The 10 Biggest Instagram Mistakes for Hotels
The 10 critical social media mistakes costing hotels views, reach and direct bookings. Learn why traditional approaches are failing to capture the Modern Traveler's attention and discover proven strategies to transform your social presence into a direct booking engine.
90%+ of hotels are losing potential direct bookings to OTAs through costly social media mistakes.
Our team has spent thousands of hours diving deep into hospitality social media, dissecting what works—and what spectacularly fails—for properties worldwide.
After countless hours in the trenches, crystal-clear patterns have emerged among underperforming hotel accounts.
These missed opportunities are costing properties hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) in direct bookings and forcing them to keep paying painful 15%+ OTA commissions.
Avoid these mistakes, and you'll be well on your way to transforming social media into your most powerful booking platform.
Here are the biggest mistakes we're seeing hotels make on social media...
#1: Reels That Feel Like Ads
This is the most common mistake we see – slow panning shots and countless b-roll clips with no defined structure.
If your content feels like it belongs in a commercial break, you're doing it wrong. Modern Travelers have an incredibly sensitive "ad radar," and the moment it goes off, they keep scrolling.
Hook viewers by creating content that guides them through an experience, not sells them one.
#2: Missing Onscreen Text
When there's no onscreen text, viewers can't process your content fast enough to spark their curiosity – they bounce within seconds.
Your content needs both a strong hook to stop the scroll and strategic text throughout to guide viewers through the experience you're showcasing.
Without onscreen text, viewers become unengaged as they're forced to process what they're seeing, instead of staying in a state of daydreaming about an escape to your property.
#3: Forgetting the Call-to-Action
We've seen absolutely stunning hotel content fall flat simply because it ends without telling viewers what to do next.
Another dopamine hit is always a scroll away – viewers need to be reminded to take action before they continue down the Instagram rabbit hole.
The most effective CTAs turn viewers into marketers…
A simple "Share with ___" transforms content into a word-of-mouth marketing machine, increasing view counts and bringing more potential guests into your booking funnel.
#4: Hyper-Specific Content
Most hotels churn out endless reels focused on just one narrow aspect of their property –
We see countless 30-second reels of a single activity or single feature of a resort.
People don't have the attention spans for hyper-focused content. It guarantees low engagement and wastes your one shot at capturing their interest.
#5: Team Posts Over Booking Content
Big brands love filling their feeds with stale, unengaging announcements and corporate initiatives. They're treating Instagram like LinkedIn.
Instagram isn't a corporate bulletin board, it's a booking engine. Save the press releases and industry accolades for LinkedIn.
I should add a caveat here – I'm not talking about behind-the-scenes content and turning your team into social media personalities like the restaurant Ember in Montana did…
That's a phenomenal social strategy.
#6: Underutilizing Influencer Collabs
While more hotels are dipping their toes into influencer partnerships, a few collaborations per year just doesn't cut it.
Most properties aren't maximizing these opportunities.
An even bigger mistake we see is when hotels invest in hosting influencers but don't leverage collab posts to bring that traction onto their own account.
#7: Clinging to Static Posts
Many properties are still heavily focused on static posts, with 80%+ of their content being image-based.
The Modern Traveler lives in their Reels feed. If you're not there with engaging video content, you're invisible to them.
#8: Unoptimized Booking Flows
The path from viewer to booking is often broken or non-existent.
Captions don't make it clear that viewers can book in a few clicks. Bio links lead to homepages instead of booking pages. Every extra click is a chance to lose a booking.
#9: Sharing the Wrong Clips
Some accounts have actually caught on to the fact that social media viewers have short attention spans, so they'll use fast cuts and quick editing.
But they're missing a critical piece – what actually goes into those cuts.
These hotels prioritize landscapes or scenery in their reels instead of hooking a viewer with a glimpse of their potential experience.
Viewers want to be inspired to escape, not watch a National Geographic special.
#10: Missing the Story Element
Hotels tend to focus on aesthetics over engagement, treating social media as a branding exercise rather than a booking engine.
There's no storyline to build tension or intrigue. Viewers aren't sticking around because you lost their interest trying too hard to "look pretty" rather than tell them a story.
Just look at any legacy hotel's Instagram – this surface-level approach is the industry standard.
The Modern Traveler is living in their social feeds, using them to discover their next getaway.
By avoiding these common mistakes, you'll instantly put yourself ahead of 90% of hotels and position yourself to capture the attention (and bookings) of these potential guests.
