Beyond the Algorithm: Building a Brand with Community, Not Clicks

Brennen Bliss: Hello, hello! My name is Brennen Bliss, and welcome back to the Propellic Travel Marketing Podcast. Today, I had the opportunity to interview someone who has become a friend over the past couple of months, Katalina Mayorga. She is the CEO of El Camino Travel—an online and in-real-life community of bold women travelers with a passion for culture, hidden gems, and going off the beaten path.

I must say, of the people I speak with, there are very few who have as good of a grip on creating a product that people love as what we found in my conversation with Katalina. I am incredibly impressed by her ability to know what her audience is looking for and build something that truly has meaning. Learning about branding, positioning—all of those things are in this conversation. I can't give this a good enough introduction; I'm just going to jump right in.

Hey, Katalina, thanks so much for joining me today.

Katalina Mayorga: Hi! Great to be here. Very excited to chat all things marketing.

Brennen Bliss: Yes, I hope I didn't overwhelm you with going from "normal talking me" to "really super excitable me" when I clicked record. I realized that might have been a lot.

Katalina Mayorga: It's all good!

Brennen Bliss: Well, I am so excited to dive in. This one's a little different from some of the typical performance marketing-focused interviews we do. You have built an incredible company as the CEO and founder of El Camino Travel, and it's all around brand and community, with very limited—if any—paid media spend, right?

Katalina Mayorga: Yeah, we've tested paid spend, but we haven't really delved into it fully. As I mentioned in our email exchange, we probably should have used Propellic at some point, but we didn't know you guys existed. But we honestly have been able to grow through word of mouth and repeat customers.

Brennen Bliss: And I think that’s the thing I’m excited to talk about today. As an augmentation to our typical focus on performance, I think this is going to be an exceptional learning opportunity for me and all the listeners. Could you give me a quick rundown of El Camino—the mission, the vision, and what you’re doing over there?

Katalina Mayorga: Yeah. So, a little background on myself: I had no intention of being in the travel industry at all. I was actually working in international development. I was consulting, and I always had the entrepreneurial itch. In my 20s, I said to myself: "If I work this hard for someone else, what would happen if I worked this hard for myself?"

That led to me consulting and, eventually, El Camino. I was consulting in international development, traveling the world, and working with social entrepreneurs everywhere from Haiti to Uganda, to Peru and Brazil. These were entrepreneurs often working with households or communities making $2 or less a day, creating products and services to better their communities. I was very inspired by that; I felt I had the best job in the world.

Then, I was in Guatemala for work, and two things on that trip led to the "aha" moment for El Camino. The first: if you’ve ever been to Guatemala—have you been, Brennen?

Brennen Bliss: I have not been yet.

Katalina Mayorga: There’s a lake there called Lake Atitlán. It’s surrounded by three volcanoes, and you can only get around by speedboat. So I jump in my speedboat—this is in 2014—and the first thing I did was grab my iPhone 4 or 5 from my pocket and start taking photos. I looked around and realized everyone in the boat who was a tourist either had iPads or iPhones out, and they were looking at this beautiful scene through their screens.

Instagram was not a thing yet; the word "influencer" didn't even exist. But I just intuitively understood that the experience of travel was about to change dramatically with these powerful tools in our pockets. Everyone was going to be much more focused on capturing the moment rather than being in the moment.

Then, on my last day on that same trip, I was in a taxi, and the driver and I were talking about everything going on in Central America, particularly around drug violence. A lot of what he was sharing hit very close to home—my family's Colombian, and we have our own history with drug violence. Out of nowhere, he goes, "You know, thank God for tourism".

I said, "That's interesting. Why do you say that?" He said, "It provides me a high income; it provides me a reliable income. The only other industry that can compete with what I'm making in tourism is the drug industry. So thank God for tourism; that is what is keeping me out of the drug industry".

That really just felt like a punch to the stomach. I always knew tourism was important to these communities from my own work, but I had my own qualms with international development. On the plane ride back, I was thinking: "How do we get people off their phones? How do we really ensure that as much of the dollars generated from tourism are getting back to the people who are creating these unique experiences?"

In parallel to all of this, all my friends were seeing what I was posting on Facebook—again, because Instagram wasn't a thing then—and were asking to join my work trips because I was getting to have so many unique experiences. So I thought, let’s just get photographers on the trip. We started having photographers on these trips to make that accessible. We had to do group trips, which had a very bad rap then—the idea of a big bus where you follow someone around with a flag. I knew if we were going to do that, we had to make these exceptional group trips and give our travelers very unique experiences.

That was the premise, and it was honestly a hobby. I didn't know what it would become. We launched a pilot trip, word of mouth started spreading, and the lesson learned was: provide people with an exceptional experience, have a photographer give them beautiful photos they want to show off, and you just start to grow organically.

