Would You Fly Around the World for Your Favorite Food Creator?

Anela Malik leads a tour in Chefchaouen, Morocco. | Yawk Creative Agency

Food content creators have amassed devoted followings through the internet, products, and books. Now they’re asking fans to follow them on global culinary tours.

Earlier this year, food creator and cookbook author Justine Doiron, also known as @justine_snacks, announced on Instagram that she’d be hosting a trip to Sicily in October: a week for her and 12 fans to sightsee and eat together. Supporters quickly snapped up the dozen spots to join Doiron on visits to markets, farms, and archaeological sites, with most of each day structured around a group venture.

Doiron’s trip is one of a handful of creator-led tours of Italy this year organized by Via Rosa. The travel venture, which officially launched in late 2024, is run by Elizabeth Minchilli, a longtime journalist-turned-food guide-turned TikTok star, and her daughters Emma and Sophie, the latter of whom is also a tour guide, author, and travel creator. Upcoming trips feature Shereen Pavlides of @cookingwithshereen, Meryl Feinstein of @pastasocialclub, Zoë François of @zoebakes, and Corre Larkin of @cocolarkincooks.

You might like a creator because of the personality they put forth in their videos. You might follow them because of their recipes. You might buy their cookbook — a commitment for $30 and some shelf space. But these trips take that loyalty a big step further. Do you like a creator enough to follow them to another country? Would you pay thousands of dollars to hang out with them for a week? For some fans, that answer is an easy yes. It’s a convergence of the parasocial relationships that the creator ecosystem fosters and the growing desire to find new ways to make friends — and it says a lot about how and why people travel today.

Elizabeth Minchilli has been offering food tours in Rome since 2012 and has long collaborated with culinary figures, like chef and restaurateur Evan Kleiman, for group travel. Through Via Rosa, the family hopes digital creators can help the company “expand our reach to new audiences,” Minchilli says.

Most people who take her tours have historically been “more or less my age,” she says. “Let’s say 40s and up.” A recent survey found that younger travelers are especially interested in experiential and event-based travel, and another survey found about 30 percent of younger travelers cite influencers and celebrities as their major travel inspiration. “[These new Via Rosa co-hosts] definitely have an online presence and they’ve managed to create a big audience,” says Minchilli. “To fill a tour, we needed people with a certain amount of reach.” And fill those tours they have, at rates around $6,000 per person for single occupancy, not including flights to Italy.

It’s not just Via Rosa. Many food creators have hosted group trips abroad through an array of partners. In recent months, author, comedian, and creator Youngmi Mayer — who previously ran Mission Chinese and often jokes about food — announced a group trip to Ireland. So have the creator-adjacent: Cookbook author Natasha Pickowicz is leading a group retreat in Greece and writer Ella Quittner, who is known on social media for her elaborate dinner parties, is launching a group trip to the French Riviera.

Outside of food, creator-led group travel has been a growing niche. Many of these trips have been popularized by Trova Trip, a company that describes itself as a platform that “powers content creators to bring their online communities offline through life-changing experiences.” As of 2023, the company claimed that around 700 creators — notably, this has included a couple from Netflix’s Love Is Blind — had used it to host trips. Founded in 2017, it gained traction as consumers, reemerging from the pandemic, craved travel and connection with like-minded folks, just as savvy content producers were transforming themselves into “creators” with “communities,” as Kate Lindsay explained in a 2023 Bustle piece.

Creator Tuệ Nguyễn, known as @twaydabae, first hosted two group trips to Vietnam in 2022 following an invitation from Trova Trip, which acted as a middleman between Nguyễn and a travel agency in Vietnam, simplifying the logistics and curation.

“All I ever wanted was to showcase my culture to people, and what better way to do that than to have them in Vietnam,” Nguyễn says. “I can talk about Vietnam all day and tell you stories, but if you’ve never been there and smelled the air or experienced the whole vibe, you just will not know.” The trips were also a content-creating opportunity for Nguyễn, who documented them in long-form YouTube videos.

Nguyễn found that Trova Trip, which is based in the U.S., wasn’t readily available when emergencies arose during the trip due to the time difference. She decided to work directly with a Vietnamese travel agency to organize future trips herself. In 2023, she brought 33 people to Vietnam for 12 days. In 2024, she went bigger, partnering with food creator David Nguyen on a two-week trip spanning 28 locations for 70 people. These trips have run between $2,300 and $3,800, not including flights to Vietnam.

