Social media influencers, or digital creators followed by online audiences of thousands and millions, are a hot marketing tool that grows over 50% annually. Recently, the impact of COVID-19 on travel has severely disrupted this developing market, and heavily impacted travel influencers whose livelihood depends on collaboration with tourism, hospitality, and food businesses. This research presents the first “big data” evaluation of the induced transformations among the top Instagram travel influencers. The findings are based on computer image recognition of photographs published by 140 travel Instagrammers ranging from micro- to mega-influencers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the research proposes a methodology of identification of sponsored posts among travel influencers based on the fuzzy matching of post mentions and a global database of 6 million businesses.

社交媒体影响者或数字创作者受到成千上万在线受众的关注，是一种每年增长超过 50% 的热门营销工具。最近，新冠肺炎 (COVID-19) 对旅游业的影响严重扰乱了这个发展中市场，并严重影响了其生计依赖于与旅游、酒店和食品企业合作的旅游影响者。这项研究首次对 Instagram 顶级旅游影响者引发的转变进行了“大数据”评估。该研究结果基于对 140 位旅行 Instagram 博主（从微型影响者到超级影响者）在 COVID-19 大流行之前和期间发布的照片​​进行的计算机图像识别。此外，该研究还提出了一种基于帖子提及的模糊匹配和包含 600 万家企业的全球数据库来识别旅游影响者赞助帖子的方法。