I touched on this in my LinkedIn post the other day–below is the full thought:

There’s a number in the Amadeus 2026 Travel Trends report that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Amadeus is the travel booking software used throughout the travel & hospitality industry.

Seoul, South Korea, hotel ADRs (average daily rates) grew 7.4% last September, then 6.9% in October, and another 5.9% in November. Three consecutive months of meaningful rate growth.

The cause wasn’t a new convention center. Wasn’t a major sports event. Wasn’t an economic boom….

It was KPop Demon Hunters, a Netflix film that, as of September 2025, had become the most-watched film in the history of the platform. Fans flew to Seoul to eat the meals featured in the show, make traditional knot bracelets worn by characters, join K-pop dance programs near the filming locations. The Seoul Tourism Organization had built an end-to-end traveler journey around it–experiences that let people step out of their screens and into the story.

Those hotels in Seoul–they didn’t run a campaign; they were simply in the right place, inside the right narrative, and they charged more for it.

That’s what the Amadeus report calls “Pop Culting.” And it’s the most important concept in travel marketing right now that most hospitality brands have no strategy for.

What “Pop Culting” Actually Is

Pop Culting, as Amadeus defines it, is cultural IP becoming a travel-worthy commodity. Fans of a show, a music act, a film, an aesthetic – they’re not just consuming the content; they’re traveling to inhabit it. The digital experience creates a longing for physical connection, and travel is how they bridge that gap.

The phenomenon isn’t new. Consider Bridgerton’s impact on Bath, England, which contributes an estimated £5 million per year to the local economy (per Visit Bath). Consider HBO’s The Last of Us, which brought in a record $14.4B in visitor spending for Alberta, Canada, in 2024 (per Statistics Canada/Travel Alberta).

The pattern is repeating everywhere. The destinations aren’t doing anything particularly clever with their marketing. They’re just inside a cultural narrative that people care about.

The Owned Demand Argument

I’ve been talking for a while about the difference between owned demand and rented attention.

The short version: rented attention is what you buy from Google, Meta, and OTAs. It’s reach that exists only as long as you’re paying for it, and at rates you don’t control, in a marketplace that commoditizes everything. Contrarily, owned demand is when people seek you out because of who you are. Because your brand is part of a story, a culture, an identity, they want to be adjacent to it.

The ‘Pop Culting’ data is the most concrete evidence I’ve seen for what owned demand actually looks like in practice.

Seoul didn’t buy ads in the EU targeting K-pop fans. Alberta didn’t run performance campaigns targeting HBO subscribers. The cultural resonance did the work, and it did it at the level of rate and occupancy, not just reach and impressions.

Here’s what makes this uncomfortable for most hospitality marketing directors to sit with: you can’t buy a bed in the room of cultural narrative. You have to be part of one. And building that relationship to culture requires a fundamentally different kind of thinking than optimizing a media plan.

The Storytelling Layer

This connects to something I read this week from SPARK, a hospitality strategy and design firm. Their piece on Hospitality Net is worth reading in full – the core argument is that hotels have entered a “storytelling era.” Travelers are now designing trips like playlists. A 2025 survey of global travelers found that 54% book two or more hotels in a single destination–not for convenience, but for variety and narrative richness (Expedia). Each property is a chapter. Younger travelers, specifically, are doing this to explore different neighborhoods, different stories, different moods within a single trip.

The implication: hotels can no longer be interchangeable backdrops. Each property has to have a storyline. And the brands that are built with history–of being built with former courthouses, post offices, factories, etc–have something that new-build properties genuinely cannot manufacture: provenance. The story is already there. The marketing job is to surface it.

But the point I keep coming back to is this: even properties with the most incredible embedded stories often don’t use them. They just post pool photos and martini glasses. They run “book direct and save 10%” campaigns. They’re sitting on a narrative asset and marketing like a commodity. Sameness.

The AI Content Problem

There’s another piece of this that the Amadeus data surfaces and that I think hospitality brands should take seriously. When the report asks travelers what their most influential sources are when researching a trip, the answers are:

Word of mouth: 36%. User-generated video: 26%. AI-generated content:....

A separate data point: only 25% of consumers prefer generative AI content. And 25% of travelers have already received outdated or inaccurate information from AI tools while trip planning.

The Amadeus report frames this as “Travel Mixology,” travelers blending AI planning speed with human content for verification and resonance. But for hospitality brands, the takeaway is sharper. The content that actually converts is content that feels verifiably human; content that’s rooted in a real place, a real community, and a real story. The more AI floods the internet with generic hospitality content, the more a distinctive, place-specific narrative stands out.

The brands building fandom ecosystems don’t just benefit when a Netflix show happens to film nearby. They benefit because they’ve built the architecture to let culture attach to them. Strong point of view. Clear narrative identity. Content that sounds like a person, not a template.

What This Actually Requires

The Seoul example is exciting, but there is an implication: most hospitality brands can’t just decide to become culturally relevant. You can’t brief your way into a fandom. And you can’t A/B test your way to a community.

What you can do, however, is make the structural decisions that create the conditions for cultural resonance to develop. That was a bit wordy, eh? What I mean is that you need to have a clear narrative identity – know what story you’re telling, who it’s for, and what cultural territory you’re choosing. This means being consistent, specific, and interesting enough that when the cultural moment arrives – when a show films near you, when a music act adopts your aesthetic, when a community of travelers decides you’re their spot – your brand is ready to hold that weight.

The KPop Demon Hunters moment didn’t just happen to Seoul. Seoul had spent years building the infrastructure of cultural identity: the food scenes, the fan experiences, the neighborhood stories. All of which made it possible to turn a Netflix film into a 7% rate premium.

That infrastructure doesn’t come from a campaign. It comes from a strategy.

Most hospitality brands don’t have that strategy yet. That’s the gap. And it’s the most interesting place to be working right now.

*note - this was written before the 2026 Oscars… just now getting around to posting