Instagram has long been one of the most powerful platforms for hospitality and tourism marketing, thanks to its ability to visually capture destinations, experiences, and lifestyle-driven moments. Engagement rate has traditionally served as a primary performance metric for evaluating content success and measuring interactions (such as likes, comments, shares, and saves) relative to follower count.
However, the industry has recently entered what can be described as an “engagement rate crisis era.” Platform changes, including the ability to hide likes and views, combined with increasingly selective content sharing by creators, have made performance measurement more complex and less transparent. While benchmarks remain critical for setting expectations, marketers must now interpret engagement data with greater context and rigor.
In this article, TURNER's Senior Digital Manager Karla Hernandez takes a look at benchmark findings from 2024 through January 2026 and examines how these metrics should be understood in today’s evolving Instagram environment.
What the “Travel Industry” Encompasses in Benchmark Research
In social media benchmark studies, the term “travel industry” is used as an umbrella category rather than a single business type. Most analytics firms group together multiple sectors that serve the traveler journey. These typically include:
- Hospitality and lodging: hotels, resorts, boutique properties, vacation rentals, and serviced apartments
- Tourism and destination marketing organizations (DMOs): state tourism boards, city tourism bureaus, and visitor authorities
- Transportation providers: airlines, cruise lines, rail services, and car rental companies
- Travel services and booking platforms: online travel agencies, tour operators, and travel planners
- Attractions and experiences: theme parks, museums, cultural institutions, and guided tours
Because of this broad classification, engagement rate benchmarks for the “travel industry” reflect a blended dataset of brands with very different audience sizes, content strategies, and business goals. Some reports narrow this further into categories such as “Dining, Hospitality, and Tourism” or “Hospitality and Hotels,” which focus more specifically on lodging and destination brands.
Understanding this scope is essential when interpreting benchmarks and applying them to individual hotel brands or influencer campaigns.
2024: Travel and Tourism Industry Performance
In 2024, the travel industry demonstrated relatively strong engagement on Instagram compared with many other sectors. Data from Rival IQ’s Social Media Industry Benchmark Report found that travel brands achieved an average engagement rate of approximately 0.398% per post.
This benchmark was calculated using interactions such as likes and comments relative to follower count across thousands of brand accounts globally. Travel ranked among the higher-performing industries due to the inherently visual and aspirational nature of its content.
2025: Dining, Hospitality, and Tourism Benchmarks
By 2025, industry research increasingly segmented hospitality and tourism into more specific categories. Hootsuite’s benchmark analysis reported that dining, hospitality, and tourism brands achieved engagement rates as high as 3.52% when posting at optimal frequency. Average performance across typical posting schedules ranged between 1.5 and 3.1%, depending on content format and audience size.
Dash Social’s 2025 Travel Industry Benchmarks supported these findings, showing that travel and hospitality brands commonly reached engagement rates between 1.3 and 3.5%, with short-form video content driving the strongest interaction.
Together, these studies demonstrated that while engagement rates began to stabilize and slightly decline compared with earlier years, hospitality and tourism brands continued to outperform many other industries.
January 2026: Early Hospitality Engagement Trends
Formal annual benchmark reports for 2026 are still emerging, but rolling datasets provide insight into early trends. According to Social Insider’s Hospitality and Hotels Industry Benchmarks, global hotel and hospitality brands recorded an average Instagram engagement rate of approximately 0.46% per post as of early 2026.
By comparison, the overall Instagram engagement rate across all industries was approximately 0.48%, indicating that hospitality brands continued to perform slightly above the platform-wide average despite declining organic reach.
These figures reflect increasing competition for attention and underscore the need for stronger creative strategies and deeper performance analysis.
The Engagement Rate Crisis Era: Hidden Metrics and Selective Visibility
The current social media environment presents new challenges for interpreting engagement rate. Instagram now allows users to hide likes and views, reducing transparency and making traditional benchmarking more difficult. At the same time, many creators selectively showcase only their highest-performing posts, creating a curated version of performance that does not reflect true averages.
This has led to a growing risk of engagement distortion, where profiles appear more successful than their overall data supports. A grid filled only with viral posts can mask inconsistent performance across less visible content.
As a result, engagement rate alone is no longer sufficient as a vetting metric when evaluating influencers for partnerships.
Why Influencer Vetting Must Go Beyond Likes
In this new era, brands must take a more comprehensive and formal approach to influencer evaluation. When metrics such as likes and views are hidden or selectively displayed, deeper qualitative and quantitative analysis becomes essential.
Effective vetting should include:
- Reviewing comment volume and consistency across multiple posts
- Assessing the quality of comments, including whether they are relevant, thoughtful, and conversational rather than generic or bot-like
- Observing audience behavior patterns, such as repeated commenters or genuine community interaction
- Requesting or reviewing additional metrics when possible, including shares, saves, story views, and reach
- Evaluating overall posting history rather than only the highest-performing content
This approach helps ensure that even when some metrics are hidden, the creator demonstrates consistent audience engagement and authentic influence.
For hospitality and tourism brands, this is especially important because partnerships rely on trust, storytelling, and emotional connection rather than simple numerical reach.
What Engagement Rate Should Be Considered Successful in 2026?
Early 2026 data shows a decline in average Instagram engagement rates compared to 2025. While hospitality and tourism brands saw averages between 1.5 and 3.5% in 2025, current benchmarks now sit closer to the 0.4 to 0.6% range.
In today’s landscape, a realistic measure of success is:
- 0.5% or higher
- 1.0% or higher as a strong result
Engagement should be evaluated alongside comment quality, consistency across posts, and available indicators such as saves and shares. In an era of hidden metrics, sustained interaction matters more than isolated high-performing posts.
Conclusion
Between 2024 and early 2026, Instagram engagement rates for hospitality and tourism brands ranged from approximately 0.39 percent to 3.5 percent, depending on methodology and content strategy. While the industry remains visually powerful on Instagram, the rise of hidden metrics and selective performance visibility has reshaped how engagement should be interpreted.
The engagement rate crisis era demands a more nuanced approach. Benchmarks remain valuable, but brands must pair them with deeper qualitative analysis and comprehensive influencer vetting practices to ensure authentic performance and meaningful audience connection.
In a platform environment where not all data is visible, true influence is revealed not just by numbers, but by the quality of interaction and the consistency of community engagement.
References
Rival IQ. (2024). Social Media Industry Benchmark Report.
Hootsuite. (2025). Social Media Benchmarks by Industry.
Hootsuite. (2025). Average Engagement Rate on Instagram.
Dash Social. (2025). Travel Industry Social Media Benchmarks.
Social Insider. (2026). Hospitality and Hotels Industry Benchmarks.
Social Insider. (2026). Social Media Benchmarks.
