The effects of influencer marketing on hotel establishments

Influencer marketing; is the type of marketing between the brand and the consumer that enables businesses to maintain promotional activities through influencers, through social media networks and reach their potential customers. One of the sectors that use influencer marketing as a technique is tourism and hotel businesses benefit from influencer marketing. Hotel businesses can quickly reach their target customers with influencer marketing, increase brand awareness, booking and sales, produce content for social media and increase interest in the hotel by promoting with the interaction it provides. This research aims to reveal the effects of influencer marketing on hotel businesses. For this purpose, a study was carried out on Alaçatı hotels with an overall rating of five and at least 70 comments on Tripadvisor. For the purpose, data were collected with the interview technique, which is one of the qualitative research methods with the 17 participants consisting of the business owners, sales and reservation managers of the hotels operating in Alacati, which cooperate with and do not do business with the influencers. In addition, information about the Instagram accounts of the hotels in which the interview participants operate was evaluated. Content analysis and descriptive analysis were applied to the obtained data. According to the analysis results, it was determined that some of the hotels included in the research benefited from influencer marketing, while the other part did not benefit from influencer marketing due to the low number of rooms and a loyal customer profile. Also on the hotel enterprises of influencer marketing; increase brand awareness, interest and sales, reach a certain audience quickly, and, while there are positive effects such as free content production for social media, influencers want to receive continuous service in exchange for promotion, some influencers can make simple and sloppy shares, and in high season, to make compromises on sales by allocating rooms to the influencer, after an unconscious cooperation, there are negative consequences such as customers outside the target audience can come to the hotel.