Hotel Santa Caterina

Renowned for its unrivalled hospitality and enviable position on the Amalfi Coast, Hotel Santa Caterina is a hotel for those in search of excellence. Offering an unparalleled view of the Amalfi Bay and uninterrupted panoramic sea views, the hotel is built into the cliffside surrounded by Mediterranean gardens and a series of terraces leading down to the beach level.

The hotel's classic Italian interiors and Mediterranean architecture has attracted famous guests over the years including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie who enjoyed time away from the cameras in the early days of their romance, Hilary Clinton and daughter Chelsea, and even Kim Kardashian. Looking further back, Hotel Santa Caterina was also a favourite for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Some hotels have to work to be photogenic. Hotel Santa Caterina has the opposite problem - it's so obviously beautiful that it's easy to produce content that's gorgeous, generic, and completely interchangeable with every other five-star property on the Amalfi Coast.

Beautiful isn't a differentiator on that coastline. It's the entry fee.

Lemongrass Marketing, a B Corp-certified travel PR agency in Oxfordshire, curated a fashion-led influencer programme for Hotel Santa Caterina, a five-star hotel on Italy's Amalfi Coast that has remained family-owned for more than a century.

Roughly 30 pieces of content per creator, from a deliberately small group.

Lemongrass Marketing, a B Corp-certified travel PR agency in Oxfordshire, curated a fashion-led influencer programme for Hotel Santa Caterina, a five-star hotel on Italy's Amalfi Coast that has remained family-owned for more than a century.

Roughly 30 pieces of content per creator, from a deliberately small group.

The brief was to collaborate with high-profile influencers who could showcase the historic glamour of the property - content that needed to be genuinely fashion-focused, from creators with large and engaged audiences that matched the hotel's aspirational positioning.

That word "engaged" is doing a lot of work. Plenty of travel creators have big followings. Far fewer have audiences who care about the specific intersection of fashion, heritage and Italian glamour that Santa Caterina embodies - and a mismatched audience produces content that performs adequately and converts not at all.

Five creators, not fifteen

We prioritised quality and relevance over volume, hard.

The selection criteria weren't "does this person post about hotels." They were: does this creator's existing aesthetic sit comfortably alongside a century-old, family-owned Amalfi property? Would their audience plausibly book here? Is their engagement real?

Five people passed. We stopped at five.

We handed over creative control

Rather than issuing a rigid brief with mandated shots and approved captions, we let each influencer capture the property's heritage, design and glamour through their own creative lens.

This makes clients nervous, and I understand why. But the entire value of a creator is the relationship they've built with an audience that trusts their taste. The moment you override that taste with a brand-approved shot list, you've paid a premium for an advert that will underperform an actual advert.

The content worked because it looked like their content, featuring Santa Caterina - not like Santa Caterina's content, posted by them.

The five creators reached a combined 2.6 million followers, generating 152 pieces of content and 32 brand mentions for Hotel Santa Caterina.

It's a useful demonstration that a small, precisely chosen group can deliver reach at scale for a heritage property - without diluting a brand aesthetic that took a hundred years to build.

Is it better to work with a few large influencers or many small ones? It depends on the objective. For luxury and heritage properties where brand aesthetic matters, a small number of tightly matched creators typically outperforms a larger, looser group. Hotel Santa Caterina's programme used five creators reaching a combined 2.6 million followers and produced 152 pieces of content.

Should brands give influencers creative control? Generally, yes. Audiences follow creators for their individual perspective, and heavily prescribed content tends to underperform because it reads as advertising. Effective briefs define the positioning and leave execution to the creator.

How do you select influencers for a luxury hotel? By assessing aesthetic fit, audience composition and genuine engagement rather than follower count alone. The key question is whether the creator's existing audience would plausibly book the property.