Ahead of the Hospitality Social Media Summit, taking place in London on 3–4 September 2026, we spoke with Santiago García Solimei, a member of the summit faculty and one of the most experienced voices in hospitality social media.
Santiago is the former Global Director of Social Media and Brands PR at Meliá Hotels International. Across 18 years at the group he grew the social function from a single person into a team of thirty-five and built global social care spanning 15 brands, more than 500 profiles and 43 countries, handling over 500,000 guest conversations. In the process he turned social customer care from a complaints desk into a measurable commercial engine. He is now the founder of Unfiltered Mindsets and Unfiltered Hotels, and teaches across business schools in Spain and France.
In this interview, Santiago explains why social care sits closer to revenue than reputation, how to triage guest conversations when volume outstrips capacity, what social listening surfaces that standard reporting misses, and where AI belongs in the guest relationship. He also previews Own the Conversation, the Day 2 lab where delegates build a Social Care Action Plan. His central argument is a simple one: social care is not the unglamorous corner of social media, it is where the business is won or lost.
You came into hospitality from software. What pulled you towards social media, and towards the care side of it in particular?
I started my career in software: Andersen Consulting, then Microsoft, then Sage in Australia for about ten years. When I moved to Mallorca, the obvious pull was hospitality. It is a massive industry there. I joined a smaller tourism agency and was then hired by Meliá on the marketing side, which is where my career really turned.
After a few years leading larger campaigns, 2016 was the moment social media became a main channel. What attracted me was the chance to completely disrupt the way companies communicated. Communication had become multidimensional. Clients, associates, anyone could share opinions publicly, and I thought there was going to be a lot of innovation here. So I took the opportunity to build the social media department at Meliá from scratch. I started with one person on my team and ended with around thirty-five.
Why social care specifically? That connects to the most unexpected thing I worked on: the pandemic. With a multi-country operation and social listening in place, we could see issues emerging in China and Southeast Asia before they hit us. Then everything happened at once. Hotels closed, destinations shut, and we had to automate. We had to provide answers to people whose flights were cancelled and whose reservations had disappeared.
That led to something remarkable. We decided to show what was really happening: Meliá hotels being converted into COVID facilities for mild cases, our entertainment experts showing families what to do with their children at home, and ultimately a project where Meliá gave away 10,000 rooms to healthcare workers, doctors and security forces. We were even featured on the BBC. We doubled Meliá’s brand awareness in Spain during that period, and that was when I truly understood the power of social media to do something meaningful at scale.
What is still misunderstood about social media in hospitality?
The biggest misunderstanding is that social media is a free activity. Because you do not need a budget to open a channel, a lot of smaller hotels assume it costs nothing. But the rules are set by the platform owners, Meta, TikTok, X, YouTube, Spotify, and those rules require a proper content strategy and real investment. The content landscape is more saturated than it has ever been. Getting the attention of your consumer is harder than ever.
Ten years ago, you could get noticed working organically with a modest budget. Today you have to understand how the algorithms work, what penalises you, and how quickly things change. A lot of businesses are still waiting to go viral. That is an extremely rare outcome, and it is not a strategy.
Platform behaviour also varies dramatically. On YouTube people are now consuming long-form content, over ten minutes. On Instagram you get one or two seconds at best. If you post a three or four minute video there and the viewer still does not know whether you are a hotel or a restaurant by the second minute, you have lost all credibility. People simply do not have patience.
And there is a wider opportunity being missed. Any guest today, equipped with a phone, can have a huge impact on your business. They could be a creator recording everything about your hotel and sharing it with their community, and you are not even part of that conversation.
Social care is often seen as the unglamorous part of social media. Why is that the wrong way to think about it, and what does it actually do for the bottom line?
There is a misconception that social care is just handling complaints. What people do not understand is that social care is the cornerstone of a massive business opportunity.
Imagine a guest checks into your hotel and is unhappy with their room. If you identify that in real time, while they are still on your property, you can change the problem into an opportunity. Change the room, give them what they need, and that person becomes an advocate for life. They will tell everyone about how you handled it.
