A hotel Instagram account has one job that a restaurant account does not: it has to survive the gap between someone seeing you and someone booking you. That gap can be weeks; in regional Western Australia it is often months.
Most accounts we audit are built for the first second and nothing after it.
tldr; these mistakes are killing you 👇
Here are the six mistakes that cost the most, roughly in order of what they are worth. And they are worth real money, because industry estimates put OTA commission at 15% to 25% of booking value while direct acquisition sits closer to 4% to 5%. On a $250 night that is about $40 a booking, every time you push someone back to a platform instead of catching them yourself.
If you want the idea layer rather than the diagnostic one, we have already written ten Instagram Reel ideas for hotels and restaurants.
1. Your room photos look like everyone else’s room photos
Wide angle. Bed made. Cushions arranged. Curtains open. Lamp on.
Every hotel in Australia has this shot, which means it does not distinguish you from anything and it certainly does not get sent to anyone.
The room is not what people are choosing. They are choosing what the room is near, what the light does at 6am, whether the balcony actually looks at the thing you implied, whether they will hear the road.
The fix. Shoot the view from the bed, not the bed. Shoot the walk from the door to the water. Shoot what is out the window at the hour it looks best. If your rooms are genuinely ordinary, sell the location and be honest about the room. Honest and ordinary converts. Vague and staged does not.
2. You never mention price, so every DM is a price question
Hotels avoid price on social out of habit. The result is that price becomes the first question in every enquiry, and enquiries do not scale, especially when you are running a property with a skeleton front desk.
The fix. Publish price with context somewhere in your regular content. “A weekend here for a family of four, all in, looks like this.” Break it down: room, meals, the activity, the fuel from Perth. Not because you are cheapest, but because you are the only one being straight.
This gets saved and sent constantly, because it does the arithmetic someone was about to do badly. It also filters your DMs down to people who are actually in market.
3. You have no availability signal
An account that never mentions dates trains people to assume you are always available, which removes any reason to act now.
This is particularly costly in WA, where the good weekends in the South West and the dry season up north sell out in patterns your audience genuinely does not know about.
The fix. Say what is left. “Two weekends in October.” “Last river-view room for the June long weekend.” Real scarcity, stated plainly, not manufactured urgency. If you are running a Kimberley or Pilbara property, remember Western Australia Day falls on the first Monday in June and is a genuine intrastate booking driver that does not exist in any other state, so it is worth calling out by name.
4. You are ignoring your DMs, which is now a ranking problem as well as a service one
In January 2025, Instagram head Adam Mosseri named the three signals that matter most for ranking: watch time, likes per reach, and sends per reach. Likes carry more weight for reaching existing followers. Sends carry more weight for reaching people who do not follow you yet.
For a hotel, sends are also literally the booking conversation. Somebody forwarding your post to their partner is the exact moment a trip becomes real.
Yet most hotel accounts we look at have unanswered DMs going back weeks, and content designed for likes rather than for forwarding.
The fix. Answer DMs like they are the front desk, because they are. And design posts around a simple question: will one person send this to another person, and why? Nobody plans a trip alone, which makes tourism unusually well suited to that test.
5. Your feed is built on guest photos, and that is now a penalty
This one caught a lot of properties out, because nothing announced itself.
Instagram introduced restrictions on unoriginal content for Reels, then extended them to photos and carousels on 30 April 2026. Accounts that mainly post content they did not create are no longer eligible for recommendation to people who do not already follow them. Your existing followers still see you. Explore and suggested posts do not.
Plenty of WA properties built their entire grid on regrammed guest sunsets. It was a sensible way to keep a feed alive with no budget. It is now the reason your reach went flat and you could not work out why.
The fix. Keep guest content, but transform it. Your edit, your voice, your context on top. And shoot more of your own, even roughly. Original and imperfect beats borrowed and beautiful.
6. You post inspiration and never answer a question
The last one is the biggest and it underpins the other five.
Search has stopped being a list of links. The Pew Research Center tracked nearly 69,000 Google searches from 900 US adults and found that when an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional search result 8% of the time against 15% without one, and clicked links inside the summary about 1% of the time (Pew Research Center, July 2025; Google disputes the methodology).
So when someone sees your Reel, opens a new tab and searches your property name, what they meet is increasingly a generated summary of you, built from whatever information exists. If you have not published the answers, someone else’s stale listing has.
For a WA property that is a serious exposure. Distance makes practical questions load-bearing here in a way they are not for a hotel in the Melbourne CBD. Drive time from Perth with a realistic stop. What is open in the wet. Whether the road is sealed. What the reception is like. Whether the restaurant runs seven nights in shoulder season.
The fix. Publish those answers properly on your own site, keep them current, and repeat them in captions because most people never click. Then make sure the second tab has something worth staying for. Our guide to tourism website mistakes covers what usually breaks.
The through line
Every mistake here has the same shape. The account is built to be admired rather than to be used.
Admiration is cheap in Western Australia. The landscape does most of it for you. What converts is being the property that answered the question, showed the real thing, said what was left and made booking direct the obvious move.
Want a straight audit of where your account is handing bookings to an OTA? Get in touch.
