EEAT in the Travel Industry: Creating the Content Holidaymakers Want and Need

It serves as a way to prove that a website’s content benefits users in the wake of Google’s helpful content update, which aims to penalise content written to appeal to search engines over users.

Helpful and useful content is a must within the travel industry. The decision to travel, where to travel, and who to travel with are often carefully considered. Whether the trip requires a significant financial investment, involves health concerns, or the holidaymaker simply wants the best possible trip, users want content they can rely on, from companies they can depend on. Exhibiting high EEAT is a strong way to signal to potential travellers that they should choose you as their travel provider. 

EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. These four components signal the usefulness of a piece of content to Google. 

• Experience refers to firsthand knowledge of the subject matter, evidenced in the content.
• Expertise refers to insight from a verified expert in the field.
• Authority is seen in the reputability of your site.
• Trust is achieved with factually accurate and reliable information, which can be enhanced by citing sources.

Below, we’ve outlined some of the most prevalent reasons that EEAT is crucial to successful travel brand content. 

Nowadays, search engines are the top resource used for travel research, and 80% of global travellers prefer booking trips online, so it’s now more crucial than ever that travel brands land in Google’s good books. 

EEAT is particularly beneficial in the world of mobile-first indexing, which enhances page speed, user experience, and mobile responsiveness. This is key, as recent statistics show that 60% of online travel traffic comes from mobile devices.

By including expert insights rather than rehashing the same main tips and tourist traps already seen online, you provide unique content. Fresh tips and hidden gems make your content more exciting and more shareable, as the brand new insights allow people to create a unique and exclusive travel experience for themselves.

This is particularly valuable with the rise of generative AI. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are being utilised for travel advice and holiday planning, so offering in-depth expertise is a significant way to stand out as an alternative to the generic offerings of AI. Furthermore, by showcasing unique experiences and valuable expertise, chatbots may even reference you in their travel query responses, directing traffic to your site.

Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) refers to content that addresses finances, health, and wellbeing —serious topics for which accuracy and reliability are essential. Within travel, YMYL content could relate to safety advice for high-risk destinations, guides on travel insurance, scam avoidance, medical advice, or travel savings. Trust features, such as external links to medical and financial authorities, along with accreditations from these authorities, are invaluable for content related to these topics. 

So, you know why you should use EEAT features in your travel content. But how do you do so effectively?

Showcasing the experience of a travel destination allows the reader to bring the holiday into the realm of reality, with firsthand recommendations and tips that they can implement. 

Expertise-led content in travel is all about showcasing specialist knowledge of the destination or key issues related to travel, such as finance and safety.

Travel companies can showcase authority in their onsite content by demonstrating that their site is viewed as reliable by fellow travel industry experts. This can be achieved by obtaining citations from other reputable sites (e.g. local tourism sites) or by winning awards from industry organisations. Examples include the TTG Awards, which include the Positive Impact Award and Diversity Trailblazer Award, or the World Travel Awards, which include the Leading Adventure Tour Operator and Corporate Social Responsibility Award. 

Industry accreditations, e.g. an IATA Accreditation from the International Air Travel Association, are also highly beneficial in establishing authority. 

As ‘sustainable travel’ is a keyword high in search volume (accruing 1.1K monthly searches at the time of writing), a Green Tourism Accreditation is particularly valuable.

Trustworthy content is factually accurate and reliable. This can be achieved by thoroughly fact-checking all content before uploading to your site and linking to authoritative external sources. Examples of high authority sources to link to in travel content include:

• UNESCO
• The NHS (for medical advice around travel, such as required vaccines)
• Government or national tourism websites (such as https://travel.gc.ca/ for Canada)

Content should also be regularly updated and repurposed to reflect industry changes, new official guidance, and fresh statistics, ensuring continually trustworthy and accurate content.

Below, we’ve looked at some of the most significant travel trends of the past few years and how high EEAT-driven content can be used to target users interested in them. 

Dark tourism is a highly searched travel type in 2025, with a search volume of 2,400 at the time of writing. The trend involves visiting sites of disaster and tragedy, aiming to connect with the historical significance and emotional power of the destination.

