The Influence of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Social Media Engagement of Luxury Hotels

The objective of this study is to analyze the use of social media by luxury hotels, focusing on identifying the reactions of consumers toward the experiential messages issued by this type of hospitality firm. This research emphasizes how the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic affected potential guests' online engagement behavior. An exploratory observation of the official social media accounts of 36 premium hotels in the Canary Islands allows for extracting digital content from 1070 Facebook posts published in 2019 and 624 posted in 2020. Based on descriptive analysis, engagement indexes are built on quantifiable elements of participation (i.e.: likes, shares, and comments). The key implication of this research is that luxury hotels have considerable scope to improve their communications on social media, especially regarding the design and diffusion of messages that include affective components.