In 2018, we had a big moment when Condé Nast Traveler came to us and asked us to run trips for their fastest-growing sub-brand, Women Who Travel. I was like, "Okay, I think this is a real job; I think this is a real company". So that is how we started, and we've evolved. Our focus now is on the "bold woman traveler"—creating experiences both online and offline for the woman who really appreciates cultural immersion.

Brennen Bliss: I would love to dive into that a little more. You and I were chatting right before we got started about being visible in large language models and how to optimize for that. One of the things we know at Propellic is that a large language model search is almost every single time going to come in with user context. It's going to know something about the user because they've been logged in, and maybe they've planned a trip before.

So, what we’ve been saying is we need personas. We need a very clear understanding of who our customer is so we can test visibility for customers that have that context. I’m curious to hear from you: if you were to give a two-sentence description of who your traveler is—if you could put it into a box, even though I know that’s not really fair—what would you say? What are their psychographics and demographics?

Katalina Mayorga: Yeah, so: the bold woman traveler who's passionate about culture. We are not everything for everyone; we want to be the lighthouse and the best of the best for that avatar.

That person is very likely in their mid-30s to mid-50s now. To them, travel is not a luxury; it’s a lifestyle. It’s a huge part of their identity. It is how they seek cultural and intellectual stimulation; it’s how they push themselves out of their comfort zone. For some of them, it’s even their form of therapy; it’s how they seek personal growth. That really is it—I mean, we have a whole avatar sheet, so I could get into even what podcasts they likely listen to. But in a nutshell, that's who it is.

Brennen Bliss: You've done the work. So, let's talk about that audience; you clearly know who they are. One of the things we deal with a lot with marketers is that we struggle to make decisions; we have "start-stop syndrome" that comes from not really knowing who we're talking to. We’ll think, "Oh, let's go do this, it's a great idea," and before it gets to the finish line, it’s like, "Oh no, wait, no, this might alienate this group of people".

Is there a decision that you’ve been able to make easily around how you market and promote your brand because you knew who your customer was?

Katalina Mayorga: I think, yes. Not only having a clear idea of who your customer is, but we love to be able to prove ourselves as a brand to our potential customer during the sales cycle. I want to show them why they should spend their "Super Bowl moment" of the year—their disposable income, likely a huge chunk of their savings—with us.

How we do that is by providing value and being very generous with our knowledge and our expertise. We do this in various ways: one very low-hanging fruit way is through our newsletter. We are not always trying to sell in our newsletter; we are trying to story-tell and demonstrate our unique point of view on how we approach travel. That helps to really build confidence and trust with our end user, our avatar. So that's always forefront for us, and that customer avatar helps inform what type of content or information we might share with them to be able to do that.

Brennen Bliss: That honestly was a really nice segue into one of the thoughts that popped into my head. So, very limited paid media spend—I have in my notes that it's zero—and you mentioned email. We've talked about word of mouth a little bit. Your marketing model is very different from the typical travel company, where bottom-of-funnel Google Ads targeting is how they drive a significant portion of their business, particularly in multi-day group travel. Talk me through the model of how you approach marketing in terms of brand versus performance, and where you spend money or focus your channels.

Katalina Mayorga: So, as you know, the marketing landscape is just evolving so quickly. How we started in 2014 is very, very different to where we are today. Instagram was not even a huge thing yet, but we could tell it was going to become big for travel decision-making. I like to use myself as a gut check—I am a consumer of travel; I am our consumer in many ways.

Brennen Bliss: You're right in that demographic.

Katalina Mayorga: Exactly, and I'm surrounded by our consumer all the time with my friends and our travelers. One thing that I think is still relevant today is that we were really reading the headwinds, and we decided to put all our eggs in the basket of doubling down on Instagram early on. Every founder has their lucky moment; ours was being founded when there was no algorithm. It was still very historical-based.

Brennen Bliss: And your friends—you'd see things from your friends and your network.

Katalina Mayorga: Yep, exactly. We had photographers, and people were sharing. If anyone listening to this is wondering where the headwinds are now—where you can get in early and be a leader—that could be with search and AI, or with Substack, which is another platform that still has a lot of room for early adopters.

That was key for us in being able to build that viral word-of-mouth marketing. But what was most important was that we were putting out strong content that really stood out—what I called "scroll-stopping". You would stop and be like, "Whoa, what is that?"

Brennen Bliss: Was this visual or text content?

Katalina Mayorga: Visual. We were very particular and thoughtful about what type of photographers we brought on our trips. We wanted people who could capture the emotion of an experience—whether it’s a wedding or a historical event. We didn't want this to be posed or cheesy; we didn't want women embracing and laughing that felt like a pharmaceutical ad. We wanted people to feel something when they saw our photos.

Who doesn't want to post a photo of themselves jumping off the side of a catamaran in the Pacific Ocean in Nicaragua? It was always fun to hear our travelers on the trips say, "Are you on a magazine shoot? Where are you?" That was a big focus for us: getting the right talent on our trips.

