Somewhere this week, a hotel marketing manager will open their Instagram Insights and watch the number drop again.
Nothing about the account changed. Same posting time, same content mix, same photographer they’ve used for two years. The algorithm simply decided, overnight, that fewer people needed to see it. There’s no appeal process, no explanation, just a graph going the wrong way and a boss running out of people to ask for answers.
This happens to travel brands more than to almost anyone else, because travel content is exactly the kind of content platforms have gradually deprioritized.
Instagram’s average reach rate now sits at 3.5% of followers, itself a 12% year on year decline. Facebook is worse, at 1.65%. According to data form Social Insider, a hotel group with 50,000 Facebook followers can expect roughly 825 people to see a given Facebook post. Not 50,000. Not even close.
None of this is a glitch. It’s the business model doing exactly what it’s designed to do. Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn no longer give reach away for free; they sell it back as an ad product. We are well and truly in the pay-to-play era of social. The organic post that a team spent an afternoon planning, shooting and captioning is, from the platform’s perspective, a sample. The boosted version is the actual product.
Travel has been through this exact argument before, just in a different channel, and it’s worth remembering how it ended.
Repeating history
For years, hotels handed distribution to online travel agencies (OTAs) and let commissions quietly erode margins because chasing direct bookings took more work than accepting the OTAs’ traffic.
Then, enough of the industry decided that the trade was no longer appealing. According to the State of Distribution Report 2025, OTAs’ share of hotel bookings fell from 30% to 22% in a single year, while separate estimates showed that direct bookings across Europe grew 8% to 15% year on year over the same period. The 2026 State of Distribution report reinforced this, finding that while OTAs still account for a significant share of bookings, direct-booking infrastructure is now nearly universal. Hotels that invested in their own booking engines, their own guest data and their own loyalty relationships discovered they didn’t need the OTAs’ audience nearly as much as they’d assumed.
Organic reach is the same trade, wearing a different outfit. A following built entirely on someone else’s platform is a relationship you’re renting—not ideal when the landlord is a callous mercenary who puts the rent up without warning.
A brand can post brilliantly for three years and still lose most of its audience the moment the algorithm decides that content type is out of favor or a platform simply falls out of fashion with the traveler it’s chasing. Nobody who built an audience on Myspace or Vine got their connections or followers back when those platforms disappeared.
The alternative isn’t complicated, even if it’s less glamorous than a viral reel. It’s owning the relationship rather than borrowing the attention. Email, SMS, app notifications, loyalty data: any channel where the traveler has actively said yes, talk to me directly, and the brand controls delivery end-to-end.
One widely cited study of hotel executives found that 81% saw a revenue lift after building a first-party data strategy. That isn’t a marginal improvement sitting alongside the social numbers. It’s the difference between a channel that compounds year on year and one that resets to zero every time a platform wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and rewrites its ranking signals.
Successfully leveraging social
None of this is an argument for abandoning social media. That would be a wild take for me to present. Discovery still happens there, and increasingly it happens earlier in the traveler’s journey than almost anywhere else, as destination inspiration moves from search engines to short-form video.
But there’s a real difference between using a platform to find people and depending on it to keep them. The first is smart. The second is a bet that someone else’s business model will stay generous to yours indefinitely, for free, which is not a bet any other part of a travel business would be allowed to make with its own money.
The practical shift for your social media is simple. Every piece of content should be doing two jobs: earning attention where the algorithm can see it and pulling the most engaged part of that attention somewhere the brand actually owns.
A booking confirmation is a chance to get someone onto an email list they will actually open. A high-intent comment thread is a chance to invite someone into a WhatsApp community or a loyalty program, not just to reply with a heart emoji. None of this replaces social. It’s what makes the social worth doing at all, because the value stops evaporating the moment reach does.
Back to that marketing manager and their falling graph. The uncomfortable truth is that the number was never really theirs to depend on. It belonged to the platform the whole time, on a lease that can be revised without notice, and usually is. The travel brands that shrug off the next algorithm change will be the ones that spend this year building something the algorithm can’t touch. Everyone else will keep opening Insights on a Tuesday morning, hoping this week’s number is kinder than last week’s.