Yup. That pretty much describes it.
The thing is, the vast majority of these "influencers" have followers in their demographic. A luxury hotel, like the one I am sitting in at this moment, overwhelmingly has an older demographic who can afford to pay $500/night. So they say, "I have 200,000 followers," but they have 26 followers who would ever consider paying for a luxury hotel.
They always hit you with what a great value it is.
Now, some of them treat it like work. They have a lot of followers and they are good photographers/videographers and they will offer you exposure, plus full use of photos and vidoe they shoot. Sometimes we'll take them up on it. The thing about a hotel is that the inventory expires every night. If you are not going to sell out, the marginal cost of putting someone in a room is only about $50. So if they turn over even a couple of decent, usable photos, that can be worth it.
One rainy day with a half-empty hotel, we got a last-minute pitch from two couples and the man in one couple had a million followers on YouTube and the other had something like that on Instagram, and they treated it like a media site visit, meaning they endured a property tour, posted video of suites they toured, but did not get to stay in, and so forth. The true cost there was only a few hundred dollars since they didn't displace revenue.
[update: actually, I just looked him up - the YouTuber has 2,000,000 followers, but again, most of them are under 25 and will not be potential customers for another twenty years]
Some of them don't get this though - they will pitch you for a stay in high season when you're going to sell out. Then the cost of that stay can be $1000 in lost revenue. More if they insist on free meals too. Most of them are living in fantasy land and I can't believe that hotels will even consider this in most cases.
As a general rule, they are a plague. But the good ones can be worth it.
Now the travel bloggers... they're actually worse. No clue about value.
