Ally Bross on Shayne Showmance, Biggy’s Betrayal and More (Exclusive)

Destination X‘s latest episode, “The Knives Are Out,” lived up to its title, with Allison “Ally” Bross receiving a proverbial stab in the back before the day was done.

After last week’s competition left all the players completely off-map, with no one correctly guessing they were in Venice, Italy, the game changed. The remaining five players were taken off the bus to actually enjoy the place for a while instead of motoring onto the next one, and they did their next daily challenges right in the heart of the floating city.

The day started light enough with lunch and cocktails by the canals, but then things took a spooky turn. At nightfall, they took a gondola ride through town where mysterious people in masquerade garbs lurked, and they had to memorize them — a particular challenge for Ally, who has aphantasia. All five players were successful at the mission, though, each ending with three daggers to secretly put on one another to send three players into elimination. After Peter Weber and Rick Szabo successfully recruited Christian “Biggy” Bailey to betray his alliance with Ally and her showmance partner Shayne Cureton by playing daggers on their names, he then chose Ally and Peter to join Rick in the elimination bout, and the boys conspired to eliminate Ally in the card challenge, sending her home.

So how did Ally feel about Biggy’s betrayal? Did she and Shayne make a go of it after the show? And what else did she have to say about the season? TV Insider caught up with Ally Bross to find out!

I wanted to start just by asking the question that you’re probably gonna hear a lot, probably already have. What’s the status of you and Shayne? Did you try to make a go of it after the show? 

Allison “Ally” Bross: We did try. We were together for about two months after the show finished. I have a very free schedule. I’m an influencer. It is my full-time job to be on my phone. I’m always traveling, always out and about, and he had a more [steady] job in Indianapolis, and he wanted to make it work. He flew me to Indianapolis. He was like, “Don’t do this.” But I can’t see my partner once a month. That wasn’t gonna fly for me. And I feel like I was having so many self-revelations and self-realizations after the show that it was a time of self-discovery rather than, “Let’s do a long-distance relationship where I see you once a month.” But we’re such good friends. I talk to him like every other day. I’m going to visit him next week in Indianapolis. So I mean, I gained lifelong friends out of that and out of the showmance. 

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You mentioned that you’re a travel influencer. How has your business changed since you’ve been on the show? 

I have gained a ton of followers. Yeah, I think I actually have a statistic. I’ve been keeping track. [Checks phone] Let’s see, I started at 149,000, now I’m at 187,000. So that’s a pretty decent jump. Yeah, so that’s been super cool. I’m not allowed to sign on to do any travel influencing at the moment. I have to get permission due to my contract, but I’ve had multiple offers to do cross-country railroads and all sorts of things. So it’s gonna be exciting to get back out there and travel and do what I love to do the most. 

This was your first time doing TV. Is there some other show maybe in a similar vein that you’re interested in trying? 

I’m interested in trying everything. That’s my problem. With NBC, obviously, there’s Traitors and DONDI. Traitors, I think I would excel at. The only reason I did so well in this game was my social game. I think a lot of it was cut out, but there was so much going on behind the scenes. There was always so much scheming and figuring out how to bring someone in, how to take someone out of the alliance, how to make sure everything’s going well. So, I would love a redemption on something like Traitors, but again, Deal or No Deal Island seems really cool. I love to be in a bikini. That’s my favorite thing ever, so wouldn’t be mad about that. Mack [Fitzgerald] and I lived together, we’re roommates, and we talk about doing Amazing Race all the time. We think we would kill it. Survivor was my dream. I did a Survivor birthday party when I was a kid. So pretty much anything. I love the exhilaration of the social game and Destination X particularly, I feel like I would not go on again because my geography skills aren’t great. I don’t think I would be the first choice. I think that if they do another season, they’ll bring back Mack or Rick. But yeah, I would love to do another show. Even The Challenge, everything just looks so fun and challenging. 

So you mentioned the manipulation. How did you feel about Biggy turning on you in favor of Rick and Peter? Did you see that coming? 

