How Instagram is Changing the Tourism Industry
Photo by Annie Spratt
In the past few years, Instagram has found its way to the hearts of wanderlust-filled travelers thanks to its easy-to-use features and eye-catching content. On the platform, users share moments from their everyday lives with their friends and followers via posts and stories. Traveling is no exception. Posts from tourism destinations around the world have become increasingly popular, leading to the rise in tourism in the world’s most picturesque destinations.
Shared travel moments can highlight experiences like eating an exotic cuisine in a local restaurant, getting a glimpse of a remote area on an island or a village, sharing cultural diversities, languages, traditions and more.
With such a wide variety of travel content posted by users, there are countless reasons to replace paper city-guidebooks with Instagram images that tell a living story. In this way, every traveler and tourism business can become representatives of a unique place and group of people. In this blog, we’ll cover why and how Instagram has changed the tourism industry along with suggestions on how your travel business can use the popular platform as a tool to boost engagement and bookings.
Why has Instagram Changed the Travel Industry?
According to statistics, 48% of people choose their destination based on what they see on Instagram and 35% of them discover new places to visit from Instagram. Although, this prompts the question: why has Instagram changed the travel industry so remarkably so quickly?
As previously mentioned, Instagram is a popular online platform with a high engagement rate due to its large volume of active users (1 billion per month). Platform users tend to engage to learn something new and to get recommendations from friends and those whom they follow including businesses and influencers. Naturally, the tourism industry has capitalized on this by using Instagram for increased reach by sharing original content and re-posting stories from travelers to show the many faces of the destination.
While in some cases this has fueled some destinations to become victims of their own success as a result of over tourism, especially those places home to exotic getaways, it has also become a tool to showcase more off the beaten path gems and secret hideaways. This opens up a world of possibilities for small tourism businesses and operators to market themselves, especially to influential market segments like Millennials and Gen Zers. Cultivating interest in your business and destination is simple with the right social media strategy. In this way Instagram can be an effective tool to persuade travelers to choose your services or destination for their next vacation.
How has Instagram Changed the Tourism and Travel Industry?
To become a leading tourism business on Instagram, it is important to know the origins of how social media marketing in the tourism industry has changed since the emergence of Instagram. Knowing this will help you better meet the needs and demands of your audience on Instagram using captivating content. Here we will discuss three biggest changes.
1. A Substitution for Print-out Travel Journals and Guidebooks
Today’s tourists prefer photos with living scenes and natural colors over the picture-perfect photoshopped ones that previously covered guidebooks. Travel photos shared on Instagram tend to look more realistic and candid in comparison to the formerly-prepared sceneries of guidebooks. Therefore, it is more likely that users will engage more with them the more natural-looking and “real” the content is.
The tone and language of guidebooks, travel journals, travel leaflets, etc. tend to be rather more “encyclopedic” than humanized. Hence, when users read the reader-friendly captions on Instagram, they are more likely to prefer the business, service or destination associated with them. Your caption can be informative and/or entertaining, both ways are conducive to interaction.
As an added bonus, skipping traditional print-out materials for those on social media is more environmentally-friendly, which is what Instagram’s user demographics prefer to see in a brand or business.
2. Contribution to the Growth of OTAs (Online Travel Agencies)
Another evolution in the tourism and travel industry by Instagram is the growth of OTAs or Online Travel Agencies. Before, travel agencies only existed in physical offices that worked from 9 to 5 and closed on weekends. Nowadays, thanks to the growth of technology, online travel agencies have emerged so that people can buy travel tickets to destinations or attractions at their leisure at the drop of a hat. Apart from their websites, these agencies can use Instagram to make their brand known and sell more tickets, tours, flights, transfers, hotels, sim cards, etc.
3. Making Travel More Sustainable and Cost-Efficient
Many tour guides and fellow travelers use Instagram to make travelers aware of what they can expect prior to departure. This includes tips on budget and sustainable travel, i.e. the best street food, accommodation, homestay, cycling routes, local businesses, souvenir shops and more. Knowing local life hacks can help you avoid overpaying and falling into tourist traps, which will provide for a more authentic experience for travelers.
How to Engage Travelers on Instagram?
If you have chosen Instagram to drive more traffic to your travel and tourism website and enjoy more sales, you should know how you can have an engaging account on Instagram. In other words, you should learn how to use Instagram features to attract greater reach for your account to generate visits to your website later. Here are some tips to make your tourism brand more appealing on Instagram.
1. Add Hashtags/Locations
Hashtags and geo-tags (tagging locations) are Instagram features that work like keywords in search engines. In other words, when you add a hashtag to your post, you have actually put your post in the search result of the users who search for that particular hashtag. Consequently, you open your post up to a wider audience. One step further is that you increase the engagement rate of your post as there would be more interactions with your content.
Locations, on the other hand, help your post to be shown to those who search based on location. Therefore, when you are posting for a special region, you can make your post open to all those who are interested in traveling to that destination.
Here are some examples of the use of hashtags/locations on Instagram:
instagram tourism travel hashtags marketing social media impact
2. Display Different Destinations
In order to make your account interesting to follow, you should post content for a wide range of destinations. Even if there is only one country that you work with, e.g. have tours, etc. you should post about many attractions in the destination’s country. From natural attractions to historical ones. Your social media strategy should be to encompass the interests of a wider audience.
3. Make Partnerships/Collaborations
You need to be very lucky to get your brand known on your own and without any collaborations. You can start collaborating with other brands or influencers depending on your budget. However, one great thing about Instagram is that there is no limit for advertising or collaboration even with low budgets.
Influencers have their own audience on which they have a great influence. If you want to get your online presence known, you should use influencers as channels through which you can access wider groups of audiences.
One thing that you should keep in mind is that when you start a collaboration or partnership with another brand or influencer, you should let them promote your brand image freely. The reason is that their followers can easily detect if there is a change in the tone or language of the influencer. If they realize a change, they are simply less prone to trust the influencer. Therefore, it is important that you give them enough elbow room to promote your brand.
4. Use Instagram Stories
As mentioned before, Instagram has a lot of users due to its attractive characteristics. In addition, as it is originally a mobile app, users can easily check it many times per day which increases the chances of them seeing your content.
A traveler can best use this platform to share their everyday moments during a trip.Therefore, as a traveler or tourism brand, you can immediately share content with your followers at any time of day and be sure that they will see your story. Content can include local food, a sustainable food experience, cultural diversity, beautiful scenery, a translation of language, etc.
Stories that come off as more organic are popular among Instagrammers. Popular content in stories is more lively, on-the-spot and real in comparison to feed posts. In addition, stories are more expressive than feed posts and you can interact with your followers more easily and closely. Adding stickers can make stories even more fun and interactive.
Here are some examples of using stickers on Instagram stories:
instagram stories stickers engagement sustainability tourism
instagram sustainable tourism travel stickers stories impact engagement tools
Conclusion
Instagram has changed the tourism and travel industry recently in many ways. Like any other industry touched by technology and the digital world, the travel and tourism industry will only keep moving forward to integrate technology and social media.
As a tourism business, remember that Instagram is a popular platform where you can promote your travel destination and services as an alternative to paper guidebooks, leaflets, journals, etc. Learning tips on how to do this, you can easily influence a wide audience and accumulate more sales and visits to your website.
Bio
I am Parichehr Parsi, a born writer, and a freelance copywriter in the fields of travel, fashion, and Instagram marketing. I currently write for SocialPros and online magazines in Italy and I love reading, writing, and researching. Find me on LinkedIn!
Parichehr Parsi