biz? Selling hotel rooms–and paying creators who help fill them

Last September, TikTok‘s Director of Travel, Tech, and Telcom said the app sees itself as a burgeoning “discovery engine” that “sparks interest in new destinations and drives visits.” She was commenting on a then-recent partnership between TikTok and Southwest Airlines, which had seen enough travel traffic from the platform to make it the center of an ad campaign with a portal where TikTok users could buy plane tickets to popular destinations like Chicago, New Orleans, and Hawai’i.

Now, TikTok is making destination booking a bigger and more permanent part of its business.

Here’s what’s happening:

• It launched a new integration with Booking.com where users find, scope out, and book rooms at hotels around the world.
• It also launched TikTok Go, a monetization program specifically for travel vloggers, where businesses like hotels and travel agencies can request promotional tasks in exchange for pay.

The Booking.com integration gives each hotel its own landing page on TikTok; there, users can check dates and rates, see other information like amenities and reviews, and check out what’s around the hotel for entertainment and dining. Then there’s the real TikTok of it all: a section that collects vertical videos about the property. Users can tag participating hotels in videos, and those videos can pop up on the landing page.

Tagging hotels ties into the TikTok Go program. Through it, any user who’s over the age of 18 and has 1,000 followers can accept tasks from hotels/travel agencies/etc, and get paid an undisclosed commission (and/or travel voucher) in exchange for completing them.

Per Business Insider, these tasks include things like posting a video from a certain type of hotel room, or posting a video review about a restaurant in the area.

We’re guessing, based on the low barrier to entry, that these tasks won’t pay out nearly the same amount as a traditional creator/brand sponsorship would–but they do represent a kind of broader TikTok Shopification. Almost anyone can earn affiliate cash by hawking products from TikTok Shop; with TikTok Go, almost anyone can get a little travel money by filming what’s essentially custom-tailored ads.

It’s worth noting Semafor previously reported TikTok had filed a U.S. trademark application for “TikTok Go,” saying that its purpose would be “promoting restaurants, retail businesses, the travel industry, and other online and offline businesses.”

This means that while TikTok Go seems primarily focused on hotels and other intensely travel-centric businesses for now, in the future it could expand to include basically anywhere you can spend money, truly completing the Shopification.

Of course, creators likely won’t be the only ones earning from these programs. TikTok hasn’t laid out the financial structure of these two initiatives, but it’s possibly taking a cut from all these transactions–the hotel bookings, the UGC ads. And, even if it isn’t, between Shop, the Booking.com integration, and TikTok Go, TikTok is effectively turning itself into an ecom hub for all products and experiences, and that position has intrinsic value.