A weighted rubric for scoring travel creators

What to take away

Score creators against fixed criteria before you brief them, so the choice is defensible to finance and to your destination partners.
Keep the rubric to five criteria, so a small team can apply it consistently.
Multiply each score by its weight and add the columns; audience overlap carries the most weight at 30%.
Gather the evidence yourselfa media kit or a tool result is a starting point, not the assessment.
A creator who scores well on audience but poorly on disclosure record should not win the brief, however cheap.

Where does creator scoring sit in the planning sequence?

Scoring comes after the objective and the audience, never before. Picture a tourism team in Yorkshire with £12,000 for the shoulder season. Until the objective is written down, there is nothing to score a creator against, and every candidate looks plausible.

Write the objective as a single sentence with a number and a date. "Raise off-season bookings from the North of England by 8% before March" is a strategy. Then define the audience you want to reach, because the first rubric criterion measures against it.

Planning sequence before budget

Write objective with number and date
Define target audience segment
Read strategy and planning guide
Fix budget after sequence
Brief creators and contract

The full sequence, from objective through to contract and reporting, is set out in the strategy and planning guide. The rubric below handles one step of it: choosing between candidates once the brief's purpose is clear.

How do the five weights work?

Each criterion gets a score from 1 to 5, and each weight decides how much that score can add to the total. Because the weights add up to the whole, the highest possible total is 5, and the third column shows the most each criterion can contribute.

Creator scoring rubric

Criterion

Audience overlap: 30%
Content quality: 25%
Engagement authenticity: 20%
Values and disclosure: 15%
Cost against reach: 10%

Weight

Audience overlap
Content quality
Engagement authenticity
Values and disclosure
Cost against reach

Score 1-5

Audience overlap
Content quality
Engagement authenticity
Values and disclosure
Cost against reach

Weighted score

Audience overlap
Content quality
Engagement authenticity
Values and disclosure
Cost against reach

Criterion	Weight	Most it can add to the total	Evidence to gather
Audience overlap with target segment	30%	1.5	Audience location and fit
Content quality and consistency	25%	1.25	Recent content
Engagement authenticity	20%	1.0	Engagement quality
Values and disclosure record	15%	0.75	Past labelling of paid posts
Cost against reach and output	10%	0.5	Fee against what is delivered

For example, a score of 4 on audience overlap adds 1.2 to the total, because 4 multiplied by 30% is 1.2. A score of 2 on disclosure record adds only 0.3. The arithmetic is simple on purpose, so finance can check it.

What evidence earns a score?

Audience overlap is scored from audience location and fit, not from follower count. Creator audiences are not interchangeable with destination audiences, so a large following in the wrong region scores low here however impressive it looks in a media kit.

Content quality comes from recent posts, read for consistency rather than one standout video. Engagement authenticity comes from engagement quality, which means reading the comments, not counting them. Use creator-discovery tools such as Modash, CreatorIQ or Traackr alongside platform search to find candidates, then check each point yourself.

Disclosure record is scored from how the creator has labelled paid and gifted posts before. The CMA's guidance for content creators says that everyone involved must take responsibility to ensure all ads are labelled correctly, so a past habit of burying labels is a real risk to the brand.

Look for a clear label such as "Ad" upfront, rather than one after a "more" break or buried among hashtags. The CMA also notes that its guidance covers disclosing gifts and upfront, prominent disclosures in reels, stories and other video content, which is where many travel posts appear.

Cost is scored last and weighs least. A longlist built from Instagram search may include cheap creators, and a low fee should not rescue one who scores poorly elsewhere.

When should one low score decide the brief?

When the low score is on disclosure record. A creator scoring 4 on audience overlap but 2 on disclosure record should not win the brief, however cheap they are. The weighted total can hide that, so apply the check before you compare totals.

The routine takes six steps, and it works for three candidates or thirty.

Fix the objective and the audience first.
Build a longlist and drop anyone clearly outside the audience.
Gather evidence for each criterion yourself.
Score each criterion from 1 to 5 and multiply by its weight.
Check the disclosure score before you compare totals.
Record the evidence beside each score, so the choice can be defended.

A selection checklist covers the screening questions that sit upstream of the rubric. Use it to decide who reaches the longlist, and use the rubric to decide who wins.

What happens to the scores after the campaign?

Set a review meeting for a fortnight after the campaign closes. Decide what you would repeat, what you would drop and what the next brief should say differently. Bring the scores, because the review is where you learn whether the weights were right.

Compare each creator's results with the score they earned. If a creator scored high on audience overlap and the campaign missed its audience, the evidence behind that score was thin. Agree the metrics before the first post goes live so this comparison has data to work from.

Name two or three metrics that connect to the objective, not ten that flatter the report. A rubric improves each time it is checked against what actually happened, and the review meeting is where that check takes place.

Common questions

How many creators should we work with?

For a first campaign, three to five creators in one segment is usually enough to learn what works. Spreading a small budget across a dozen creators makes the results hard to read.

Why only five criteria?

A small team can apply five consistently, and five weights are easy to explain to finance and to destination partners.

What if the campaign misses its target?

Review the objective, the audience match and the creative before blaming the creator. A miss usually traces back to a brief that was too broad or a channel that did not reach the right people.

Should cost count for more on a small budget?

The cost criterion stays at 10%. A small budget makes a poor audience match more expensive to fix, so the audience weight matters more, not less.