No, I did not see that coming, and I’ve seen Biggy a few times in person since the show has wrapped, so I was very surprised to see that he put daggers on both Shayne and I because if he had just put his daggers on Peter and Rick, there would have never been a tie. I think the more shocking thing to me was that he put the dagger on Shayne; put it on me, okay, you’re not sure about the romance, but he didn’t know he was going to have the ability to save someone. That wasn’t explained to us until there was a tie. So I was quite shocked, but I have no bad blood. It was a game. I think it was a silly move because, at this point in the game, I think alliances should be shifting out because at this point, you’re wanting to go to the end with people you can beat geographically, right? And it seems like that’s not happening and people are sticking to their alliances, and I think that that’s gonna bite these boys in their a**. I think that Rick, Peter, and Biggy should have been thinking about, out of all of us, who has known the least about European geography? Shayne and I. So you would think to win the game, you would want to be against Shayne and I. So I was surprised, but I’m sure something will come to light next episode that explains Biggy’s strategy that I haven’t heard about, and I’m definitely gonna ask him about it next week when I see him in Chattanooga. 

The Biggy stuff wasn’t the only time there was like a dust up about behavior on the set, There was also Tai. When I talked to her, she was a little bit mad about you not bringing her the truth, and then Jonah, you told him the wrong thing with Bern. Do you have any like regrets about how all that played out? 

I have zero regrets. I was playing a very strong social game, that was my ticket to make it as far as I did. And I’ll start with Jonah since that happened first. Jonah was gonna put Germany, and I loved Jonah. Jonah and I were very close on the bus. I wanted to give him a fighting chance by telling him Bern without telling him Geneva. But what’s not shown is I actually told Rachel and Mac Bern as well. So my strategy was to have all three of them put Bern and hopefully Mack would go home because Mack was such a strong competitor, and I couldn’t tell Jonah Geneva because Mack was thinking Geneva. And if she told Rachel Geneva and I told Jonah Geneva, then we all would have been in a tie. So I had to try to convince all three of them to put Bern. And unfortunately, Jonah was three miles away from Mack. Otherwise, my plan would have worked. And I love Mack. We live together, like I said, but she needed to go. She was such a threat. She’d been backpacking Europe. So I don’t regret that at all. I felt bad that it was Jonah, but it wasn’t like a target to Jonah specifically. I was targeting three people. My priority was to keep me and Tai out of the map room, not out of the map room, safe in the map room. 

And then, in terms of Ty, yeah, she’s been pretty upset. I haven’t heard anything from her. I’ve messaged her twice saying, “Hey, how are you doing? Are you doing okay?” She hasn’t replied. She did name her podcast A Lover Girl Is Never a Girl’s Girl, and she talks about me and Shayne for about 10 minutes and how I betrayed her. But in my perspective, and you can let me know your outside perspective, I don’t think it was a betrayal. We felt betrayed in our alliance that she had leaked information to Peter. So, from my understanding, she’s very upset that I didn’t tell her we were actually in Amsterdam, but I found out she was talking to Peter. So at that point, it made no sense for me to stay in an alliance with someone who was gonna be lying to me. So, I doubled down the next morning. She said it in all her interviews. In the morning, she was thinking about putting The Netherlands, and I was like, “No, it’s Belgium, the Belgian waffles. There’s so many Belgium clues. You just have to trust me, girl, you got this.” But I had to keep myself and my alliance safe and Tai was leaking information. So, I mean, she had to go. I think that her theorized strategy could have worked if she had not been caught. And I think that that happens in game shows. Either you try a strategy and it works and it takes you far, or you try a strategy and you get kicked out. 

In this challenge, you actually got to go into Venice, so how was that for you just getting to finally get off the bus and actually be there in a place?

I loved Venice. I thought it was so beautiful. I was so excited. I thought that we were in Italy. I had guessed the Dolomites in my head, just because of the kayaking challenge. But Venice was so far from anything in my brain that I was so shook. I was like, “Holy s**t, the bus is on a boat. What the heck?” That was crazy. I kind of felt rocking, but I wasn’t sure. And then, yeah, that was absolutely crazy getting to walk around…. I buy children’s books for my future children from every country that I go to, and since Venice was the only place that I got to walk around, I got to buy my future kids a book from Venice. And I wrote in the front that I bought this during my experience on Destination X and “I hope you get to watch it one day” and blah, blah, blah. So that was really special to me. 

Destination X, Tuesdays, 9/8c, NBC