There is an irony at the heart of social media’s relationship with travel. The same platforms that have made the world’s hidden places discoverable have also made them overcrowded. The same content creators who inspire wanderlust have, in aggregate, funneled millions of travelers toward the same dozen photogenic spots.
Klook’s chief commercial officer Wilfred Fan sat down at WiT Japan to talk about what a platform with 30,000 creators in its network and real-time transaction data across Asia is doing to rewrite that dynamic and whether it can be done without simply creating the next overcrowded destination.
First, Fan was asked whether social media bears responsibility for concentrating tourism, he said yes—with context.
“For any content creator, they need to make a name for themselves, so they will talk about the most popular things people are searching for, because that has the highest likelihood of going viral. Once they build a voice, they can talk about something more offbeat.
“But as we’ve seen in the past decade, there’s a generation of content creators coming up, because that’s become a sustainable livelihood for a lot of people. When that happens, this wave of people all talk about the same thing, because they all want to reach a million followers.”
The ecosystem, in other words, has structural incentives that push toward homogenization at the discovery stage. The good news, in Fan’s reading, is that this is a phase rather than a permanent condition. As the creator economy matures and more creators build established audiences, the space for niche, offbeat and regional content grows.
“Once this ecosystem matures, it will be a lot more balanced.”
The question is when and whether this process can be accelerated before more harm is done.
Facilitate discovery, understand local intent
Fan shared a case study in deliberate dispersal. Klook brought 120 content creators, drawn from a network of 30,000 built over three years, to Japan with a specific brief: Start in Osaka, which everyone goes to, then take the train to Hiroshima, stopping at points along the way.
Said Fan, “We don’t write a script for them. We just facilitate it. Ultimately, what goes viral and what doesn’t is beyond anyone’s control. But we want to make sure that places that are less explored, undervisited, get the chance.”
The three-day exercise generated 35 million impressions across platforms. A Hiroshima travel pass product that Klook developed specifically for the campaign saw bookings multiply 12-fold in the period after the content went live. Traffic to Hiroshima on Klook spiked immediately and sustained for approximately a month before gradually declining, a pattern Fan described as requiring continued investment rather than one-off activation. “It’s an exercise that needs to be calculated, needs to be continued.”
The prerequisite for all of this, Fan was clear, is destination readiness. Before the creators arrive, Klook works with local tourism authorities and associations to map the routes, identify what exists beyond the famous sites, ensure the infrastructure can handle increased visitors and, importantly, confirm that the local community actually wants to be discovered. “Sometimes a place has a lovely backdrop, but they don’t want anyone to come by. Everything that comes with it, we need to understand the intent of the locals first.”
Reading the data: Japan’s warning signals
Klook’s transaction data gives it a real-time read on where tourism is concentrating and where it is dispersing. Fan described a simple but powerful metric: the growth rate of bookings outside the top three gateway cities—Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka—relative to the growth rate within them. “As long as we see that our growth outside those top three is faster than the growth of the main gateways, as a whole, we’re going in the right direction.”
That condition is currently being met in Japan, helped partly by organic traveler behavior—repeat visitors dispersing naturally as they seek out new experiences—and partly by active intervention.
Places like Kanazawa, Fan noted, offer a comparable aesthetic to Kyoto with a fraction of the congestion. The platform’s job is to make that comparison legible and to provide the logistical confidence—how to get there, what to book, what to expect—that converts intent into booking.
There is of course also the risk of dispersal where the traveler arrives at a charming rural town that has been made to look trendy on Instagram, only to find everything closed and no one else around.
“That could be prevented by having the right content, not just someone saying the place is great, but a content creator whose taste you associate with. If that person likes the scenery, the food, the experience and their taste matches yours, that’s the validation you need.”
It is why the 30,000-creator network matters: The variety of personas, backgrounds and aesthetic sensibilities is what allows Klook to match content to audience.
Social commerce: From aspiration to transaction
Three years ago, social media was a meaningful but secondary channel for Klook. Today it is a different story. Fan was reluctant to give precise numbers—the growth has been exponential, he said, and the overall picture is still led by direct traffic, followed by advertising and search, but the conversion rate from social media channels is now approaching parity with paid advertising. “That means the transaction is really happening. It’s not just aspiration anymore. It’s real social commerce.”
Klook was an early partner in TikTok Shop’s travel commerce experiments, a trial that Fan said encouraged TikTok to build out its travel commerce offering more broadly. The platform has also seen Instagram performing strongly as a transactional channel, particularly in South Korea.
Self-disruption: The honest reckoning
When asked, as Klook’s chief commercial officer, how he thinks about self-disruption in a world where AI is changing the front door of travel, he said, “I’ve come to the conclusion, coming back and forth, that I probably don’t need to be in this company anymore, because the capability and power of AI is so incredible. What does an OTA do with this? We have to lean in as much as possible.”
His read of the near-term trajectory was specific: AI is already good at answering where to go, how to get there, how much to spend. The next step—already arriving—is AI proactively recommending rather than reactively answering and generating customized audio or video content that replaces the browsing experience entirely. “Instead of reading, it will come to you as an audio guide or a video clip built just for you. That’s already coming. It’s not that futuristic.”
What survives this shift, in Fan’s analysis, is infrastructure and content. Not static content, the kind that can be scraped and summarized, but the living social content that AI will need to farm in order to generate genuinely useful, personalized, trustworthy responses.
And beneath that, the logistics: the rail connectivity, the real-time inventory, the QR check-in systems, the pre- and post-booking service architecture that makes a trip actually work.
Klook has been building this infrastructure since before COVID, he said. Ninety-nine percent of Asian rail content covered in real time is an engineering commitment made years ago. “There’s no change in that. The difference for us as a B2C player is we don’t focus on distributing to third parties. We are there to serve our consumer.”
The B2B infrastructure question came up in this context, with Fan acknowledging that the battleground for travel’s next era is not at the consumer interface but in the supply and connectivity layer beneath it. Klook’s position—deep rail and activities infrastructure, a creator network generating social content that AI will need, real-time transaction data across Asia—is, in his framing, a set of assets that become more rather than less valuable as AI takes over the discovery and planning experience.
The Heidelberg test
Asked to name one place he had dispersed to deliberately, without prompting, he described a six-hour layover in Frankfurt that he converted into two nights and a day trip to Heidelberg, an hour by train from Frankfurt Central. A beautiful afternoon, a good dinner, a pleasant surprise.
“My wife was pleasantly surprised. Success,” he smiled.
This story originally appeared on WiT.