Questions hotels actually ask.
The things owners and general managers put to us before anything is signed, answered properly rather than pitched at.
How do I get more bookings through Instagram as a hotel?
Treat it as a funnel, not a feed. Instagram is a booking channel like any other and deserves the same structure, and the reason most hotel accounts produce nothing is that they are running one stage out of three.
We work to a 3R model.
Reach. Getting in front of the right people, organically and through paid, inside the catchment that can realistically travel to you. The target is relevant viewers, never volume. A million irrelevant views will not fill a room.
Reassurance. Social media is now where guests do their research, so this is the stage that answers what they need to know before they are comfortable booking: the team, the amenities, opening times, what there is to do nearby. This is where the relationship gets built and the decision gets made easy.
Reservation. Mostly stories. The offers, the reminders, the reason to book now rather than later.
Most properties run one stage and skip the rest. Some make trend content, pull twenty thousand views a video and take no bookings, because the reach was built on an audience that was never given a reason or an offer. Others post nothing but offers, to an audience that was never built in the first place, and get the same result. The bookings come from the three running together.
Why am I not getting views as a hotel on social media?
There are a few usual causes, and most properties have at least two of them.
You are treating Instagram as a catalogue. Beautiful stills, nothing else. Instagram is not your gallery, your website is, and that is where professional photography belongs. Nobody opens Instagram to look at a hotel's portfolio. They open it to find information and to find places they would want to stay in. Views come from video that people can actually find: trending formats, something genuinely interesting, or something informational.
The quality is not holding up. Shaky footage, soft focus, bad audio. Social media gets better every year because creators keep investing in their setups, so the bar rises whether a property keeps up or not. If content is being filmed by whoever is on reception with an old phone and no kit, it will not perform, and it is not a fair representation of the property either. Quality is the rare thing that is a win on both counts.
You are not posting enough to compound. Consistency does the quiet work. Even at two hundred views a video, four videos a week is eight hundred people who did not see you before, every week. With the right strategy that number climbs rather than holds.
And you may be watching the wrong number. Views are close to the least useful metric a hotel can track. Shares, saves, link clicks and profile visits are the ones that indicate a guest moving toward a booking, and those are what we report on.
How do I go viral as a hotel?
There are plenty of ways to do it, but going viral is usually not the hotel's goal. The goal is to be fully booked. The two can correlate, but only when the rest is done properly.
We have seen it several times: a property films a trend, the video goes viral, the follower count jumps, and nothing arrives in the reservation system. That happens for one of two reasons.
The trend was irrelevant. It made people laugh. It did not make them want to stay. Reach without relevance is just entertainment someone else paid for.
Or there was no trust yet, and no easy way to book. Booking is a journey, not a single decision. Someone can decide they want to come, and if the path from that decision to a confirmed reservation is full of friction, they give up halfway and book a different property instead.
This is why PRES. does not stop at discovery. We work the whole process, and we actively bring the hotel improvements to make booking easier: offers that exist only on your own direct channels, a shorter route into the reservation system, information given upfront so a guest is not hunting for it, and offers promoted on social with the booking link right there, so the easiest option is always yours.
Going viral is not what makes a hotel fully booked.
How do I gain followers as a hotel?
If the follower number is genuinely the goal, then the first question to answer is why anyone should follow you. Nobody follows a hotel because they saw one video. People can follow unlimited accounts, so the only thing that earns a follow is a reason to keep seeing you.
There are three that work for a property.
Inspiration. They like the look of the hotel, they want to stay there one day, and they enjoy watching it in the meantime.
Education. Tips for trips, what is worth doing nearby, how to make the most of the area. Useful enough that they want the next one.
Entertainment. This works, with one caveat worth knowing. Entertainment for a hotel usually means behind the scenes, and behind the scenes gets watched by other people in the industry: receptionists, cooks, other hoteliers. It grows the number, it does not necessarily grow the guest list. If followers are the target, it is a route. Just know who you are collecting.
Two things make all three work harder. Put a call to action on every piece of content, because a viewer who enjoyed something still needs telling what to do next. And make content worth sharing, because a share puts you in front of someone's friends, which is new discovery you did not pay for, and paired with a call to action it converts into follows.
The strongest format for this is a series. Something people want to see the next episode of gives them an actual reason to follow rather than a vague good feeling.
Short version: build the reason, and the followers follow.
What are the best social media platforms for a hotel?
Instagram, with everything cross-posted to Facebook, and TikTok as a third surface rather than a third strategy. Google Business Profile sits outside the list and is not optional.
Instagram is where the main strategy lives. It is where destinations get shortlisted and where a property gets checked before anyone books.
Facebook runs off the same content. We would not build a separate Facebook strategy, because cross-posting puts one piece of content in front of two audiences. For most stay-destination hotels the Facebook audience skews older and more family-led, which is frequently the guest actually paying.
TikTok, the same way. People genuinely search on TikTok now, so being there is worth it, and we add extra cuts from stories and trials on top to keep the volume up. But it is cross-posting, not a second plan. More platforms means more reach, and that is the whole argument.
Google Business Profile is the one no hotel should be without. It sits closest to the moment of booking, it costs nothing, and it is the profile most properties fill in once and never touch again. If a hotel does not have one properly set up, that is the first thing to fix, before any content strategy.
