Influencer and collab in our serviced apartment

[wondabar]

We run a few serviced apartments in a town. We have just been approached by an Instagram influencer with around 300K asking for a week's stay in one of our serviced apartments in return for her to mention it in her posts. We would be losing around £700 in letting her stay there. Should we do it? Just wondering if her mentioning it would attract more direct bookings.

No !

She's a cheeky cow. Can you pay your bills with social media mentions?

God no!

I think this is really cheeky. 100k is not that big in the grand scheme of social media either. I’ve also seen more than 1 small business say they aren’t doing this sort of “exposure advertising” anymore as it doesn’t result in sales.

300K is nothing! She's a cf.

Influencer - shorthand for cheeky sods!

Sorry I misread 300k - still not huge. I really want to know who it was…

No! There was a hotel somewhere (Ireland maybe?) whose owner's response to an influencer who asked this went viral. He basically told her to fuck off. As should you!

Defo not.

You can buy followers for a pittance. Nowhere near that many will actually see anything she posts.

nope. If they have to ask they are not worth it.

Found it!
www.yahoo.com/amphtml/lifestyle/hotel-influencer-wanted-stay-free-155200839.html

Provide them with a personalised booking code and tell them that you will refund their stay if you get X amount of referrals from their post.

Hahaha no.

Are you struggling for bookings?

Essentially it's advertising, so if that week your apartment is empty anyway and you don't think you'll fill it, it could be worth it.

Make sure you agree certain parameters, e.g. 2 main posts, 3 stories, each tagging you Instagram page, plus a discount code when people booking using a specific code get 5% off their booking of a week or more with you.

Ensure sign-off from you about apartment content before posting - they could do a negative story about how unclean/ noisy/ smelly the apartment is if you don't (not saying it is, but who knows).

Alternatively, say you'll give them £100 discount for every person who books using the code they include on their post. So they pay up front for the week stay. Once followers have made bookings using the influencer's code you let them know and once that person has stayed and paid their bill you refund £100 to the influencer.

If they're confident their followers will book they'll be happy with this, if they're not confident why would you be?

Get everything agreed in writing if you do proceed.

Not a chance. It won’t just be the apartment shell expect for free. Every chance she’ll expect you to facilitate in getting everything else for free during her weeks stay. Let me guess - she’s also just bought herself a blue tick 🤣

I’d say it really depends on whether the influencer has a reach with followers that are your target customer. Is all her content travel related for instance? I sell a product, certain placements result in sales boosts but only because it’s niche, with a niche audience. but my product costs £50 rather than 700 so I can afford the gamble if it doesn’t work out.
Also tiktok has a big effect on sales with big exposure so can be beneficial if that’s the kind of content she’s creating, especially if you are not doing your own online marketing to that extent.

Hard no. She’s a chancer.

@Skatingwaiting makes a really good point about target audiences. Are your apartments particularly niche or special OP? Not to offend but the serviced apartments I’ve stayed in have been quite corporate and inoffensive. People tend to watch travel influencers because they go to luxury or niche places. I am not sure if city serviced apartments tie into that.

If she's convinced she's worth that then let her out her money where her mouth is - if X amount of people book your apartment via her special link then she can have her booking money returned!

300k is not enough, I have more than that and don't ask for free holidays! Unless she has a money back guarantee if you get nothing out of it, don't bother

I had an travel influencer of ~400K stay in my holiday cottage. It didn't cost me anything as my agency paid for it (it was part of a national sponsored PR campaign). The instagram posts got ~13K likes each post but I think I only got one additional booking because of it.

So I would say it's not worth it, given you would be losing out on income.

This is exactly what I was going to say!

Great idea! Bet the influencer won’t do it though …

Would you spend £700 on one social media advert? Because that’s effectively what you’d be doing. How many bookings would make it worthwhile, and do you think that’s likely?