Attract More Guests With Influencer Marketing for Hotels

The hospitality industry is highly competitive, making it an ongoing challenge to win over potential guests. But a powerful social media marketing trend can offer big help for hotels, especially when it comes to attracting younger audiences. When used effectively, influencer marketing for hotels can deliver powerful benefits including new perspectives, fresh and authentic content, and increased brand awareness and bookings.

Research shows that Millennials and Gen Zers take roughly 20% more trips than other generations, and they devote nearly 30% of their incomes to travel. In addition, these same groups put significantly more trust in influencers than other generations do, and their leading channel for product discovery is social media. It’s also worth noting that 62% of travelers use platforms like Instagram and TikTok for inspiration, with 29% swayed by influencer partnerships.

Our own 2025 Influencer Travel Study offers even more evidence of the power influencers can provide for hotels specifically. Just a few of the study’s findings include:

• Nearly three-quarters of travelers have booked a hotel based on a recommendation from an influencer.
• More than 35% of survey respondents said they consider influencer advice when making travel decisions. 
• 54% of travelers on Instagram and 57% of travelers on YouTube report placing either a fair or great amount of trust in influencers’ recommendations. 

The data is clear: A strong social media presence with genuine influencer content can help you attract guests — especially younger hotel guests who look to these personalities for travel recommendations. For independent or boutique hotels with limited staff, influencers can also help fill in marketing gaps and provide the attention-grabbing, authentic content social audiences crave.

Hotels Need To Use Influencers or Risk Being Left Behind

Influencer marketing is relatively new for most hoteliers, but its ongoing success indicates this tactic won’t be going away anytime soon. Influencers’ creative marketing ideas for hotels can help your brand stand out, and these pros bring a ready-made audience with them, too. Your competitors are likely already using influencers to reach new audiences, so it’s time you do, too.

Why Is Influencer Marketing Important in the Hospitality Industry?

Standing out in the competitive hospitality industry is difficult without fresh, compelling content, and influencers’ engaging posts give hotels an edge in increasing brand awareness or providing social proof. Even better, influencer-created content can accomplish these and other marketing objectives faster and more effectively than a branded ad, as their audiences already trust what they have to say. Boutique hotels and independent properties without many resources can use influencer marketing campaigns to grow their audience in less time than doing so organically.

Why Should Hotels Work With Influencers?

It is difficult to overstate the importance of social media marketing for hotels, especially when looking to reach younger consumers — nearly 85% of social media users are between the ages of 18 and 29. Partnering with an influencer is an easy way to get your brand noticed across platforms, including those you may not be savvy about yet. The fresh marketing ideas and original content stand out from the crowd, and the influencer’s long list of followers has already been won over for you. Influencer marketing doesn’t have to be a one-and-done arrangement, so hoteliers can invite these partners to experiential marketing events or yearly engagements to help foster repeat business.

How Can Hotels Leverage Influencer Marketing?

Most travel influencers have a legion of followers who trust their opinions on hotels and destinations. Hoteliers can leverage this relationship to boost off-peak reservations or secure bookings for a new property. Giveaways, follower discount codes, guest posting and sponsored posts can all be effective in marketing campaigns, especially when each influencer adds a personal spin.

Otherwise, the most effective types of influencer content for hotels are authentic, visually appealing and engaging. Room and property tours, posts exploring local attractions and culture, posts highlighting the experiences offered at the property, and (as mentioned above) promotions and contests are especially powerful.

Category-Specific Influencer Marketing Strategies

For added influencer marketing success, different hotel types can also use strategies geared toward their particular category. Consider these effective tactics for common property types:

Boutique Hotels

For boutique hotels, it’s important that influencer marketing efforts deliver a fit with their unique vibe, style and audience. For example, a property with a particularly artsy feel could collaborate with influencers whose content focuses on the arts or arts-driven travel. In their posts, these influencers could highlight the hotel’s aesthetic and showcase its paintings, sculptures, design elements and other features with high artistic appeal. 

Diving deeper, they could even tell the stories of the artists behind these works and property details. Additional posts could spotlight the art galleries, museums and other art-driven attractions in the vicinity of the property. 

To encourage the creation and sharing of user-generated content, the hotel and influencer could launch a contest asking followers to create their own artworks that fit with the hotel’s vibe and share their submissions on social media with branded hashtags. The winner(s) could be rewarded with a stay at the property, and their winning artworks could be displayed at the hotel.

Luxury Hotels 

In most cases, luxury hotels achieve the best results by partnering with lifestyle influencers, fashion bloggers or upscale travel enthusiasts. These influencers’ followers tend to be more affluent, and their content often aligns with a luxury property’s high-end brand image. For these brands, a partner influencer’s posts could focus on exclusive perks and amenities available at the hotel, along with the unique features and services that set it apart from the ordinary. Spotlight the property’s most elegant and expensive accommodations, its premier chefs and extravagant dining experiences, its curated art collection, or its premium spa services. 

Images and videos shared by the influencer should highlight the property’s exceptional location and its stunning views. For a series of posts that’s sure to impress the target audience, treat the influencer to an all-inclusive VIP stay that spotlights the top-shelf experiences available at and around the hotel, from room service and fine wines to yacht trips, pet pampering and highly personalized concierge services. Associated contests could reward winners with their own stays at the property — or even the same VIP treatment provided to the influencer. 

Budget Hotels

Budget hotels can reap big benefits by developing partnerships with influencers and bloggers focused on travel savings, as their followers are likely to have a strong interest in booking economical accommodations. To appeal to this audience and highlight a particular hotel as a budget-friendly choice, a partner influencer could share posts showcasing the amenities and perks that make a stay at the property a good value, such as free Wi-Fi, free breakfast, free parking and on-site pool facilities. Posts focused on the hotel’s location could spotlight fun and wallet-friendly things to do in the area, including the best nearby restaurants, attractions and activities for travelers on a budget.

