Brand Trips Are Dead—Now Influencers Are Selling You Their Therapy Sessions

Let’s put a bullet in the skull of the “brand trip” as it existed last summer: a parade of C-list influencers, all expensed Aperol and infinity pools, posting the same fake-laugh boomerangs from Tulum. If you’ve been on Canal Street lately, you know exactly what I mean—nobody’s pretending these influencer junkets move product anymore. The ROI is as dead as the influencers’ interest in whatever tequila brand flew them out.

The corpse is still twitching, but something weirder is growing in the ashes. The new playbook is “radical authenticity”—brands sending smaller creator squads on stripped-back, supposedly “real” trips. No more staged group shots with a logo floating in the pool. Now it’s all about influencers crying on camera by the campfire, or confessing their mental health to their followers in a borrowed cabin upstate, hashtag sponsored. You thought sponcon was cringe before? Wait until you see a TikTok beauty guru post their tearful “healing journey” from a luxury yurt, all paid for by a vegan ice cream startup. This isn’t storytelling—it’s branded group therapy, and it’s just as engineered as the old Instagram feed.

Agencies are already flooding LinkedIn with case studies about “connection over conversion” and “building community”. Translation: the same old grift, just with more ugly crying and less obvious swag bags. Influencers are now expected to bleed on camera for engagement—because apparently nothing says “authentic” like a sponsored trauma dump. The brands are loving it because it looks like real content, but the only thing genuine here is the desperation.

Here’s a number for you: one major lifestyle brand that switched to “intimate retreat” trips this summer saw engagement per post actually drop by 30% compared to their old, shallow poolside campaigns. Turns out, followers don’t want to process your influencer’s childhood drama between sips of branded kombucha. But the agencies are already selling this as the future—because “authenticity” is just the new word for “we ran out of ideas.”