What I learned about social media running a hotel — and getting it all wrong.

Years before OLA, I ran Villas Sol, up on the Papagayo Peninsula in Guanacaste.

Villas Sol had one incredible thing going for it: the view. Every room and every restaurant sat perched on a hill over the bay of Playa Hermosa, and the sunsets were the kind people don't quite believe until they're standing in them. The catch was the building itself — it went up in the mid-90s, and it felt it. The bones were old. The place was beautiful and worn in equal measure.

Our social media looked exactly like the hotel. Not curated. Rough around the edges. Shot on an iPhone and a cheap drone, most of the time. It showed the staff, the behind-the-scenes, what life actually felt like around the resort. And it worked — good following, great engagement. But the part that surprised me was the reviews. They were excellent. Consistently. For a hotel that, on paper, was far from the newest or the nicest one on the coast.

I filed that away as a happy accident and didn't think much more about it.

Then I ran House of Somos

A few years later I became GM of House of Somos in Santa Teresa — and I'll say up front, it's one of the best-run, most beautiful little properties I've ever had the privilege to be part of.

Somos was everything you'd want. Walking distance to the beach, genuinely gorgeous architecture, small but electric, an incredible team, service with real heart, and one of the trendiest, most beloved spots among locals. And the content matched the place — flawless. Curated to within an inch of its life: stunning visuals, reels that hit every trend, captions with real bite, shot on Fuji, Canon, and Red, by an actual team of international photographers. The following was enormous. The feed was, honestly, a masterpiece.

Which is what made the next part so confusing. Despite all of that — the beauty, the team, the service — the reviews were often tougher than they should have been.

At the time, I assumed it had to be something operational I needed to fix. But the rooms were only five years old and immaculate. The service was genuinely excellent. The team was pouring everything into it. It didn't add up. A hotel this good shouldn't have been getting reviews like that.

I didn't figure out why until after I'd left.

Here's where I got it wrong

It took stepping away from Somos to finally see it — and once I did, it was obvious. The problem was never the hotel. It was the content. My content strategy.

The content at Somos wasn't just good. It was too good.

So polished, so trendy, so impossibly vibey that it quietly promised a level of five-star, white-glove, nothing-ever-goes-wrong luxury that no boutique hotel on earth can guarantee every single time. We'd set the bar somewhere in the clouds. So when something went even slightly sideways — as it always does in hospitality, at every hotel, everywhere — guests felt the gap between the perfect feed and the real (still excellent, just human) experience. And they let us have it, in the reviews and the comments.

The hotel was never the problem. Somos was, and is, wonderful. The problem was that I'd made content so flawless it left the place no room to be human. We got no benefit of the doubt, because we'd promised perfect — and perfect leaves no margin for the small, forgivable things that happen at even the finest hotels.

Meanwhile, think back to Villas Sol. Rougher content, cheaper gear, real and unfiltered — and it made the place feel personal, human, honest. Guests already saw it as a real hotel run by real people, so when something wasn't flawless, they forgave it. The imperfect content had accidentally set honest expectations. And honest expectations are a lot easier to meet.

That was the eye-opener. At Somos, the very polish I was proudest of was the thing quietly working against a hotel that deserved so much better. I just wish I'd seen it while I was still there.

Then the internet confirmed it

A few weeks later I was doom-scrolling the gram and landed on a reel from a social media agency — a serious one, great team, best gear, historically the most cinematic content you've ever seen. Except this reel was shot on iPhones. And the whole point of it was that they were deliberately moving back from cinematic. Making their content rougher. More real. More human. Less perfect. On purpose.

That's when it fully clicked.

Everyone's been marinating in perfect, polished, color-graded content for so long that they've swung the other way — now they're craving the opposite. You can watch it happen on YouTube. It used to be Peter McKinnon, Casey Neistat, MrBeast — immaculate, produced, every frame earned. Now some of the biggest stuff is a guy from Tennessee filming on his phone from the front seat of his pickup. No script. No strategy. Just go.

The pendulum swung. Perfect stopped being the goal, because perfect stopped being believable.

And now AI has poured fuel on it

Here's what's made this shift go from a trend to a tidal wave: AI.

Feeds are now flooded with content that's technically perfect and completely hollow — flawless AI images, generated captions, polished videos of things that never happened. And people can feel it, even when they can't name it. The more perfect and synthetic everything looks, the more suspicious of it we all become. "Too polished" used to just read as expensive. Now it reads as fake.

Which means real is the new premium. A slightly shaky iPhone clip of an actual chef, an actual room, an actual morning at your hotel is worth more today than the most beautiful rendered thing on the internet — because it's the one thing AI can't fake: it genuinely happened. In a feed full of perfect nobody trusts, the human, imperfect, obviously-real stuff is what stops people. It's proof of life.

The Villas Sol content had that by accident. It was undeniably real, so people believed it, and so they trusted the place. That's worth more now than it's ever been.

What I do with this now

I got it backwards for years. I thought better content meant more polished content — and at a hotel as genuinely great as Somos, the polish is what quietly cost us reviews we didn't deserve. I only understood it in hindsight, after I'd moved on.

What I know now, and what we build on at OLA, is that the goal was never to look perfect. It's to look true. Content should set expectations you can actually meet, show the real people behind the brand, and leave enough room to be human — because that room is exactly what earns you the benefit of the doubt when something inevitably goes wrong. And in a world where anyone can generate perfect, real is the only thing left that people actually believe.

An old hotel with an incredible view understood that by accident. It took running a beautiful, beloved, flawlessly-shot hotel — and only realizing afterward that my own perfect content had worked against it — to finally understand it on purpose.