Mistake 1: The Empty Room Shot
Scroll any hotel's Instagram. You will find it. A perfectly made bed in an empty room. Styled cushions. Folded towels. Zero sign of human life. These posts average 30-50% lower engagement than any other content type. Nobody saves a photo of an empty room. Nobody shares it. Nobody books because of it.
The fix is simple. Show the room in use. A coffee cup on the nightstand. A book on the bed. Slippers on the floor. Curtains pulled open with someone looking at the view. The room is not the product. The experience of being in the room is the product.
Mistake 2: Posting Once a Day at the Same Time
Most hotels post once daily at a time their social media manager picked in 2019 and never changed. Instagram's algorithm in 2023 favors accounts that post 4-5 times per week with varied timing. Reels at different lengths. Carousels mixed in. Stories that use polls, questions and countdowns.
We restructured posting schedules for Rosewood Hong Kong and saw engagement jump 280%. The content was better too, but the posting cadence accounted for roughly half the improvement.
Mistake 3: Ignoring Food Content
Hotels spend millions on their restaurants and bars. Then they photograph the food with an iPhone in bad lighting and post it with no context. Food content consistently outperforms room and property content by 2-3x on every hotel account we have audited. Yet most hotels allocate less than 10% of their content budget to F&B.
Four Seasons Bali's best-performing content from our shoot was not the infinity pool or the jungle suite. It was a 12-second clip of a chef preparing a breakfast dish at Sundara restaurant. 1.8M views. The pool suite video got 400K.
Mistake 4: Hiring the Wrong Type of Creator
Hotels invite influencers with 1M+ followers for comped stays. The influencer posts 3 Stories and a carousel, tags the hotel, and disappears. Engagement is average. Direct bookings from the content: near zero. The hotel declares that "creator marketing does not work."
The problem is not creator marketing. The problem is hiring for reach instead of relevance. A creator with 50K followers who specializes in luxury travel and has an engaged audience of travelers will drive more bookings than a lifestyle influencer with 2M followers who posts about everything from skincare to restaurants.
Mistake 5: No Content Strategy Beyond "Post Pretty Pictures"
The hotels winning on social have a content framework. Aman alternates between architecture, detail shots, guest experiences and destination content on a 4-post rotation. Mandarin Oriental ties every post to a specific experience that can be booked. Marriott Bonvoy builds every piece of content around the loyalty program value proposition.
A content strategy does not need to be complicated. It needs to answer three questions. Who are we trying to reach? What do we want them to feel? What do we want them to do next? Most hotel social accounts cannot answer any of them.