The influencer could also offer cost-saving travel tips, with the hotel’s money-saving features and value-adding offerings woven into the narrative. Another angle could see the influencer challenged to complete a full trip on a specified (and relatively low) budget, with the partner hotel featured as the cost-effective accommodation of choice.

How Do Hotels Find the Right Influencers for Their Brand?

When searching for an influencer to meet its marketing goals, your hotel must evaluate a combination of factors to find the right fit. Consider the following criteria when choosing influencers to partner with.

• The influencer’s built-in following. Hotels can find influencers with audiences whose demographics, interests and travel preferences align with those of their own ideal target audience by using research tools such as influencer marketing platforms.
• The influencer’s social platform of choice, which should deliver a match with your target audience, the type(s) of content you’re looking to share and your hotel’s primary existing social channels. In most cases, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube are the best social media platforms for hotel influencer marketing. 
• The influencer’s reach, which should be a fit with the planned campaign’s goals and budget. For hotels, this consideration often involves making a decision between macro-influencers vs. micro-influencers. While influencers with larger followings can provide access to larger consumer audiences (typically at a higher price), studies have shown that audiences of more niche influencers tend to be significantly more trusting and engaged — making them more likely to convert.

Your hotel can also leverage a range of useful tools to ease its influencer search, including:

• Influencer discovery platforms streamline the process of finding the right influencers by filtering an extensive database of candidates based on audience demographics, reach, location, content type and follower engagement.
• Influencer marketing software such as GRIN, which can help you quickly search influencer profiles across popular social platforms to find the right champions for your brand.
• Social platform searches for relevant hashtags such as #LuxuryTravel, #BudgetTravel and #TravelBlogger can help you find appealing candidates. Use geotag searches to track down travel influencers who are active in your area and region.

How Do Hotels Measure the ROI of Influencer Marketing?

In most cases, the primary objective of a hotel’s influencer marketing campaign will be increased bookings. There are two ways to measure the direct impact an influencer campaign is having on your bookings:

1. Have your influencer provide unique booking or promo codes to his or her audience for use when making reservations.
2. Place trackable UTM links in their content. 

Either of these options will allow you to trace bookings directly back to the influencer’s efforts. With that information in hand, you can compare the revenue generated by those bookings to the cost of your influencer collaboration to determine your campaign ROI.

But direct bookings aren’t the only benefits an influencer campaign can bring for your hotel. Other business-boosting advantages include:

• Increased brand awareness. Track reach-related KPIs such as the total impressions of the influencer’s posts, and use social listening tools to monitor for increases in brand mentions during the campaign. 
• Increased website traffic. Use tools such as Google Analytics to determine the number of visitors the influencer’s posts and content delivered to your hotel’s website. Examine session duration, bounce rate and other metrics that reflect the quality of the traffic being brought in by the influencer.
• Social media engagement. Track likes, comments and shares on both the influencer’s and your hotel’s social platforms. Any higher-than-ordinary follower growth on your hotel’s social platforms during the campaign period can also be an indicator of increased engagement.

What Are the Biggest Mistakes Hotels Make in Influencer Marketing?

Some of the biggest mistakes hotels make with their influencer campaigns include:

• Putting an outsized focus on an influencer’s number of followers. In many cases, working with “smaller” influencers can provide a higher ROI for hotels via a lower cost of collaboration and more engaged, loyal and targeted audiences.
• Failing to partner with an influencer whose following, content and values deliver a match with the hotel’s branding and the campaign’s target audience. Careful candidate research, audience analysis and content review can help hotels find an optimal influencer pairing.
• Neglecting to communicate clear expectations and campaign goals with the influencer partner. Each influencer partnership should be supported with a transparent contract that outlines specifics such as the type of deliverables expected, the number of posts to be shared and the hashtags to be used.
• Overlooking disclosure requirements such as labeling paid-for posts with clear and conspicuous sponsored-content tags and otherwise being transparent about any material connections between influencers and hotel brands. Both parties should be aware of and follow the FTC guidelines in place to prevent deceptive advertising.

How Much Should Hotels Budget for Influencer Marketing?

How much hotels pay for influencer marketing can range greatly — from a free stay to thousands of dollars per post. A nano-influencer with fewer than 10,000 followers may accept a compensated room in exchange for advertorial content, while a mega influencer with a cult-like following may charge thousands of dollars per post. Ultimately, the price a hotel will pay for an influencer engagement will vary based on the influencer’s number of followers, the projected impact of the post, the quality of the content and other factors.

For More Digital Marketing Success, Turn to TravelBoom 

Whether your hospitality brand needs social media, content development, website development or search engine marketing, look to TravelBoom. We’re experts at digital marketing for hotels and resorts — and we’re ready to put our know-how to work bringing more guests to your property. Connect with us today to discuss how we can help you boost the effectiveness of all your hospitality brand’s marketing efforts.

About TravelBoom Hotel Marketing

TravelBoom specializes in developing and executing customized data-driven marketing solutions that drive direct bookings and growth for its clients. With over 25 years of experience in digital marketing for travel and hotels, TravelBoom leverages advanced data science and analytics to uncover insights and develop strategies that greatly enhance results for our clients and reduce reliance on third-party channels. TravelBoom is also host of the world’s #1 ranked Hotel Marketing Podcast and its quarterly Traveler Sentiment Study both of which can be found at www.travelboommarketing.com.