The commercial case is direct. If you use social care to generate additional business, through upselling, cross-selling, directing guests to your restaurant, your terrace, your rooftop bar, or flagging a sister property in another destination, that has a measurable positive impact on your bottom line. Those opportunities are easily quantifiable, and many of them start with a complaint.
Social care also gives you direct access to your customers’ pain points. Through a proper social CRM, and now AI, you can interpret everything guests are sharing: comments, reviews, what they liked, what they did not. That intelligence is incredibly valuable. We are often so caught up in the day to day operations of a hotel that we forget to actually listen to our customers, yet they hold the answers to many of our biggest opportunities.
The question is always whether you are quick enough to capitalise. If a guest has already checked out before you have seen and responded to their complaint, that is a missed opportunity you can never recover.
And most of what guests want to know is very simple. Do you offer early check-in? What time does the restaurant close? What food do you serve? These are informational needs. They do not want to queue at reception. They want the simplest possible path, and social care can give them that.
Over your years at Meliá, what changed about social care, not just the tools, but the mindset behind it?
Every large hotel chain eventually realised that a younger generation of customers would far rather contact you through a social media channel than through a call centre. The volumes arriving on social were massive, and companies simply were not equipped to respond in real time. Reply times were very long. Years ago, if you messaged a hotel on Instagram, you would often hear nothing back.
Companies gradually understood there was a huge opportunity in improving digital customer service, and social care was the solution. In the beginning it was entirely manual, agents replying one by one. Then came the first generation of chatbots, which were frankly quite frustrating: rigid decision trees that often made you feel the system did not understand you at all.
Now, with properly implemented AI-led solutions, you can hold voice conversations in multiple languages with an agent that the guest may not realise is automated at all, and those answers are genuinely valuable. The mindset shift is recognising that a quick, accurate, informative answer to a simple question is an opportunity, not just a service obligation. If a guest asks what time your restaurant opens, that tells you they are interested in dining with you. That is your cue to mention the rooftop bar, a premium experience, a special menu, and to impact your bottom line.
As head of department, how did you decide which conversations went to the social team, which went to operations, and how quickly each needed to be handled?
You need a priority framework, a decision tree of some kind, because the volume of messages means you cannot treat everything equally.
The highest priority is always a guest who is currently on your property and experiencing a problem. That must be addressed immediately. Second priority is anything operational and urgent: a guest stranded at an airport not knowing whether a transfer is arranged, a booking crisis, anything requiring a fast resolution. Complaints come next, and they need to be addressed while the guest is still at the hotel, because once they have checked out your window of opportunity is closed.
On when to involve operations: if the query requires knowledge you simply do not have on the social team, for example what the special dish is today or whether the pool level has been topped up, route it to one designated person in operations rather than bombing different departments with messages. Consistency is key.
As for channel policy, anything that originates in social should be answered in social. If someone sends a message on Instagram, that is where you respond. And you need the intelligence to recognise when the same person is asking the same question across multiple channels simultaneously, and to reply consistently.
One warning. The better your social care, the more queries you will receive. Once guests discover they get fast, accurate, helpful answers, they will keep coming back to that channel. You need to plan for scale, because the volumes will only increase.
Can you recall a situation where social listening surfaced something about the guest experience that traditional reporting missed?
You need real-time listening tools operating 24 hours a day. At Meliá we used a platform called TalkWalker, part of the Hootsuite group, which allowed us to monitor public opinion as it happened. What you are capturing can represent millions of impressions being generated without you even being aware.
Social listening is often associated with crisis management, but it is just as powerful for capturing positive moments and capitalising on them. A good example, not hospitality, but the principle applies, is Levi’s Stadium during the World Cup. The regulations required them to cover the Levi’s logo, but they covered it in the exact shape of the Levi’s logo, so people recognised it immediately and recreated it on social media. That is smart social listening turned into brand amplification.
On the crisis side, most crises do not start on social. They build elsewhere and migrate in. If your listening tools are sharp enough, you get early warning and more time to prepare a response. That extra time to react is invaluable.
