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In 2026, 91% of UK hospitality brands now do some form of influencer marketing, and 90% use UGC-style video as their dominant creative approach. 58% of TikTok users have visited a restaurant after seeing it on TikTok, and 77% of UK Gen Z factor a venue's Instagram and TikTok-worthiness into where they book. Sends via DM are now the single most valuable engagement signal on Instagram. AI search is amplifying all of it: 48% of all search queries now trigger a Google AI Overview (up 58% year-on-year), and for restaurant queries specifically, 76% of cited sources do not appear in the organic top 100. This page collects the primary-sourced data behind those shifts, with sources, dates and methodology disclosed for every figure.
of TikTok users have visited or ordered from a restaurant after seeing it on TikTok, up from 38% in 2022.
A 20-percentage-point jump in two years. 64% of TikTok users have learned about a restaurant on the platform, and 50% say TikTok is the key social influencer driving their restaurant choice, surpassing Instagram, Facebook and Yelp.
of UK Gen Z and 71% of UK Millennials consider a restaurant's Instagram or TikTok-worthiness important when deciding where to dine.
Aesthetic appeal, photogenic dishes and design moments now sit alongside food quality and price as a primary booking driver for UK diners aged 18 to 44.
of UK hospitality brands now do some form of influencer marketing.
Paid influencer work has risen from 37% to 49% year-on-year. The State of Social report is the canonical UK hospitality benchmark, surveying 68 brands across more than 1,900 sites.
Section 01
The strongest operator-side data here is the KAM and Kitch State of Social 2026 report, which surveyed 68 UK hospitality brands across more than 1,900 sites. It is the canonical UK benchmark for what hospitality marketing actually looks like in 2026, and the patterns match operator behaviour in the US and EU. Influencer marketing, UGC and creator content are now dominant, not emerging.
views generated for UK hospitality brands by Joli-vetted creators.
Across 66k+ pieces of content from 10k+ active creators, serving 298+ brands in 47 UK cities. Joli's creators are all food, drink and hospitality-focused, with a minimum 5% engagement rate, well above the 0.2% Instagram industry median for hospitality.
of UK hospitality brands use UGC-style video content as their dominant creative approach.
72% specifically use creator-produced content. Professional photography and videography use has dropped year-on-year as brands shift to short-form, authentic creator video as the primary content type.
of UK hospitality brands outsource at least one part of their social media strategy.
The average UK hospitality social media team is just 1.3 people, and limited resource is the number one challenge cited in the State of Social report. Brands routinely outsource videography, photography, paid management and influencer marketing.
of UK Gen Z are willing to travel to see social-media-famous venues.
SevenRooms estimates social represents around an £800 million annual opportunity for the UK hospitality sector. Survey conducted in late 2022 and still cited in SevenRooms's UK trend communications through 2024.
Section 02
MGH's annual TikTok restaurant survey is the closest thing to a published save-to-visit conversion rate, measured against a 1,142-person sample. It shows TikTok now overtakes Instagram, Facebook and Yelp as the leading social driver of restaurant choice.
higher purchase intent for paid campaigns running 10 or more unique creatives versus campaigns running fewer than 5, per TikTok's own Brand Lift Study.
Campaigns running 10+ creatives also drive 2.6x higher ad recall and 1.5x higher brand awareness in North America. In Europe, the threshold is 7+ creatives for an 11.7% recall lift and 1.6x purchase intent. The single clearest published link between number of creative angles and downstream paid-ad performance.
of Gen Z restaurant discovery now happens via TikTok alone, the highest single-channel share for any generation.
Overall, 64% of guests said they tried a new restaurant in the past month, up from 39% in 2024. Word of mouth remains the strongest single discovery channel cross-generation, but for Gen Z it is overtaken by social.
Section 03
Adam Mosseri has been unusually transparent about Instagram's ranking signals across his 2024 and 2025 video updates. The clearest pattern: watch time wins for both connected and unconnected reach, but sends via DM dominate when you are trying to reach people who do not already follow you, which is where most new hospitality customers come from.
Sends via DM are now identified as Instagram's most valuable engagement signal for reaching non-followers.
