Instagram travel influencers coping with COVID-19 travel disruption

Social media influencers, or digital creators followed by online audiences of thousands and millions, are a hot marketing tool that grows over 50% annually. Recently, the impact of COVID-19 on travel has severely disrupted this developing market, and heavily impacted travel influencers whose livelihood depends on collaboration with tourism, hospitality, and food businesses. This research presents the first "big data" evaluation of the induced transformations among the top Instagram travel influencers. The findings are based on computer image recognition of photographs published by 140 travel Instagrammers ranging from micro- to mega-influencers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the research proposes a methodology of identification of sponsored posts among travel influencers based on the fuzzy matching of post mentions and a global database of 6 million businesses.