The travel industry has spent decades trying to figure out how to make booking a hotel room seem exciting. Expedia appears to have concluded that the answer is to hand the keys to a hyperkinetic 20-year-old streamer named IShowSpeed and see what happens.

The online travel company has entered into a year-long partnership with Darren Watkins Jr., the creator known as IShowSpeed, who has amassed more than 150 million followers across YouTube, TikTok and Instagram by completing athletic stunts and broadcasting his travels to destinations including China, India and Australia. The deal, which Expedia declined to quantify but which a person familiar with such arrangements estimated at around $250,000, kicked off last month with a sponsored stream in which Mr. Watkins visited five Caribbean countries in a single day.

Lauri Metrose, senior vice president for global communications at Expedia, said the campaign — unofficially titled "Exspeedia," because of course it is — took more than six months to plan. The company brought in consultants from the gaming and streaming industries to avoid what Ms. Metrose described, with admirable directness, as the risk that "people will call bullshit right out."

The arrangement includes an interactive website where viewers can vote on Mr. Watkins's next destination, a dedicated TikTok account, and what Ms. Metrose characterized as a "war room" of employees tasked with clipping the most brand-appropriate moments from his unscripted livestreams. (One imagines the clipping is selective.)

"Speed is Speed," Ms. Metrose said. "You're not going to edit him."

The partnership represents something of a philosophical shift for Expedia, whose creator marketing has historically skewed toward audiences old enough to remember when travel agents existed. Ms. Metrose said the goal was less about bookings and more about "cultural relevance" — a phrase that tends to appear in marketing presentations when the return-on-investment slide is still blank.

Alessandro Bogliari, chief executive of Influencer Marketing Factory, suggested the deal reflects a broader change in how brands think about creators. "A year isn't a campaign," he said. "It's a content property."

Whether Expedia will still feel that way in month nine remains, as these things do, to be seen.

Original story published in Digiday: "Inside Expedia's year-long partnership with mega creator IShowSpeed"