A traveler can fall in love with a city in six seconds and forget it in seven. This is the odd little crisis at the center of tourism marketing. The product is a feeling, the purchase may happen months later, and the person who closes the sale might be a travel adviser who never saw the Reel that started the whole thing. BrandsTravel built its agency in that inconvenient middle. It makes the film, courts the editor, briefs the influencer, trains the agent, buys the media, reads the data and, when the assignment calls for it, produces the room where the industry meets.
Founded in 2007 by Carlos Ulibarri Orvananos, the privately held company specializes in travel, hospitality and leisure. Its corporate profile points to Miami; its current website calls Mexico City headquarters and describes teams or strategic partners in Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Miami, New York and Toronto. That geographic wrinkle is more revealing than untidy. BrandsTravel is a border-crossing firm by design. A destination in New York or California may want Mexican travelers. A Latin American tourism board may want meeting planners abroad. A Canadian agency may need cultural and media fluency farther south. BrandsTravel sells the crossing.
The job is not “make an ad.” The job is “move a traveler.”
On paper, BrandsTravel is a full-service agency. In practice, it works a travel decision from several directions at once. Communications includes media and influencer relations, sponsorships and media buying. Creative includes editorial production, branding, video and experiential events. Digital covers data-led campaigns, social and affiliate marketing. Trade marketing brings in strategy, product development, education, relationships and sales. The client list shown publicly ranges from New York City Tourism + Conventions and 360 Chicago to the Empire State Building, Avis Budget Group and Los Cabos.
The distinction matters. A generalist agency can target “affluent adults who like travel.” A specialist knows that an observation deck also needs travel agents to understand why a direct ticket is better than a city pass; that a hotel needs creators whose audiences match the property; and that a destination needs stories sufficiently specific to earn a journalist's attention. BrandsTravel does not treat those as separate universes. Its service menu is a map of the handoffs between them.
“The future of tourism marketing is not just integrated - it is editorial.”BrandsTravel's stated point of view
The receipts are unusually specific
Agency case studies often arrive dressed as adjectives. BrandsTravel's 2023 casebook is more interesting because it sometimes shows the plumbing. For 360 Chicago, it reported training 717 travel agents and producing 8.5 million in media reach. For New York City tourism work between January and October 2023, it counted 273 clippings, a reach of 204,983,376 and $957,240.38 in media value. A three-day South Coast Plaza trip with fashion and lifestyle influencers generated roughly 649,000 impressions and an estimated $684,922 in advertising value.
The Thompson Zihuatanejo example is the most copyable. Over 12 months, the hotel gained 7,988 followers organically, a 31.8 percent increase. BrandsTravel attributes the lift to original Reels and images tailored to a chosen audience; the action that generated the most organic followers was Reels. The disclosed paid support was a $30 monthly boost for each Reel or image. That is not a universal cost formula, but it is a tidy lesson: identify the format that earns attention on its own, then put the modest budget behind that signal rather than asking money to rescue indifferent work.
A data partnership changes the target
In June 2025, BrandsTravel announced that it had become Adara's exclusive commercial partner in Latin America. Adara, part of RateGain, pools shopping and booking signals from travel brands. The practical promise is sharper than “data-driven”: help destinations and hotel groups reach people who have demonstrated real or emerging travel intent, then evaluate what happened.
This moves the target from a demographic sketch to a behavior. Someone who has searched a route, watched destination videos or booked a flight behaves differently from a person who merely fits an age and income band. BrandsTravel's own campaign philosophy argues for adjusting while the work is live - move money toward the audience that converts, refresh creative that stalls and refuse the old “launch and forget” habit.
One reported Sandals Beaches Resorts campaign makes the point. BrandsTravel cited 0.46 percent as a good tourism display click-through benchmark. Its campaign averaged 3.65 percent and never dipped below 2.44 percent, even as creatives changed. The agency describes the result as a period of algorithmic learning and efficient optimization. It is a sober description of something agencies too rarely admit: creative is not a marble statue. It is a hypothesis with a media budget.
The agency is becoming a stage
BrandsTravel has also started turning its network into products. The first BrandsTravel Summit, held in Mexico City in October 2025, gathered more than 70 executives, entrepreneurs and tourism professionals. Speakers came from Adara, New York City Tourism, Los Angeles Tourism, Los Cabos, The Culturist Group, Faulhaber Agency, Avis México and elsewhere. Sponsors included Avis México, Adara, Air France-KLM, Fiesta Americana and PriceTravel. A second edition is scheduled for October 2026 around data, culture and the “new economy” of the traveler.
The Sports & Experiences unit, introduced in 2026, follows the same logic. A World Cup match or Formula 1 race can fill a stadium without helping a visitor discover the restaurant, neighborhood or second night that creates broader value. The unit combines precision media, local activations, regional PR, creator work and training for hotels and tourism offices. The intended outcome is not merely temporary occupancy. It is a first-time fan who becomes a repeat visitor.
What another marketer can steal
The portable idea is not “hire more specialists.” It is to design the handoffs. Train the people who can recommend the product. Give reporters and creators a story with an angle, not a folder of approved adjectives. Build an audience you can reach again. Target signals of intent where privacy and data access permit it. Watch the conversion behavior while the campaign is still running. Let the useful content become the ad, rather than producing one species for the audience and another for the media plan.
This approach earns its keep when the purchase journey is fragmented, the markets are culturally distinct and no single channel can close the sale. It has less leverage for a local operator with no cross-market ambition, a one-night promotion that cannot compound into an audience, or a client unwilling to share conversion data and change creative midstream. The BrandsTravel machine needs enough time, access and organizational patience for press, trade, content and performance to reinforce one another.
The company's phrase for the whole arrangement is “blur the lines between content and advertising.” The better phrase might be: remove the walls between inspiration and distribution. Travelers do not experience the marketing plan. They experience a sequence of small permissions - watch this, trust this, imagine this, ask about this, book this. BrandsTravel has spent nearly two decades learning how to stand in more than one of those places at once.