As history is the main focus of such trips, expert guides with historical insights would be attractive to dark tourists. Drawing attention to lesser-known destinations of historical significance, or revealing lesser-known historical facts and insights about the destination, creates content that dark tourists would find valuable, compelling and shareable. 

As dark tourism sites are understandably harrowing, a blog featuring psychological insight on the mental effects of this type of travel would provide extremely valuable expertise. Specialist psychologist advice on maintaining mental wellness during and following dark tourism trips would be both interesting and beneficial to users.

Dark tourists are also interested in preserving these historically significant locations. They would thus be more likely to choose a travel provider with relevant accreditations as an authority marker, such as an accreditation from the Global Sustainable Tourism Council. 

Digital detox trips describe holidays during which the holidaymaker parts from their phone and other technology to achieve a sense of calm and peace. 

Experience-led content around this subject would allow users to understand how such a trip might affect their sense of wellness from those who have already tried it. A blog featuring perspectives from various digital detoxers, encompassing a diverse range of ages and backgrounds, provides readers with the most comprehensive and well-rounded view. 

Experience-led content that includes a variety of perspectives also gives the user more opportunities to see themselves and their lifestyle represented in your onsite content, allowing them to obtain a fuller picture of how a digital detox trip would benefit them specifically.

Modern travellers are swapping mainstream travel destinations for lesser-known locations, according to the BBC. This is an excellent opportunity for cultural experts to provide fresh expertise on lesser-discussed destinations. 

While expert content on mainstream destinations may be more saturated, niche travel destinations and tourist spots offer a perfect opportunity to create blogs packed with fresh knowledge and viewpoints. Less-travelled destinations are also an excellent opportunity for experience-led content. Users seeking the adventure of a less popular location often still require reassurance that the experience will be enjoyable and safe, with a clear idea of what to expect. This makes content that showcases firsthand experiences of the destination incredibly desirable.

We have conducted keyword research on some of the most frequently searched terms related to travel and tourism to illustrate how EEAT-driven content can effectively target high-volume search queries. 

Insurance-related content falls under the category of Your Money, Your Life (YMYL) content, and as such, expertise and authority are of great importance.

Expert insights from financial and legal experts are immensely valuable here, providing reassurance to anxious users over their financial choices. Faith in these expert quotes is further bolstered by the presence of expert headshots and bios, providing users with the reassurance that the guidance comes from a genuine specialist. 

Accreditations also instil greater confidence in your insurance-based and financial advice, whether that’s via the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA), The Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), or any other official body relevant to your type of travel brand offering. 

Lastly, with YMYL content, accuracy is even more vital, so advice must be kept up-to-date and in line with the latest guidance and figures.

To combat these concerns, experience-driven content can platform positive travel stories. 

Stories surrounding tourism protests can be countered by experience-led pieces involving interviews and quotes from locals in tourist destinations who want to encourage visits.

Therefore, it is important to reassure travellers with climate anxiety and demonstrate, through your on-site content, that you are an environmentally conscious supplier.

Sustainability-focused blogs that alleviate concerns need to be trustworthy and expert-led. They should obtain comments from environmental scientists and include reliable data from reputable sources that can be externally linked to, providing eco-conscious readers with greater peace of mind.

Sustainability and environmental accreditations clearly displayed on-site, such as an accreditation from the Global Sustainable Tourism Council or an Earth Check certification, allow readers to place greater trust in your advice on sustainable travelling.

This indicates a need to shift public attitudes, which can be accomplished by combining high EEAT content with Digital PR in collaborative, multi-platform strategies. Expert quotes on the benefits of tourism for both tourists and destinations can be embedded into both on-site content and outreach PR campaigns to ensure tourism-positive content rises in the SERPs for queries like this.

Multitrip has found that 45% of Gen Z holidaymakers have either used AI to plan their holidays or plan to use AI in the future. Kayak claims that a third of Britons surveyed would use AI to inform their holiday booking. And these numbers are only set to grow with Google AI’s Canvas travel planning, which has the capability to build customised travel itineraries in AI mode’s side panel interface. 