Across his 2024 and 2025 algorithm communications, Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram) has repeatedly elevated sends and shares above likes as a ranking signal for reaching audiences who do not already follow you. Industry analyses of his December 2025 algorithm update (Later, Buffer, Hootsuite) consistently summarise sends via DM as the single most valuable engagement signal, on the basis that a personal recommendation reflects the highest level of user intent.
Section 05
90% of UK hospitality brands already use UGC-style video as their dominant creative (KAM and Kitch, 2026). Across paid campaigns, content built to feel authentic outperforms polished brand creative on the metrics that drive bookings, and Meta's Andromeda rollout has accelerated this by making creative diversity the new primary lever.
TikTok's own analysis comparing creator content boosted via Spark Ads against ads created and posted from brand accounts. Creator-led wins on every metric.
Source: TikTok for Business, The Creator Advantage, November 2025. Sample: North American advertiser results, matched-CPM cohorts, February 2024 to January 2025.
higher ROAS and 68% lower CPA for Meta advertisers allocating 60% or more of conversion budget to multi-creative formats versus those allocating under 30%.
Under Meta's Andromeda system, the structural fix for falling performance is creative diversity. Catalog ads with at least 5 design variants and multiple aspect ratios maintained a 20% to 30% ROAS advantage over static ads at every point through six weeks. The top third of advertisers by ROAS saw a 31% collapse in performance during the rollout, while bottom-third advertisers actually trended upward, because the old playbook (one hero ad, narrow targeting, polished creative) is now the biggest liability.
higher click-through rate for lo-fi UGC-style creative versus account average on Facebook and Instagram Reels.
Hi-fi polished creative ran in the opposite direction: 71% lower CTR and 14.5% lower 25% view-through rate. The direction (lo-fi beats hi-fi) is the more useful finding than the precise magnitude for a hospitality marketing director deciding between an agency video shoot and creator-made UGC.
higher ROAS for brands testing 20 or more new Meta ad creatives per month versus brands testing fewer than 10.
A single ad set with 25 conceptually diverse creatives outperformed five narrowly targeted ad sets by 17% on conversions at 16% lower cost. The data reflects how Meta's Andromeda algorithm now rewards creative diversity over audience-side targeting.
of shoppers engage with creator content before making a buying decision, with 80% of Gen Z saying UGC is crucial to how they decide.
65% of global shoppers rely on UGC (ratings, reviews, photos, videos) in their buying decisions. This is the 2024 successor to the widely-recycled 2012-era authenticity stats and is the cleanest current benchmark on how much weight consumers give UGC.
Andromeda's precision matching finds the optimal audience for a creative faster, then exhausts that pool faster. The result is a roughly halved creative lifespan, which forces brands to produce more fresh content to maintain performance.
Source: Confect, Meta Andromeda: The Ultimate Guide to Meta Ads in 2026 (March 2026). Sample: 3,014 e-commerce advertisers, 73 countries, $834 million in ad spend, full 2025 rollout window.
For UK hospitality brands running paid social, this is the case for briefing real creators to produce ad-ready content rather than commissioning traditional brand creative. Joli's Ad Studio exists for exactly this: vetted UK food and drink creators producing brand-owned UGC for paid Meta and TikTok campaigns.
Section 06
On-premise data from CGA by NIQ and Pernod Ricard's joint research shows the visual social effect extends well beyond restaurants. Drink choice itself is now partly driven by visual shareability.
of global on-premise consumers have visited a venue after seeing it on social media.
46% of global Gen Z bar-goers say a drink's Instagrammability influences what they order (rising to 64% in Germany and 62% in the Netherlands). A counter-trend of disconnected consumers preferring no-phone venues is also emerging.
Section 07
Hotel-specific data is thinner than restaurant data, but Phocuswright and Adobe both publish methodology-disclosed measurements of social and AI's role in accommodation decisions.
of US travellers used social media to make accommodation choices in 2024.
62% of those using social for trip planning made a specific decision after viewing content. Instagram and TikTok dominate among travellers taking six or more trips per year.
increase in traffic to US travel, leisure and hospitality websites from generative AI sources by July 2025, year-on-year.