How would you prove the value of social care to leadership, beyond “we replied to 400 comments”, and how would you change the mind of a general manager who still thinks social is a nice to have?
Show the impact on the bottom line. Tell them: we generated this many upsells through social care, we diverted traffic to a sister property in another destination, our TripAdvisor ranking increased by this much. Move from volume metrics to outcome metrics.
But the more powerful argument might be the risk of inaction. I would tell leadership directly: if we do not have these systems in place, we are losing customers and becoming irrelevant. Nobody under 40 is going to reach us through traditional channels alone. In my experience, practically every customer checks a hotel’s social media profiles before deciding to book, and roughly one in three change their mind based on what they see there. If your presence is weak or absent, that customer will choose the competition. The journey from inspiration to booking now runs across dozens of touchpoints, and social media is definitely one of them. Your hotel is being scrutinised from A to Z.
Honestly, though, the general manager who dismisses social outright is becoming rare. Most understand it now. For the holdouts, I would put it this way: think of your social media channels the same way you think about your lobby, your reception, your rooms. You invest in those because they represent your brand. Your digital channels are an extension of exactly the same thing.
And the intelligence you get from social is irreplaceable. What do your guests appreciate most? What do they dislike? Do they think your restaurant is overpriced? Do they love your views? All of that is in social media, waiting to be extracted. Your customers are essentially telling you what you need to do. You just need to listen. The small share of clients generating most of your revenue is a good place to start. You should know their names, know their birthdays, acknowledge them when they are on your property. A lot of smaller hotels are simply not doing these basic things, and it is a huge missed opportunity.
Smaller hotels often invest far more in OTAs and paid channels than in social. How would you make them rethink that, and what is the single most important first move for a property with no dedicated social function?
I would not tell anyone to abandon OTAs, especially when entering a new destination where you have no presence. Booking.com is one of Google’s largest advertising clients. You need your core business generators covered. But social deserves serious investment too. Think of social media as television primetime running 24 hours a day. People are on their phones constantly, while eating, while commuting. That is a massive opportunity to reach exactly the people who share your hotel’s values and convert them into potential guests.
The landscape is also shifting rapidly. Search is increasingly driven by AI now. When people ask Claude or Gemini or Copilot for the best hotel in London, you need to understand how to appear in those results. That is a whole new avenue, and it is connected to your broader social and content strategy.
As for the first move, it is this: integrate marketing and social as one discipline, because they are one. It makes no sense today to have a marketing professional without social media knowledge, or a social media person without marketing knowledge. In smaller hotels, 70 to 80 per cent of the marketing budget often ends up going to social anyway. An ad someone sees on Instagram needs to carry the same branding, the same tone, the same identity as every other piece of collateral: your website, your email marketing, your PR. If you have two different people running those in silos, you risk losing consistency, and consistency is everything in brand building.
What you need within your marketing team is public relations, social media, digital, branding, social care, email marketing, SEO and SEM, all interconnected, all speaking the same language. It is one function, even if it is one person wearing many hats. Start there.
And never forget the most important touchpoint of all: the hotel itself. You are setting an expectation online, and when the guest arrives, that expectation has to match reality. The person who opens the door is an extension of your brand, the first real-world impression. Digital builds the desire. The experience is what earns the advocate.
AI is the shift most hospitality brands are not yet ready for. Where does it already help with social media and social care, and where do you still need a human in charge?
AI is the main revolution coming our way. You could potentially run your entire hotel marketing operation with the help of AI. We are already reaching a point where it will be genuinely difficult to distinguish AI-generated content from real content, and that is going to create significant compliance and legal challenges. The legal framework is always running behind the technology.
In social care specifically, AI is already excellent at handling volume: responding to comments, messages and questions across multiple languages, in real time. The latest models can genuinely add value to your guests in an automated way. You can even deploy voice-based customer care for an individual hotel at relatively low cost, and guests will often not realise they are talking to an AI agent.
