Award-winning UK travel-tech start-up Reeltrip has launched the next stage of its platform, bringing travel discovery and hotel booking together in one video-first experience. Now, with native booking live and its travel ecosystem growing, the business is looking to expand its network of hotel, activity and creator partners.
The way we discover travel has changed.
A new generation of travellers increasingly finds its next hotel, restaurant or destination through short-form video and creator content. Yet when inspiration strikes, the journey to actually booking it remains fragmented. Travellers leave the content that inspired them, search again across multiple websites and try to work out whether the experience they saw online matches what they are about to book.
Reeltrip was built to close that gap.
Founded by Matt Rushworth and Melanie Keenan, Reeltrip is a UK travel technology platform built around a simple proposition: Watch it. Love it. Book it.
Instead of starting with endless lists and static hotel photography, Reeltrip puts authentic travel video at the heart of discovery, connecting inspiring content with destinations, hotels, restaurants and experiences with direct bookings.
From travel inspiration to live booking in exceptional destinations
Reeltrip’s ambition is to build the connection between the content influencing where people want to travel and the infrastructure that allows them to book it.
The platform has already built a growing ecosystem of travel creators and video content spanning destinations around the world. Its destination guides and editorial content combine travel inspiration with recommendations designed to help travellers move naturally from discovering somewhere to planning a trip.
Now, 2026 marks an important evolution for the business.
Reeltrip has now launched native hotel booking, allowing travellers to access live hotel availability and pricing directly through the platform. Signed-in users can also access eligible Exclusive Member Prices, creating an increasingly seamless journey from watching a destination or hotel to finding a room and booking a stay.
For co-founder Melanie Keenan, this is a fundamental part of the opportunity.
“Travel discovery has moved towards video, but the booking experience hasn’t moved with it. We want Reeltrip to connect those two worlds. If you see a hotel or destination you love, you shouldn’t have to start your search all over again somewhere else. The journey should be as simple as: watch it, love it, book it.”
That proposition is increasingly about more than convenience. As travellers interact with content and subsequently search and book, Reeltrip sees an opportunity to better understand the relationship between travel inspiration, intent and transaction.
Over time, that data can help create more relevant recommendations for travellers while providing creators and travel businesses with a clearer understanding of the content that actually drives bookings.
Built, launched, and gaining momentum in the travel industry
The company has spent the last year building the foundations required to turn that vision into a scalable travel platform.
Reeltrip has launched its creator programme, expanded travel content across international destinations, developed destination guides and an organic content engine, established travel industry partnerships and tested the relationship between video discovery and booking intent.
Its creator model is also designed to address another gap in the travel ecosystem. Creators already produce enormous amounts of high-quality travel content, but monetisation is still frequently centred around one-off brand campaigns. Reeltrip’s longer-term model is designed to connect creator content to the bookings it helps generate.
Building a repeatable creator and community flywheel
At the heart of Reeltrip is a growing creator and community flywheel. As creators upload authentic video clips, stories and travel footage from hotels, cities, food experiences and adventures across the UK, Europe and beyond, Reeltrip builds an increasingly engaged audience around content that reflects how people travel in real life.
More relevant content helps create organic demand through Google search, social channels and Reeltrip’s travel articles and destination guides, reducing the platform’s reliance on paid acquisition. Crucially, every traveller Reeltrip inspires can become part of the next content cycle, travelling, filming and sharing their own experiences with the community.
This creates a repeatable content → discovery → booking → travel → new content flywheel. As the volume and quality of content grows, Reeltrip’s aim is to lower customer acquisition costs over time while building an engaged audience that returns to the platform for travel inspiration, planning and booking.
The result is an ecosystem in which creators provide authentic travel inspiration, travellers discover places they genuinely want to experience, and hotels and other travel businesses gain another route to potential customers.
That creates a potentially powerful ecosystem: creators provide authentic inspiration, travellers discover and book places they genuinely want to visit, and travel businesses gain a new route to customers.
This combination of travel, technology and video-first discovery has now earned Reeltrip further external recognition, with the company named Best Video-First Travel Discovery Platform 2026 in SME News’ Business Elite Awards.
Reeltrip’s next chapter: growing the travel ecosystem
With the platform live and native booking now launched, Reeltrip is moving into its next stage of growth by expanding the network of businesses and creators that travellers can discover through the platform.
The company is looking to build direct relationships with hotels, accommodation providers, activity and experience partners, destination businesses and other travel brands that want to connect with travellers through authentic video-led discovery and booking.
Creators are equally central to that next chapter. Reeltrip is inviting travel creators to join its growing community, contribute authentic content from the places they visit and help travellers move from inspiration to action. The longer-term aim is to create a closer connection between the content creators produce and the bookings and travel decisions that content influences.
“We’ve reached an exciting point,” says co-founder Matt Rushworth. “Reeltrip is live, travellers are using it, creators are contributing travel content and we can now process hotel bookings through the platform. The next step is to bring more great travel partners and creators into that ecosystem, so travellers can discover more places and experiences and act on that inspiration in one journey.”
The wider opportunity extends beyond hotels. As Reeltrip develops, the platform aims to connect travellers with more of the experiences that shape a trip, from activities and attractions to food, drink and destination experiences, while giving travel businesses and creators another route to reach an engaged audience.
Its technology roadmap includes increasingly intelligent content tagging and matching, using signals from videos to understand locations, hotels, activities and traveller interests, and ultimately providing more personalised recommendations.
But the philosophy behind the product remains deliberately simple.
Travellers shouldn’t have to choose between being inspired and being able to act on that inspiration.
For Reeltrip, the future of travel starts with what you see.
Watch it. Love it. Book it.
Discover Reeltrip: reeltrip.com
Partnership enquiries: partners@thereeltrip.com
