They don't. The article is chockablock with unverified claims: Quantify "often." See this post? The "influencer" misspelled the tag of the outfit that supposedly "personally invited" her. Like, spelled "balloon" with one "o." You think that's the way pay-to-play works? There's a verifiable quote. The quote? A hotel manager who says that about 10% of the requests are "worth investigating." As in, "would I think of bothering with you." This is Chopard. They're a brand. They've got a million followers. This is one of Chopard's influencers. She's got 28m followers and an actual career. I fully believe that there are plenty of wannabes hammering random hotels for deals, but I remain unconvinced that there's a lot of pay-to-play amongst people with less than a million followers.since then, she has stayed in breathtaking hotels everywhere from Mexico to Quebec to the Cook Islands. Often, she stays for free.
While Linh and other elite influencers are usually personally invited by hotel brands,
“Everyone with a Facebook these days is an influencer,” she said. “People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It's people with 600 Facebook friends saying, ‘Hi, I'm an influencer, I want to stay in your hotel for 7 days,’” she said. Others send vague one-line emails, like “I want to collaborate with you,”with no further explanation. “These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” She said that only about 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating.
I would read the shit out of that. Let's be honest, it's a Funny-Or-Die webseries waiting to happen. You could call it "influencers" but that shit's already taken. Celebrity branding goes back to Josiah Wedgewood and the Queen. What's funny to me is that credulous sources like The Atlantic assume there's no calculus there. "How much does a hotel room cost me? How much will I recoup that expense if I give it away?" If you've got an empty room that otherwise goes fallow and your expenses are limited to the half man-hour it's costing you to clean it, you're looking at like a $10-$20 local equivalent cost so the barrier to entry is low - does some resort in Phuket make $10 from some Instagram influencer taking their picture at your hotel? Not if your hotel's name isn't listed anywhere on any of their selfies, it doesn't, like pretty much every shot The Atlantic used in their article."Loser twenty-somethings who are addicted to social media are harassing luxury hotels because other loser twenty-somethings are lying about getting to stay there for free"