Columns

What we have learnedrunning collabs.

11 pieces on getting creator collabs to work: what to agree before anyone books, which formats do which job, and what changes from one location to the next.

For venues and brands

Running the collabs

10 September 2026 · 2 min

Somebody searches "club in Canggu" on TikTok. Is your venue in the results?

Somebody lands in Bali on Friday and wants to go out on Saturday. They do not open a search engine. They open TikTok and type "club in Canggu", and they scroll the videos that come back. Whether one of those videos is yours is not luck, and it is not follower count either.

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3 September 2026 · 2 min

Running creator marketing out of your Instagram DMs, and what replaces it

Most venues that run creator marketing run it out of one inbox. A manager checks the DMs between services, judges a profile from a phone screen, agrees something loosely, and hopes. It works often enough to keep doing and badly enough to resent. The problem is not the creators. It is that nothing was written down.

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26 August 2026 · 2 min

An empty room earns nothing: creator stays and the cost of unsold capacity

A hotel room that goes unsold on a Tuesday does not cost you the rate on the website. It costs you the linen, the cleaning and the breakfast, and nothing else. That gap between the marginal cost of a night and its retail value is the whole argument for creator stays, and it is why the maths works for accommodation in a way it does not for most businesses.

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22 August 2026 · 3 min

A Story lasts a day. A Maps review is still working next year.

Most venues judge a collab by what happened in the first day: how many people saw the Story, how many tapped through. That is the easiest thing to measure and the least durable thing you got. The parts that are still earning in six months are the ones nobody screenshots.

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10 August 2026 · 2 min

Most collabs do their job quietly. One of them pays for the year.

The honest objection to creator marketing is that it is hard to measure, and the honest answer is not better attribution. It is that the returns are not spread evenly. Most collabs do something small and useful. Occasionally one goes a long way, and that one is what you are actually playing for.

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5 August 2026 · 2 min

Put collabs in the hours that were not selling

The complaint about barter collabs is nearly always the same, and it is fair: a creator turning up at seven on a Friday takes a table you would have sold. That is a real cost, and it is avoidable. The venues that get the most out of this treat collabs as a tool for the hours that were not selling anyway.

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29 July 2026 · 2 min

What separates a Reel that fills tables from one that just gets views

Two videos of the same restaurant can perform completely differently, and the difference is rarely the budget. It is structure. This is what the ones that produce bookings have in common, written so a venue knows what to ask for and a creator knows what to make.

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For creators, models and UGC makers

Making the work

6 September 2026 · 2 min

Getting approved with under ten thousand followers

The most common reason people do not apply is that they assume they are too small. Venues are not buying follower counts, and they have learned the hard way that a large account with a distant audience is worth less to them than a small one with a local following. Here is what a review actually looks at.

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29 August 2026 · 2 min

Landing somewhere new without spending three days in the DMs

The pattern is familiar to anybody who moves between places to make content. You arrive somewhere new, and the first three days go on introducing yourself: finding the venues, working out who handles collabs, sending messages, waiting. By the time anyone answers you have lost half the trip.

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17 August 2026 · 2 min

UGC or influencer work: two different jobs, and you can do both

These two get used as if they mean the same thing, and they do not. The difference decides who hires you, what they judge you on, and what you can ask for. If you are good with a camera and do not have a large following, the second one is where the work is.

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2 August 2026 · 2 min

Hospitality work for models, and what it is actually worth

Models get measured by the same follower count as everybody else on most platforms, which is a poor fit for what they do. The value is in the images, the presence and the people you end up working with, and none of that shows up in a number on a profile.

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