AI-referred visitors had a 44% lower bounce rate than non-AI traffic once on a travel site. Top AI-assisted travel use cases included travel inspiration (43%), local food recommendations (43%), itinerary creation (37%) and budget management (31%).
Section 08
Dash Social's 2026 Food and Beverage benchmarks are the cleanest published targets for hospitality content performance. Use them as baseline, not ceiling.
is the cross-industry average TikTok engagement rate (by views), with Reels driving roughly double the engagement of static Instagram posts.
Reels post a 2.7% average engagement rate on Instagram, nearly double carousels (1.4%) and static images (1.3%). Dash Social's 2026 Food and Beverage industry benchmarks suggest hospitality brands target the 3.0 to 3.5% range on TikTok and the 2.0 to 2.5% range on Instagram as directional baselines.
Section 09
Social media was already the dominant discovery channel for hospitality. AI search engines are now multiplying that effect. Restaurant queries are the most AI-saturated surface in local search, and the sources AI assistants cite are skewed heavily toward the earned content (reviews, social, third-party listings) that hospitality brands generate, not the corporate websites they own.
AI Overview presence across all tracked queries grew 58% in a year. Restaurant queries are among the most AI-saturated verticals BrightEdge studied.
Source: BrightEdge, AI Overviews at the One-Year Mark, February 2026.
of all search queries now trigger a Google AI Overview, up from approximately 31% a year earlier.
A 58% year-on-year increase in AI Overview presence across all tracked queries. The average AIO now exceeds 1,200 pixels tall, pushing the first organic result below the fold on a standard desktop viewport. Restaurant queries are among the most AI-saturated verticals BrightEdge studied.
of sources cited in AI Overviews for restaurant queries do not appear anywhere in the organic top 100 search results.
For restaurants specifically, only 9.3% of AI Overview citations overlap with the traditional organic top 10, versus 17% on average across all industries. Traditional SEO and AI visibility are now largely independent surfaces. AI Overviews for restaurants cite review aggregators, social platforms, best-of lists and forum content that fall outside conventional SEO targeting.
of restaurants are completely invisible in AI-generated local recommendations.
ChatGPT recommends only 1.2% of all local business locations across 350,000 locations and 2,751 brands studied. Only 45% of brands that perform well in traditional local search also appear in AI recommendations.
of AI citations for foodservice queries come from reviews and social media, the highest share of any vertical studied.
Across 2.2 million AI citations for foodservice queries, 41.6% came from third-party listings (Yelp, Google Business, DoorDash), 39.8% from first-party restaurant websites, and 13% from reviews and social. ChatGPT leaned more on third-party directories, Gemini on first-party sites, and Perplexity was more evenly split.
year-on-year increase in consumers using AI to find local services, rising from 6% in 2025 to 45% in 2026.
of US 35 to 44-year-olds use AI tools like ChatGPT to research restaurants and bars, with 20% of all consumers now doing so.
AI sits close to TikTok and Instagram combined (26%) and Yelp (24%) for venue research. Google Search still leads at 56%. 61% of 25 to 34-year-olds have used AI for personalised food or drink recommendations, versus 4% of those 65 and over. 86% of younger adults trust AI-generated review summaries.
Yext analysed 2.2 million AI citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Around 60% of foodservice citations come from earned, off-site sources (listings, reviews, social), and only 39.8% from restaurant-owned websites. Foodservice also has the highest share of reviews and social media citations of any vertical Yext studied.
Source: Yext, AI Visibility Research 2025 (October 2025). The foodservice-specific split is from Yext's vertical research dataset; per-model breakdowns are publicly visible on the linked Yext article.
The questions hospitality operators ask us most often, answered using only primary-sourced data from this page.
Yes, and the data is now clear at multiple levels. 45% of UK diners find new restaurants on social media (SevenRooms, 2025). 58% of TikTok users have visited or ordered from a restaurant after seeing it on TikTok (MGH, November 2024). 77% of UK Gen Z and 71% of Millennials say a restaurant's Instagram or TikTok-worthiness is important when deciding where to book (OpenTable UK, 2026).
