With over one billion active users, Instagram belongs to the upper echelons of social media platforms. Hotels all over the world are “increasingly using these tools, integrating them into their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies to engage customers in active conversations” (Garrido-Moreno, García-Morales, Lockett, & King, 2018, p.94). Yet the truly digital-savvy hotels, have understood that the possibilities of these tools are not merely useful for engaging guests (many from Generation Z) on a digital platform, but can be used to design their spaces, experiences, as well as allowing a co-creative model of visual storytelling to thrive. By looking through the lens of Instagram, these hotels can assess “their level of innovation and inspiration from the consumer perspective” (Anderson, 2017, p.1). Successful shows such as Netflix’s “Motel Makeover” featuring The June Motel is an excellent example of the owners understanding the inherent value of designing spaces and experiences through such a lens. Yet while the two owners of the June Motel (who had no prior hospitality experience to launching their motel) had an instinctive understanding of the instagrammmable hotel, research is needed on better understanding this phenomenon, both from an academic and practitioner perspective.
This project will focus on investigating our understanding of the instagrammmable hotel from multiple perspectives, namely (i) a guest-and-consumer perspective, (ii) from a hotel management perspective and (iii) from a social media expertise perspective. The project will help create a definition for the instagrammmable hotel in terms of spaces, experiences, and visual storytelling.
References
Anderson, C. (2017, September). In the millennial, social-media-centric age, Instagrammable hotels stand out. Hotelmanagement.Net, 1–3. Retrieved from https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/79885
Garrido-Moreno, A., García-Morales, V. J., Lockett, N., & King, S. (2018). The missing link: Creating value with Social Media use in hotels. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 75, 94–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2018.03.008
