Inflatable unicorns, petal baths and infinity pools: how Instagram ran amok with our holidays

Alice Paris can pinpoint the precise moment her tiny hotel became Instagram famous. In July 2016, an Instagram couple – Jack Morris and Lauren Bullen – posted the same picture to their collective audience of almost 2.5 million followers. In it, Bullen floats in the pool’s clear water while Morris lounges nearby. Between them, a strategically-placed bowl of oranges contrasts with the cool whites and blues of the enclosed courtyard.

It was a picture that launched a thousand imitations. On Instagram, there are over 6,500 posts that tag Le Riad Yasmine in Marrakech. Scroll through them and you will see the same variations on a theme. Overhead shot? Tick. Bowl of oranges or breakfast tray? Tick, tick. Blissful sense of isolation? Bingo.

“When they both shared one picture, we earned a lot of new followers and had so many requests for bookings,” says Paris, who runs Le Riad Yasmine with her partner, Gabriel. Having spotted Morris and Bullen on Instagram, she invited the pair to stay at her traditional Moroccan riad – a neat bit of social media marketing that has paid off many times over. “We started to be fully booked all the time from that moment,” she says. Now, her hotel is booked solid for the next five months.

But what is it about Le Riad Yasmine that makes it so Instagrammable? “We are always trying to improve the decoration and make things nicer to feel more comfortable,” Paris says, but she didn’t decorate the hotel with Instagram in mind. “We think of what we like first. We wanted the space to be zen, and full of natural colours and plants,” she says.

Although achieving Instagram fame requires a decent amount of luck, most successful posts stick to a tried-and-tested formula, says Sara Tasker, an Instagrammer with 200,000 followers who runs courses helping other people to master the platform, and hosts a podcast called Hashtag Authentic on the same topic. “There are definite trends on Instagram and styles that you need to tap into if you’re going to grow an audience and speak the Instagram language,” she says.

Around half of the people that take Tasker's courses want to learn how to use Instagram to promote their small business. The other half dream of becoming influencers – Instagrammers who are paid (in freebies or cash) to promote certain brands. Often, she's asked how to achieve Instagram fame. “Normally I start by telling people that it's really not what they think it is.”

But for many, the holy grail is becoming a travel Instagrammer, getting paid to roam the world and share envy-inducing photos of your adventures. And the key to a successful travel ‘gram, Tasker says, is to showcase your experiences. It’s about moments, not things. A popular formula, she says, is a breakfast in bed shot with crumpled sheets and a jaw-dropping view. That, and the now-ubiquitous glass-of-champagne-in-an-ornate-bath snap, get across the sense of a blissful, perfect moment that can’t easily recreated at home. Extra likes are available if the bath is full of petals. Drone shots of a single person on the beach, a style that Tasker calls “me on the beach,” also feature prominently, as do “floaties” – over-sized inflatables shaped like unicorns or dolphins.

A certain amount of duplication is to be expected, Tasker says. After all, there are only so many angles that work when you're snapping a photo of your poolside breakfast. The trick is to pick a neutral background – a white or a wood hue works well – to really make the colours of your breakfast pop. But Tasker doesn't think this duplication much to moan about. After all, is it that different to hordes of people taking that same shot of them holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa? The only cardinal sin is too much purple. “Not many people have purple on their Instagram,” she says, so hotels that splash out on lilac risk relegating themselves into Instagram's room 101. “People probably just won't book those as much.”

And then there’s the infinity pool – one of the age-old staples of travel Instagram. “We never thought about the kind of attention it would attract when building it,” says Amanda Syrowatka, director of sales at the Viceroy Bali, a luxury hotel that’s been tagged in more than 12,000 Instagram posts. “In the early days we took a photo of a woman standing on the edge of the infinity pool with her arms outstretched, and I believe this has been copied or mimicked to some extent by most guests - we've even had brides in their wedding gowns shuffle out to the centre of the pool and stand on the infinity edge.”

According to Angela Giakas, a travel blogger with over 450,000 Instagram followers, there’s a subtle art to getting the perfect infinity pool shot. “If we're shooting a pool, we also have to take into consideration how many people will be there,” she says. “We had an infinity pool for our last hotel and decided to wait just before closing time at 6pm to quickly run in after everyone had already got out and get the shot. It worked out, thankfully.”

Syrowatka and her colleagues get roped into taking infinity pool shots “all the time,” she says, but doesn’t mind one bit. For her, like Paris, Instagram success is something to be embraced, but that you can’t plan for. “We build and design to aesthetically please the eye at all angles, incorporating the beautiful nature that surrounds us, but not particularly with camera angles and photos in mind,” she says, adding that more bookings come through Facebook adverts than Instagram referrals. “If you are designing something well and with the highest quality fittings and style, then good pictures will come naturally from this.”

Tasker agrees. “Photography has a lot of principles and rules that people follow, and Instagram is just one facet of that with its own set of rules,” she says. In other words, if it looks good in real life, there’s a good chance it’ll look great on the ‘gram. “The appeal of a really visual space that people can capture themselves in will probably be around for quite a while,” says Tasker, pointing to a colourful tiled wall outside a south London studio as an example. A couple of years ago it was unheard of, but now a steady flow of Instagrammers are making the pilgrimage to have their photo taken in front of the pastel backdrop. “That picture is everywhere – it’s on everyone’s Instagram.”

Theses Insta-pilgrimages happen on a global scale too. “I know that there are people who have an Instagram itinerary and they travel the world to get those shots in those places,” Tasker says. On a recent trip to Australia’s blue mountains, Tasker picked her AirBnB partly because it had the right Instagram aesthetic, even if it meant that fitting her five-year-old and husband in would be a bit of a squeeze.

Both Giakas and Tasker know that for some naysayers, the idea of travelling to a place to take the same shot as thousands of people before you seems a little redundant. But people who think that are missing the real point of Instagram, Tasker says. “We don't buy tourist knick-knacks, we don't send postcards, we take pictures and that's how we remember the experience. If it gives you the impetus to live the life you want to live – because you want to get that picture of it – ultimately you get to live that life so maybe it's not all bad.”

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