Meliá Hotels Uses Local Influencers to Drive COVID-19 Awareness

Brochures and signage are easy to overlook, but social media influencers are harder to miss. As they work to bring back guests during the Covid-19 pandemic, a number of hotel chains are relying on partnerships with social media influencers to educate guests on the new safety protocols they've put in place.

At Meliá Hotels International, a Spanish hotel chain with more than 380 locations around the world, safety is top of mind for both guests and executives. As travel begins to pick up and marketing strategies kick back into gear, Meliá is launching a Covid-related campaign with the social media influencer Chiara Ferragni. Meliá's global director of social media, Santiago Garcia Solimei, says the campaign is designed to educate customers on the measures the company is taking to ensure safety at its hotels.

"Our number-one goal for this campaign is to raise awareness of the changes we've made at our hotels to ensure the safety of our guests and staff," Garcia Solimei says. "We know how important it is to earn the trust of our guests in the current context of Covid-19."

Like so many other hospitality groups, Meliá closed down almost all of its hotels at the height of the pandemic. Given the unprecedented nature of the shutdown, Garcia Solimei says Meliá felt it was important to establish new procedures to ensure the safety of guests. Those procedures, created with the help of a third-party organization called Bureau Veritas, became the basis of a new social media campaign. The #StaySafewithMeliá protocol includes new check-in procedures, food and beverage protocols, cleaning processes, and a full re-design of the hotel experience.