Restaurant queries trigger a Google AI Overview 78% of the time in 2026, up from 10% a year earlier (BrightEdge). 45% of consumers used AI tools to find local services in 2026, up from 6% in 2025 (BrightLocal). 20% of US consumers now use AI tools like ChatGPT to research restaurants and bars, rising to 45% among 35 to 44-year-olds (Reputation/Nielsen, November 2025). Traffic from generative AI sources to US travel sites rose 3,500% year-on-year by July 2025 (Adobe).
76% of sources cited in Google AI Overviews for restaurant queries do not appear in the organic top 100 results, and only 17% of AIO citations overlap with the traditional top 10 (BrightEdge, February 2026). For foodservice AI queries specifically, 13% of citations come from reviews and social media, the highest share of any vertical Yext studied. AI systems pull from third-party listings, review sites, social platforms and forums, surfaces that are largely independent of a restaurant's own SEO efforts.
Adam Mosseri (December 2025) confirmed sends via DM is the single most valuable engagement signal because it represents the highest level of user intent. For Reels distribution, the three signals that matter most are watch time, likes per reach and sends per reach, with sends mattering more for reaching new audiences and likes mattering more for reaching existing followers.
More than ever. 91% of UK hospitality brands now do some form of influencer marketing in 2026, and paid influencer work has grown from 37% to 49% year-on-year (KAM and Kitch State of Social 2026). 90% of UK hospitality brands use UGC-style video as their primary creative approach, and 72% specifically use creator-produced content. The shift is away from celebrity-style mega-influencers toward authentic micro-influencers with hyper-engaged, niche audiences. Joli's model (creators with 2,000 to 50,000 followers, 5%+ engagement, food and drink-focused) is built for exactly this shift.
The available data says yes, though it is mostly cross-category rather than hospitality-isolated. Bazaarvoice's network analytics (covering approximately 13,000 brands) show paid ads featuring UGC achieve 4x higher click-through rates and 50% lower cost-per-click than standard brand ads. On product pages with at least one review, conversion rates rise 354% and revenue per visitor rises 446%. The translation to hospitality is directional rather than definitive (no published hospitality-specific A/B test yet), but the creative pattern is consistent: authentic-looking creator content outperforms polished brand creative on the metrics that matter for paid social.
Engagement and authenticity. Joli-vetted micro-influencers (under 50,000 followers) average 5%+ engagement rates, well above the 0.2% Instagram industry median for hospitality brands (KAM and Kitch State of Social 2026). They have audiences who actively care about food, drink and hospitality, rather than broad audiences with passive interest. Algorithmic discovery on TikTok and Instagram now drives most reach, with 58% of TikTok views and 49% of Instagram views coming from non-followers (Dash Social 2026), which means a strong piece of micro-influencer content can outperform a celebrity post if it resonates with the algorithm.
On TikTok, 58% of views in 2025 came from non-followers via the For You Page, up from 31% in 2023. On Instagram the equivalent shift was 30% to 49% (Dash Social, April 2026). Algorithmic discovery now outweighs follower count as the primary reach driver, which is why shareable content beats large follower lists for hospitality brands.
Dash Social's 2026 Food and Beverage Industry Benchmarks suggest a target engagement rate of 3.0 to 3.5% on TikTok and 2.0 to 2.5% on Instagram for F&B brands. Reels average 2.7% engagement on Instagram, nearly double carousels (1.4%) and static images (1.3%).
Follower count is no longer a primary KPI. The signals that now matter most are share rate (shares per impression or reach), save rate, sends via DM, non-follower view share, and downstream booking attribution. TikTok shares grew 45% year-on-year in 2026 while comments dropped on both major platforms, reflecting the shift from passive to private engagement.
Two widely-quoted hospitality stats we left off because we could not trace them to a primary source:
Joli. Social Media Statistics for Restaurants & Hospitality Brands (2026). Updated 15 May 2026. https://joliapp.com/resources/hospitality-social-media-stats/
The brands cited in the data above are doing one thing in common: they are systematically generating shareable UGC and creator content at scale. Joli runs that engine for UK restaurants, hotels, pubs and bars in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and dozens more UK cities.