With a roaring 500 million monthly active users, sharing around 80 million images and videos each day, Instagram became the world’s most popular photo-sharing application which had proved user-friendly too.
Well, as we know Instagram purely serves as a photo sharing app, this key feature has been targeted by the travel industry in the present era. People of all generations love looking at images of beautiful locations and favorite spots on earth which someday they may visit.
Eventually, the ones who benefit through this are the travel agencies and their travel photographers. Travel agents attract their customers through Instagram by specifically targeting only those people who are adventurous and love moving on to places. Specific Hashtags helped them in this process.
Instagram Stories was like a cherry on the cake, as travel photographers specifically added photos of the locations on Instagram Stories. Instagram live video functionality too proved to be an asset. Travel agencies made an option for those who loved to get there, can directly visit the booking page for the service in just a simple click.
This, in turn, provided opportunities for various hotel chains, travel agencies and also tourism operators. This ultimately created a new channel of income for travelers and photographers.
A popular page on Instagram, Beautiful Destinations has over 9.3 million followers. Clients like Hilton Worldwide Hotels, Marriot Hotels and the New York City’s tourism board pay them a huge sum to sign with them.
The tourism board of many other countries like Norway and Iceland used this strategy and they found a record-breaking increase in the number of tourists who have been influenced and attracted by the images they see on Instagram.
Instagram is indeed a boon for the travel industry.