How Hospitality and Travel Brands Make Influencer Marketing Work

The hospitality industry is at a crossroads. With Airbnb turning more people into innkeepers, huge shifts to mobile purchases of digital travel and consolidation like the just-announced Marriott-Starwood deal, hospitality brands are still finding the best way to build lasting relationships with customers that go far beyond reward programs and spam email blasts. The best hotels have been effectively harnessing the power of content and influencer marketing campaigns to connect with their customers, knowing that Nielsen recently reported that influencer content can lift brand familiarity 88 percent more than regular branded content. Yet, as social platforms change and target audiences consume digital media in different ways, the strategies for building a loyal following in hospitality have become more complex.

Great Influencer Marketing from Hospitality Brands

Many hospitality brands are going directly to users on Snapchat to build relationships through geofilters and other partial creativity tools in hopes that individuals will promote brand messages to their own network, and that they essentially crowdsource additional content that hits a critical mass from the sheer ease of co-creation provided by this tool. If I’m staying at a W hotel and don’t want to come up with language to go with the picture I’ve captured on Snapchat, W’s team can do that for me. The user is willing to share it if it captures an authentic message about how they feel about the picture being posted. While influencer marketing is more effective when you know the size of the audience available, these open opportunities for user-generated content can powerfully resonate within each individual’s social network. 

Marriott took that a step further last year with opportunities to co-create content with influencers that visited cities decided on by Snapchat users. They partnered with Casey Neistat and sent him to Haiti to both tour their recently-opened hotel and provide his audience with an overview of how the country has recovered from the devastating earthquake that rocked the country five years ago. Marriott knew that building a relationship with Neistat was key. They laid the foundation for it by letting him incorporate their brand message into content that was important to him, which gave him the ability to keep his output authentic.

Marriott continues to innovate with their Moxy Hotels brand, too, which just launched the Do Not Disturb video series hosted by comedian Taryn Southern. These humorous vignettes also feature influencers Mamrie Hart, Brittany Furlan and many other social media creators with built-in audiences participating in conversations where they share clever content that lines up with Moxy’s boutique hotel branding. 

Consumers Can Detect Pay-to-Play Influencers

Hospitality brands do want to proceed with caution, however. Early on, many travel-related influencer marketing campaigns were done as one-off relationships with creators purely on social media reach. The credibility of many of those creators were called into question as trips and free hotels were routinely handed out for positive reviews and mentions. Certainly, some of the most influential creators avoided this issue by retaining their independence with occasional criticism of the brands they represented (we’re thinking Ben Schlappig here). The key to avoiding this issue is ensuring brands connect with ideal creators who line up with their goals. Then, brands can let the creator lead on the content to ensure its authenticity. The occasional callout when a brand fails to meet the creator’s expectations ensure that the audience doesn’t question whether the content is simply being created as part of a PR campaign for the company.

Social media is a natural way for travel and hospitality brands to grow their business because they’re all visual and video platforms that can highlight destinations and accommodations. Brands need to sort out the right combination of user-generated content and influencer marketing campaigns for their products based on what works best for the social sites being targeted. There is no magic formula but a great place to start is to explore the powerful examples above and sort out which elements will work best for the character of your brand.