But you always need a human responsible. The human sets the direction, defines the objectives, and makes sure the overall strategy is clear. You need someone overseeing compliance, satisfaction and escalation, and a clear escalation path so that anyone who wants to speak to a person can do so. If a conversation is becoming frustrated or heated, identify it and route it to a human immediately.
For hospitality specifically, I think the challenge and the opportunity are the same thing. Hospitality is a service-led, human-driven industry. People will increasingly crave authentic experiences precisely because so much will be AI-generated. Hotels that can maintain genuine human warmth while adopting AI for efficiency will have a significant advantage.
As a consumer, if you solve my problem, accurately, quickly, in my own language, I genuinely do not care whether it is a human or an AI. What I care about is the outcome. And that is the mindset shift. AI is not a threat to hospitality’s human essence, it is what frees your people up to deliver that essence where it matters most.
Do you agree that a hotel’s social care reflects the level of care at the property itself, and that potential guests make that connection directly?
It is identical. Social care and in-person care are the same thing expressed in different environments.
Imagine someone queuing at your reception desk. When it is finally their turn, the receptionist completely ignores them and says nothing. What does that communicate about your brand? Now translate that to social: a guest sends a message and gets no reply, or an unhelpful one. The impression is the same.
We all want to feel heard, valued and cared for. The best thing any hotel can do is listen, acknowledge, and, when a mistake has been made, accept it and fix it. That guest has chosen you over dozens of other options. That is precious. Treat their interaction accordingly.
The additional challenge in social is that you often do not know who you are talking to. Are they a loyalty programme member? A high-value repeat guest? A first-time visitor? You need to gather that information quickly and respond with the right tone and level of personalisation. That is why a consistent brand voice and a well-built knowledge base are so important, and that is precisely what AI can help you embed and scale. Including multilingual capability: responding to someone in their own language, instantly, signals that you truly see them. That elevates your brand in a way that is hard to replicate any other way.
When hotels want social care to become a source of business intelligence, what patterns should they be hunting for in messages, comments and reviews?
You need a system to convert big data into actionable information. The data is all there, across TripAdvisor, Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and more, but without a structured way to read and interpret it, it is lost data.
Start with the basics: monitor and reply to all reviews across all platforms, always. Then go deeper. What are guests consistently praising? What are they consistently criticising? If a specific dish on your menu is mentioned and praised constantly on social media, do not take it off the menu. It sounds obvious, but hotels do it all the time, without realising that dish is being talked about everywhere.
Ask yourself: what is my number one complaint? What are the recurring pain points? What do guests love about the rooms, the cleaning, the views, the food? Are people saying the restaurant is overpriced? Are there influencers already talking about my brand that I have not engaged with?
Every digital interaction is a data point. People are talking about your hotel with or without your knowledge, including on TikTok, even if you do not have a profile there. You might have thousands of mentions you have never seen. Getting a system in place to capture and analyse that is not optional. It is where your most honest customer intelligence lives. The guests who go through an experience and share it are giving you a gift. You just need to receive it properly.
What should delegates at the Hospitality Social Media Summit walk away ready to do differently?
A reality check, first of all, and I mean that positively. The greatest thing you can get from a programme like this is permission to stop, think and reflect. We are all so consumed by daily operations that we rarely get that space. If you leave with three or four concrete actions that will genuinely change the way you work, that is an enormous output.
Beyond that, I would want delegates to leave with the conviction that social care is not a secondary, unglamorous function. It is a commercial engine. And that AI is not something to wait and see on. The speed of adoption is going to create a very clear divide between the hotels that adapted early and those that did not, and that divide will show up directly in customer acquisition, retention and revenue.
The world is changing faster than most of us have time to process. The summit should be the moment you stop running and start thinking, so that when you go back, you are running in a better direction.
The Hospitality Social Media Summit takes place live in London and online on 3–4 September 2026. Across two days, delegates work with award-winning global leaders to build practical social strategies, systems and assets designed specifically for hospitality.
To explore the programme, meet the faculty and secure your place, visit hospitalitysocialsummit.com.