Just as Minchilli’s tours of Italy benefit from the time she’s lived there, Nguyễn’s trips to Vietnam draw on her having been born and raised there and having visited many times. Accordingly, she acts as the primary tour guide, she explains, though a tour guide from the travel agency joins to manage logistics. “I love introducing people to these new experiences,” Nguyễn says. It’s like “this is what I learned here last time when I was here.” Still, some experiences, like taking an overnight train, are new to her too.

Similarly, Anela Malik, a food and travel content creator, leaned on her experience when she started hosting small group trips centered around food and culture in 2022. Malik’s first group trip was to Jordan, where she lived while serving as a U.S. diplomat. These trips were initially available just to her paid subscriber community, though she’s since opened them up more.

“Those are the things I make content about so I assumed, if people wanted to travel with me, those would be the things that they’re interested in,” Malik says. “I thought, if I’m going to host trips, they should be to somewhere where I have something to offer.” Malik, who is fluent in Arabic and has a master’s degree in Arab studies, took subsequent tours to Egypt and Morocco, where she saw her role not as a tour guide, nor as a companion, but as a “facilitator” who sets the tone.

However, after those trips, she polled her subscribers about how they wanted her to approach future destinations. The results pushed Malik to diverge from her traditional areas of expertise. This year, she’s hosting a trip to Portugal, a place she’s never visited. Similarly, Mayer’s will be her first trip to Ireland, Doiron’s her first trip to Sicily, and Pickowicz’s her first trip to Greece.

Compared to the tours she runs, trips with hosts who are less familiar with the destinations offer “definitely a different kind of tour,” Minchilli says. The idea, Minchilli explains, is that what they might lack in local expertise, they make up for in curiosity about food and their other culinary chops, as evident from their recipes. She also notes that these creators aren’t hosting alone but are accompanied by a local guide. (The same goes for Malik and Mayer’s trips.) “While they’re [all] learning, the [guest] host can also bring their own knowledge,” Minchilli says.

Even if she isn’t an expert in a specific place or culture, Malik says the takeaway from her audience is that people want to experience things with her. “People do come because they want to spend time with me, which is something that I had to wrap my head around,” she says. “In my head, I’m just a normal girl who, you know, likes to eat food and talk shit, but that is part of the draw.”

If the prospect of being in a different country for a week with a group of total strangers is intimidating, the creator is a familiar face. “I think people just want a chance to hang out with them and wander and have a pastry and have fun with them,” Minchilli says. It’s not just a creator’s audience size that matters, but the level of that audience’s engagement, she adds. “The people who want to come on a tour with [a creator] feel a personal relationship with them.”

And that’s the appeal of watching creators, isn’t it? They typically start off as normal-enough people — which is to say, not celebrities, though many of them have neared that status — who you watch because they seem like someone you’d want to hang out with. Creator-led group trips let you do exactly that, to fulfill the parasocial urge, if you pay up.

Sometimes, followers are right: They really would get along with their favorite creators. “I’ve made very close personal friends from the people who come on my trips,” Malik says. Other times, the whole parasocial thing has its downsides. Given that Malik shares a lot about her personal life in her content, “I have had people on trips ask me things that I felt were kind of out of pocket,” she says. “I think having strong boundaries is important, and just being very clear about what you want to share.”

To be safe, Nguyễn does background checks and social media vibe checks of potential attendees. Even when the vibes are fine, the parasocial relationship can be demanding, especially when your name is cause for someone to fly to a different country. “I learned from my past trips that these trips can take a lot from you,” Nguyễn says. “These people are looking to have you be ‘on’ all the time and I can do that, but it’s a lot.” Having a co-host on her most recent trip meant Nguyễn could skip certain activities without the sense of leaving anyone hanging.

Even with all that, Nguyễn still enjoys hosting now-yearly Vietnam trips. The only potential holdup now is the cost. She admits that even with the seemingly high-price tags, the trips aren’t lucrative for her, once she pays the tour company, her team, and a videographer. Knowing that her audience — mostly people in their mid 20s — might have more limited means than other demographics, keeping prices fair has been a priority. “I price it just enough for me to make this trip happen and not really gain money from it,” Nguyễn says.

Her team is currently having a big discussion about the financial sustainability of the existing model around her 2025 trip. Nguyễn hopes to make it work though. “I have every intention of continuing these trips,” she says.