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Best hashtags for hotels: tags that reach guests before they book

October 18, 2026

What are the best hashtags for hotels? The ones browsed by people choosing where to stay in your town, and the ones your past guests already post under. Giant tags like #hotel, #travel or #luxuryhotel take thousands of new posts a day, and most of them come from other hotels, travel creators and booking sites. Instagram now caps a post at five hashtags, so each of the five has to point at a real person: a couple planning a weekend away in your city, a family looking for a pool within driving distance, a guest from last month who posts their breakfast and wants to find your account again. This guide shows how to build a pool of hotel tags, how to pick five per post, and how to check each month which ones bring people who book.

Why hotel hashtags are harder than they look

A hotel sells something nobody can try first. The guest decides from photos, so Instagram matters, and the tags decide which photos get seen. Four things make the niche different:

• Most of the audience on the big tags is other hotels. #boutiquehotel and #hotellife look lively. Scroll the recent posts and you will mostly find properties, agencies and creators, all hoping to be seen by the same few travellers.
• Guests search by place first. Nobody plans a trip by browsing #hotelroom. They look up the town, the neighbourhood, the beach or the festival, then pick somewhere to sleep near it.
• Your guests post for you. People share the view from the room, the breakfast tray and the pool. The tags they use are the best evidence of how future guests search, and they cost you nothing to read.
• Seasons change everything. Ski weeks, summer at the coast, a Christmas market, a conference in town. The right five tags in February are the wrong five in August.

For the general method (broad, mid and niche tags, with a worked example), see best hashtags for Instagram. If you write about trips rather than host them, best hashtags for travel covers the traveller’s side. This article is for the people running the property.

The best hashtags for hotels, by type

Every property, from a six-room guesthouse to a resort, draws on the same six kinds of tag. What changes from post to post is the mix.

Place tags reach people who have already picked the destination and are now choosing a bed. Stay-type tags reach people who know what kind of place they like. Trip tags catch people at the planning stage, before the town is settled. Experience tags sell the moment a guest will remember. Industry tags reach other hoteliers and suppliers, which is useful for hiring and partnerships and close to useless for bookings. Your own tag collects every guest photo in one place.

Five tags is the ceiling, so the pool matters more than the post. Keep the pool in groups and choose five for each post. Pasting the same thirty tags under every photo no longer helps at all.

How to build your hotel hashtag set

You need the Instagram app, a notes file and about an hour.

1. Write one sentence about the guest you want. “Couples from London looking for a quiet weekend in the Cotswolds.” “Families who want a pool within two hours of Madrid.” “Business travellers in town for the trade fair.”
2. List your places from narrow to wide. Street or neighbourhood, town, region, the landmark people come to see. #alfamalisbon before #lisbon, #windermere before #lakedistrict.
3. List what people come for. The hike, the beach, the vineyards, the wedding venue down the road, the festival in June. Each is a tag candidate and a reason to post.
4. Read your guests’ posts. Search your own location tag and your hotel name. Note every tag guests used. These are the words your future guests think in.
5. Open each candidate tag in the app. Are the recent posts about stays like yours? Does the tag belong to a chain, a football club or a band with the same name? Drop anything that does.
6. Check how busy each tag is. A tag with a handful of posts in the last month has almost no audience. One flooded every minute buries you. Keep tags with steady recent posts from real guests.
7. Look at what properties one step ahead of you tag. Pick a few places in your area or your style with a bit more reach. Treat their tags as candidates and check each one yourself.
8. Save the pool in groups, one per kind of tag, plus a seasonal group you swap every few months.

If you are not sure how to search a tag or read its page, how to search hashtags on Instagram covers the phone and the web. To spot an event or trend that is rising now, see how to find trending hashtags on Instagram.

Best hotel hashtags for each kind of post

A room tour, a breakfast shot and a winter offer are found by different people. One fixed block under every post wastes most of your five.