This means travel brands need to create content that offers more than AI can, and expertise, experience, authority, and trust are exactly how that can be achieved. 

When you deliver expert insights that can’t be found elsewhere on the web, you stand out from the generic guidance that AI regurgitates. And, if AI does reiterate your expert guidance, the chatbot may name your expert and direct traffic to your site in that way.

One thing AI absolutely cannot do is provide a real human perspective and experience, meaning experience-led content will be a key way of portraying destinations in a way that differentiates you from AI. Users who want to understand the thoughts and feelings that accompany travel types are more likely to choose onsite content that uses a real human voice, if available. 

A study by KPMG found that only 42% of people in the UK trust AI. This means ensuring that your content is trustworthy and fact-checked is another way to signal to users that you provide content beyond what Large Language Models (LLMs) are fully capable of. This is further enhanced by showcasing industry-specific authority, indicating your offering of specialist intelligence as opposed to a generic LLM’s generalised overview.

One of the most significant recent developments in AI content is Google’s implementation of AI overviews in the SERPs. The overview pulls from websites recognised as trustworthy and authoritative to create a general snippet response to search queries. These websites are then linked in the sidebar.

By providing new, fresh expert information on a topic and by demonstrating that such information is trustworthy and authoritative, you increase your likelihood of appearing in AI overviews for the targeted keyword. 

While the overview provides a general summary, users who require in-depth guidance, detailed trip recommendations, and more will then click on the linked source blogs. 

Want to learn more? We’ve got a blog on AIOs’ impact on organic search.

We’ve explained the importance of EEAT in onsite content for travel brands, along with some examples of ways to implement EEAT in your content. Now, we’ll discuss how working with a digital marketing agency (like ourselves) can ensure your EEAT content is of the highest quality and has the greatest chance of achieving SEO success. 

A digital marketing agency offers SEO specialists who can audit your current site. Through this, they can advise on which EEAT elements are missing and which of the present elements can and should be improved. 

Natural language processing enables Google to understand the content’s subject matter by analysing the first 100 words, such as the introduction of a blog or the above-the-fold text on a webpage. It then classifies the content accordingly. 

However, content can be classified incorrectly, making it less likely to appear in relevant searches. This means that your EEAT efforts are undermined.

Fortunately, with NLP tools, such as Flaunt Digital’s Goose, content writers can ensure that text is correctly classified. For travel industry content, these classifications include:

The classification aimed for depends on both your brand specialism and the desired content topic. 

NLP tools also rank the highest entities in your continent. These are the keywords that Google will view as the most prominent in your copy. Aiming to ensure the main keyword of a piece of content is the highest-ranking entity in your content improves the chances of your content ranking in the SERPs for this keyword.

To demonstrate the benefits of NLP tool use in the travel industry, we have chosen to showcase how it can enhance already well-performing travel content for the successful travel brand, Jet2.

At the time of writing, the above-the-fold content for the page https://www.jet2.com/en/destinations reads:

“Dreaming of getting away? Discover where we can take you to! Take your pick from 13 UK airports and more than 75 destinations across Europe. Want somewhere warm?

All those beach classics you know and love are among our line-up, like Majorca, Tenerife and the Algarve. If you’re more of a city break type, we’ve got plenty of those too!

Pick from culture-stuffed capitals like Rome, Budapest and Prague, as well as places by the beach like Barcelona and Palma. Ski fan? We can whisk you away to Geneva, Innsbruck, Salzburg and more!”

The NLP results for this content are as follows.

This is a strong classification for ‘travel’, but the keyword ‘destination’ has a disappointingly low salience. Other supporting entities include ‘dreaming’, ‘pick’, ‘love’, ‘somewhere’ and ‘line-up’, which have low relevance to the topic.

We rewrote the content for NLP to read as follows:

“Discover the destination of your dreams with our selection of holiday hotspots. Take your pick from 13 UK airports and more than 75 destinations across Europe. Want somewhere warm? All those beach classics you know and love are among our line-up, like Majorca, Tenerife and the Algarve.