For paid, we lean on Meta. Google Ads has its place, but Meta is where we can target the catchment precisely and buy visits to the booking page at a sensible cost.
LinkedIn only if the property has conference or event space. That business is bought by people who are on LinkedIn, not Instagram, and it is the one case where a separate platform earns its time.
How do I set up Meta ads as a hotel to get reservations?
Meta ads are one of the best paid routes to reservations, but only with a strategy behind them, and that strategy has to cover the creative as much as the targeting. People are not fond of ads that look like ads, and the visual side has to account for that.
Start with the goal of the specific campaign. Is this about getting discovered, about reservations, or about pushing one particular offer the hotel is running? Answer that before anything else, because the whole build follows from it. A campaign without a decided goal cannot be judged afterwards either.
Then make the ad itself clear. This is where cost per click gets misread. A vague ad will be clicked, because people are curious, and the cost per click will look excellent. But the person clicked out of curiosity, not with any intention of looking at a room. Cost per click only means something when the ad is clear about what it is, the path leads into the reservation system, and that path is short. Cheap clicks on a vague ad are not a good result, they are a cheaper way of buying nothing.
Remember what you are actually buying. It is still paid media. A small billboard round the corner does not perform like a large one on the motorway. With Meta you are buying reach, so more spend buys more of it. What decides whether that reach turns into reservations is how well the ad is built.
Then read the numbers and keep adjusting. No campaign is finished when it goes live.
How do I get more website traffic that turns into direct bookings?
Start by working out which half is broken: the funnel, the path, or both. In our experience it is almost always one of these three.
The funnel does not exist. There is nothing actually leading to the website. No Google Business Profile properly set up, no Google free booking links, no social presence pointing anywhere. The hotel has a booking page and no traffic arriving at it.
Free booking links are worth singling out here, because they are free and most independent hotels still do not have them. When a guest searches your property, Google shows a box comparing prices. Paid slots in it are Hotel Ads. Free booking links put your own rate and a link to your own booking page in that same box at no cost to you. If you are not set up, the only prices a guest sees in the moment of comparison are the ones that charge you commission.
The path is broken. The website is not built for making a reservation. In the worst cases a guest spends five minutes hunting for the booking link and then hits an error, and of course they book elsewhere. Far more often it is milder than that: an older website, a reservation system that looks cluttered and complicated, and the guest quietly switches to the portal because that journey is smoother. Nobody complains, they just leave.
Or the offer is not worth taking. This one catches hotels who have fixed the first two. The traffic arrives, the path is clear, and the guest still books through the portal, because the direct rate is the same and the portal throws in free cancellation. Guests compare everything available to them. If booking direct carries no advantage, there is no reason to do it.
What should a hotel post on Instagram?
Build the strategy first. Posting without one is the single most common reason a hotel account produces nothing, because random content cannot add up to a result.
At PRES. we plan every post against the 3R framework, so each piece has a job and each stage has its own formats.
Reach. Trends, viral formats, trial reels, aesthetic and inspirational video, collaborations, UGC and creator work. Content built to be found by people who do not follow you yet.
Reassurance. The informational layer: what the rooms genuinely look like, what there is to do around the property, the staff, opening hours, real guest reviews and reposted guest experiences. This is the content that answers a guest's questions before they have to ask, and builds the trust that makes booking feel safe.
Reservation. Special offers, booking links, and content whose explicit job is to ask for the booking.
Then make it a plan you can actually keep. A month of strong video followed by a month of silence undoes the work, because consistency is what compounds. Set a strategy the property can sustain, follow it, and adjust it based on what the results tell you.
What does a hotel social media agency cost?
It depends entirely on what is actually included, and the fee on its own is the wrong thing to judge.
We understand why the question is loaded. A lot of hotels have been burned. An agency charges a great deal of money, delivers eight nice videos and a strategy document, calls it finished, and the property is left with a hundred thousand views and nothing in the reservation system. Paying ten thousand euros for reach that produces no bookings is not a marketing cost, it is a loss.
The other end of the range has its own problem. A very low fee buys exactly what it is worth: inexperienced people, weak production, and content that will not perform no matter how consistently it is posted.
So judge the offer, not the number. The questions worth asking:
- What are they actually measuring? If what they show you is view counts and how beautiful their videos look, that is not a result, it is a portfolio.
- How much of the journey do they cover? Plenty of agencies work on one fifth of the path and leave the rest to you. Content with no offer behind it, no booking path and no reporting is not a system.
- Do they execute, or do they hand you a plan? A strategy that someone else has to carry out is not a delivery.
- Does working with them add work to your team, or take it away? It should take it away.
- Will they tell you what is wrong when it is not their department? Your website, your booking engine, your on-property setup. It is all connected, and an agency that only protects its own scope is not working on your revenue.
- Are they honest about what they cannot do?
And give it time. Nothing meaningful can be judged after one month. Three to four months is the point where the numbers mean something.
That is how PRES. is built. We make the strategy, we execute it, and we answer for the result. We work the whole booking process, and we bring you improvements wherever we find them, including things outside social entirely, from the booking path on your website to QR codes and photo frames on the property itself. Most agencies make attractive videos. Very few are thinking about guest psychology, how a booking decision actually gets made, and the arithmetic of your revenue.
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