The local guide post is the one most hotels skip and the one guests save. “Five things to do within a walk of the hotel” with place tags reaches people still choosing the town, which is earlier than anyone searching for a room.

Hashtags for guesthouses, boutique hotels, resorts and groups

• Guesthouses and B&Bs: place and stay type lead. #bedandbreakfast plus your village beats any luxury tag, because the reader you want is looking for character and a host.
• Boutique and design hotels: #designhotels and #hoteldesign reach people who choose a stay for how it looks. Pair them with a place tag so the reach is not all other designers.
• Resorts: experience and occasion tags carry most of the weight: honeymoon, family holiday, spa weekend. Place tags still matter for the region.
• Small groups with several properties: keep one pool per property. The places differ, so a shared block sends each hotel’s posts to the wrong town.
• Direct booking: a tag like #bookdirect is mostly read by other hoteliers. Say “book direct” in the caption and spend the tag on a place.

Common mistakes with hotel hashtags

• Leading with #hotel, #travel or #luxury. The post is gone in minutes, and the people on those tags are mostly other accounts.
• Only tagging the hotel, never the place. Guests find the place first. A post with no place tag is invisible to the people closest to booking.
• One block for every post. A spa photo and a conference room need different readers.
• Ignoring guest tags. The tags guests use after a stay are free research. Read them every month.
• Tags in a language your guests do not search in. If most guests come from abroad, check the tags they use, which may not be yours.
• Never changing with the season. Last summer’s beach tags under a winter offer reach nobody planning a winter break.

How to tell which tags bring guests

Instagram’s insights show how many accounts reached a post from hashtags. That says “seen”, not “booked”. Three cheap checks get closer:

1. Ask at check-in or in the booking form: “How did you find us?” Note every answer that says Instagram.
2. Compare similar posts. Two room tours a month apart with different place tags tell you more than any single number.
3. Watch who saves and messages. A save from a local account is a weekend guest. A message asking about dates is the best signal you will get.

Do this monthly. Drop the tags that bring nothing for two months and try a new one from the pool.

When the manual way is enough

For one property in one town, the routine above is all you need. It is free, takes an hour to set up and a few minutes a month to check, and nobody knows your guests better than the person at the front desk.

It stops being enough when:

• you run several properties, each with its own town to tag;
• you handle Instagram for a few hotels or a small group;
• you want to compare dozens of candidate tags at once instead of opening each page;
• you want to see which local accounts post most under your area’s tags, to find creators to invite for a stay (see how to find influencers on Instagram);
• you want the research written down so you can repeat it each season.

A faster way to plan the research

The slow part is deciding what to look at: which tags, how far back, and what to compare. Hashtag Ninja takes that as a sentence. Write something like “hashtags a ten-room boutique hotel in Porto should use to reach couples planning a weekend away”, and the free planner returns a research plan: the tags to look at, how many posts per tag, over what window, and the assumptions it made. You can correct an assumption, such as the wrong town, before relying on it. Planning needs no account, and the hotels page lists hand-picked hotel tags to choose your five from.

Running the plan, which means collecting the posts and returning a written report and a CSV, is open to anyone signed in, on the 500 free rows every account starts with. The pricing page says what more rows cost. The report answers what the monthly check above asks by hand: how many posts a day each tag carries, typical and top engagement, which accounts post most under each tag, which tags appear together, and when posts go up.

A short checklist

• One sentence for the guest you want to book.
• A pool of 20 to 30 checked tags in six groups: place, stay type, trip, experience, industry, your own.
• Five per post, chosen for that post.
• A different mix for rooms, views, breakfast, local guides and offers.
• Every tag opened and read before you use it.
• Your own tag on the key card, the menu and the welcome note.
• A seasonal swap every few months, and a monthly look at what guests tagged.

Start with your town and what people come to it for. That alone puts you ahead of every hotel pasting the same thirty giant travel tags under every room photo.

Plan your hotels hashtags →