If you’re more of a city break type, we’ve got plenty of those too! Pick from culture-stuffed capitals like Rome, Budapest and Prague, as well as places by the beach like Barcelona and Palma. Ski fan? We can whisk you away to Geneva, Innsbruck, Salzburg and more!”

This resulted in the following NLP results:

With our improvements, the keyword ‘destination’ is now the highest entity, and the classification under ‘travel’ has been boosted to 99%, with additional strong supporting entities for the destination topic, such as ‘holiday hotspots’, also appearing. 

With a digital marketing agency, content and PR teams can strategise together to create a multi-platform plan that implements EEAT via a range of channels, creating a positive public perception of your brand and industry. This includes expert insights and firsthand experiences for compelling press releases that can also be incorporated to inform wider blogs and guides.

Another component in this multi-channel EEAT plan is organic social content. Instagram reel interviews with destination experts, featuring tips that can be expanded upon in blog posts, are an excellent example of spreading your EEAT content onto social media. Another example is experience-driven social content, including candid street-interview style reels with holidaymakers, and, of course, influencer marketing content. 

As a travel company, you likely have a wealth of experts who can offer knowledgeable insight on a range of destinations, travel hacks, safety, legal advice and more.

However, these experts may feel unable to confidently write compelling and well-structured content in your brand’s tone of voice. They may also not have the time to write an in-depth article due to their other responsibilities as field experts. That’s where trained content specialists come in.

A digital content specialist can use keyword and audience research to gain a clear understanding of the necessary information and then conduct an interview with your expert, crafting questions that facilitate the most in-depth and thorough expert insight.

They can then use this interview to create well-structured and informative content, organised under search engine optimised headers and rich in keywords, while also tailored to your brand’s tone of voice. 

Discover more with our blog on why expert interviews are the key to better content.

EEAT is a significant part of the battle in creating content that users want to read. However, another essential part is building a brand identity and tone of voice that resonates with the reader. 

A digital marketing agency with content specialists can create this tone of voice, incorporating your brand’s vision, audience types and more. This establishes the perfect companion to EEAT content. EEAT delivers content users need to read, while your tone of voice and brand persona ensure that it’s also content they want to read. 

Perhaps you want an imagery-rich tone of voice that pushes readers to envision the destination. You may want a reassuring, professional tone that reassures readers. Or a blend of both? However you want to speak to your customers, skilled content specialists can implement it for you. 

Of course, understanding your consumer base is one of the most essential aspects of creating an effective tone of voice, and we can aid you in gathering and interpreting audience insights to help with this. 

Read our dedicated audience insights blog to learn more about this.

By staying on top of algorithm updates and monitoring keyword trends, your digital marketing agency can identify which types of high EEAT content are most beneficial to users throughout the year. Attitudes and trends change continuously, particularly in travel, and your digital marketing specialists can observe how these changes are reflected in searches to create a digital strategy that delivers the expertise, firsthand experience, and authority that users want, at the time they want it. 

In this era of search, keyword research needs to expand beyond Google’s search engine. People now use a far broader spectrum of platforms for search, including social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.  By conducting keyword research across various platforms, we can develop an EEAT-led content strategy that spans these platforms, thereby capturing a wider audience.

EEAT content is wasted if it isn’t hosted on a technically sound site for search engines to read. That’s where our tech SEO specialists come in.

A good digital marketing agency wants to see your spending optimised. So, we’ll get the clearest picture of where high EEAT onsite and offsite content is needed by looking at where your brand is experiencing success gaps in its paid media campaigns. 

This enables us to more effectively allocate EEAT SEO campaigns that will address those gaps and deliver the greatest benefit. Similarly, our Paid team can utilise a granular campaign structure to redirect spend to areas that are experiencing SEO success.

At Flaunt Digital, our SEO and Content experts can create in-depth, razor-sharp EEAT strategies that lift your brand through the SERPs and elevate your content for both Google and your users.