Also, there was a type of individual creator then that was documenting "lifestyle," and travel just happened to be part of that evocative lifestyle. Any profit we made the first years, we invested back into bringing those creators on our trips to document our experience. These were not travel bloggers; these were just people who captured the world around them in evocative ways.

Brennen Bliss: It's really interesting because you think about this concept of how people always remember how you make them feel. Getting a text from a friend asking "Are you on a photo shoot?" is such an unexpected feeling and a special value add. I can imagine retention and repeat rates skyrocket from touches like that. But how do you measure it? How do you know that this less tangible brand effort translates into bookings?

Katalina Mayorga: Data is still really important. I'm a Gemini, so I'm very left-brain/right-brain; I love data and numbers, but I love being creative too.

Very simple things: referral rate. One in two people who book a trip with us come from a previous traveler or referral. And our repeat booking rate is 40%. I think it would be higher, but I'm also realistic about our customer—we’re with a demo that is evolving quickly, whether it's getting married or becoming a mom. But right now it's 40%, and that's pretty good.

We are also very meticulous about getting feedback from our travelers after an experience. We capture NPS scores, asking how likely they are to recommend the brand and the specific trip. We really want to understand their highs and lows and make sure they understand we're taking their feedback seriously. They get a personal response from us after they fill out the form. You can't change your company based on every piece of feedback, but there are ways to do it in a measured, thoughtful way. So, data is always paired with that human element and personalization.

Brennen Bliss: I want to take a bit of a pivot. There is something you do that is not common: online community.

Katalina Mayorga: Online, offline, IRL, digital community. To build any community, you have to create IRL moments around it. We’re very lucky that we are "travel," so we create a ton of IRL moments where our community can connect over extraordinary shared experiences.

But the online/digital part is so powerful because you can continue to connect with your audience in between trips and be top-of-mind. We actually launched our online community out of necessity, which was COVID. Revenue went to zero overnight—PTSD, sorry if I'm doing that to anyone right now.

Brennen Bliss: Just as I was forgetting it.

Katalina Mayorga: I know, exactly. But being entrepreneurs, it was: "Okay, what do we do with this?" Any moment I’m in doubt of what to do next, the first people I go to are our travelers and our customers. I knew travel was so important to them and their mental health. So we went to them, got on phone calls, and asked: "What are you feeling?"

A lot of what I said earlier about travel being an identity came from these interviews. So we thought about how we could bring El Camino to their living room. We started an online community with virtual events. The big takeaway from 2020 to 2025 is that for the last five years, we've had a front-row seat to the pain points and inquiries our travelers have. They are asking questions in the community, and that is so valuable because it allows us to better serve them and tweak our products.

If you want to go back to the data: of the cohort that joins our community and has never traveled with us before, 20% of that cohort basically upsells and buys a trip with us within 90 days. That cut our sales cycle in half. When we saw that data, we went back to that cohort and asked: "Why did you buy the membership and then a trip?"

They said, "Listen, your reviews were great, your social media was great, but it almost felt too good to be true. This was a very low-stakes way to test out your brand and see if you are the real deal. When I got in there and saw the travel guides and questions from other people, it gave me that push to take the leap and spend my savings on that trip".

Brennen Bliss: I do want to double-click on this concept of memberships. Memberships are widely understood in travel to be ineffective; that is the narrative. Clearly, that is not the case here. Can you talk a bit about that?

Katalina Mayorga: That's interesting. Why do you think—before I answer—what have you heard about why memberships are ineffective in travel?

Brennen Bliss: The things I hear are: number one, people are not going to pay for things they can easily access online. Number two: if they're traveling once or twice a year, they don't necessarily want to do it with the same company; why would they be paying a membership? There is luxury where membership works well, like Inspirato, but generally, you don't see it frequently. So, I'm curious how the economics work and how that influences the flywheel.

Katalina Mayorga: It goes back to providing value and something meaningful that your audience can't get anywhere else. The only way to do that is by being obsessed with your user and being in the trenches talking to them all the time.

I think what happens in travel is a lot of companies are trying to be everything for everyone, or they’re still being pretty broad—like "women travelers". What does that even mean? We're half the population. "Millennials"—that was the big mistake I saw early on. Everyone was trying to be the go-to brand for "millennial travelers," but what does that even mean?

I think niche-ing down on who you want to be the best for is key. Ours is so focused on unique destinations, emerging destinations, and cultural immersion—not just food, but in all forms. We've niche-d down, and then we're super focused on creating value—specific travel recommendations and guides. In our community, we also have suppliers that have been vetted by us. We've cut out all that research and Google searching for our travelers. They go to the community and ask, "Who's the El Camino expert for Argentina?" They can trust them because they love our brand.

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