Louise Truman, founder of Gen Z travel company Plotpackers, began making TikTok videos as a way to document her backpacking trip to Central America in 2021. Quickly gaining more than 150,000 followers and being inundated with questions about her itinerary and how to have the confidence to travel solo, Truman decided to begin hosting group trips to destinations such as Costa Rica and Iceland, in collaboration with other viral travel TikTokers. In September 2023, she launched Plotpackers.
The new-age travel agency was founded out of Truman’s frustrations negotiating with third-party companies that charge extortionate rates for travel packages but claim to have a limited budget to compensate creators. One of Plotpackers’ most highly anticipated trips to Mount Everest base camp in March 2024 recently sold out in under 20 seconds and throughout 2023, the company plans to take over 100 travellers on group trips to various locations.
Founded in February 2023, The Black Travellers Collective (BTC) organises and hosts group trips for Black travellers with an onus on community and wellbeing. Two years earlier, founder Bethany Thompson embarked on a solo trip to Zanzibar following the loss of her mother and grandmother. Finding the experience to be extremely healing, she returned home to London with a mission to create a safe space for other Black travellers to ‘focus on their emotional, physical, intellectual and social wellness while connecting with the community’.
BTC used TikTok hashtags such as #grouptravel (104.6m views) and #blacktravelfeed (396m views) to source community members for the collective. Thompson’s debut trip to Zanzibar in February 2024 has already sold out.
