REVEALED: The Secret Sauce for Glamping Virality

Hello Insiders,

You’re getting a peek inside one of the industry’s brightest minds this week.

Ben Wolff is the guy behind Onera, a brand with two incredibly cool micro-resorts in the Texas Hill Country.  

I could talk about Ben’s numbers all day. 

Like how Onera was valued at $7 million in a part-acquisition deal after just 12 months of operations. Or how his occupancy is damn near 90% and his daily rates sometimes exceed $1,000.

But what I find most impressive about Ben is how he figured out how to systemize social media virality for resorts like his. In doing so, he discovered the secret to generating more direct bookings than you know what to do with.

The logical next step was to help other operators level up their marketing and revenue management. So he founded Oasi, which implements everything he learned at Onera for your own resort.

I’ve written a lot about the importance of Instagram Reels for your glamping business. This is an explainer from the guy who wrote the blueprint.

Before we begin: Ben has a superb weekly newsletter that’s a must-read for anyone looking to take their glamping site marketing to the next level. Subscribe here.

The Interview

Nick: Hi Ben! I’ve raved about how good Oasi is at marketing in this space. Now I want to set the scene with some numbers. Give me some of Oasi’s most mind-blowing figures. No need to be humble.

Ben: No problem! Here’s a snapshot:

• Alila Marea Beach Resort - We quadrupled their follower count in less than a year (90,000 today), increased their web traffic from social media 20x, and they’ve seen a 40% uptick in their leisure travel bookings. 

• Onera Wimberley - This was the second Onera location. We’re doing $250k-$300k in direct bookings per month, driven by social. 

• Spoon Mountain - We added more than 21 million views, grew social following by 62k, and oversaw a 68% increase in revenue in our first year working with them.

Nick: Impressive. Let’s take Spoon Mountain as an example. How did you generate such crazy results?

Ben: Absolutely. Spoon Mountain was a great example of what happens when you combine smart social strategy with storytelling and a complementary pricing strategy.

When we started, Spoon Mountain had a great product: luxury safari tents just 45 mins south of Austin in the beautiful Wimberley, TX. They’d performed extremely well during peak-Covid, but had seen a significant revenue dip in late 2022 and early 2023.

Ken and Yvette, the founders, turned to us for help. We set out to optimize their social media marketing and revenue management in search of Onera-level results. 

Here’s what we did.

First, we gave the brand a visual identity that matched the premium nature of the experience. That meant professional photo and video shoots designed for social—not just wide cabin shots, but moments that made people imagine themselves there.

Then we put together a Reels-first content strategy. We consistently posted high-performing videos across Instagram and TikTok, using trends, on-screen text, and storytelling formats that grab attention fast.

Check out this Reel as an example of what I’m talking about. (Note from Nick - I strongly recommend you watch the Reel, as it helps you visualize what Ben talks about in the next section).

To maximize the value created from a viral social media, we paired it with smart revenue management. We raised rates when our videos went viral to capture more of the value driven by millions of views.

We used dynamic pricing strategies, based on compression and decompression, to book out low season far in advance and keep raising rates during high season to get max value. 

The result? Over 21 million views across our content, 62k new followers, a huge spike in engagement, and a 68% increase in revenue in our first year working with Spoon.

Nick: Is there a secret sauce for a high-performing Instagram Reel?

Ben: Instagram is flooded with content. Just "looking pretty" isn't enough to stop a viewer from scrolling.

Legacy brands like Four Seasons have already proven this doesn’t work. Their gorgeous, highly cinematic content consistently gets less than 10,000 views.

Our hook worked because it acted as a "mirror" for our target audience.

Picture someone in Austin scrolling through Instagram. They see "Couples safari tents in Texas Hill Country" and instantly think: "Hey, I'm in Texas. I could take my partner there this weekend!"

It immediately communicated two critical things:

- The LOCATION (Texas Hill Country)

- That this was a BOOKABLE experience (for couples)

They stop scrolling. They watch. They share it with their partners or friends.

Then as engagement increases, Instagram's algorithm takes notice and starts recommending the content to more people in Central Texas and the views snowball from there.

The key takeaway: clearly identify your ideal guests in your content and make it obvious that your experience is created specifically for them.

Nick: Could you break down the key steps for creating a Reel that acts as a mirror for the audience?

Ben: The Reel has to call out ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘where’, making it abundantly clear who we are targeting, getting them to stop/watch/share with their significant other. 

This initial engagement identifies to the IG algorithm who is engaging with the content and where they’re based, and starts to recommend the content to similar accounts on the platform. 

Instagram is amazing at getting the right piece of content in front of the right audience. We make sure our content helps them do just that. Without this "mirror", content can fall flat as it never finds the right audience or resonates with that audience enough to engage with the content. 

Outside of the hook, there are a few other notable parts in our core IG strategy. 

1) The sequence of clips. 

Our clips are structured and shot to be optimized for social media. The initial clips help guide the viewers into the reel showing someone driving up to the property, leading them through a door, etc, to help hook them into the sequence and get their mind to identify that we are going to guide them through a series of events. 

This opens a loop in the viewer's mind that has to be closed, so they watch along in order to get to the end and close the loop.

Then, throughout the other clips, we’re re-hooking them with more shots of a model walking through the property and continuing to guide them as we showcase what the guest experience would look like if they were to book.

2) On-screen text to keep them engaged.

We also utilize onscreen text throughout the reels in order to help the viewer understand what they’re looking at and keep them engaged. Without this text, they’d have to juggle deciphering what they’re looking at while staying engaged with the experience we’re guiding them through. That just causes a lot of friction as the mind has to do two things at once, leading to a fall-off in views. 

The onscreen text allows the viewer's mind to merely follow the experience as we tell them directly on the screen what they’re looking at. 

3) Ending videos with an on-screen call to action

At the end of each reel we have a very clear call to action (CTA) to remind viewers to share it with their significant other/ friends, or whoever we’re targeting in the video. 

Without a clear CTA viewers, will simply enjoy the content and keep scrolling for the next dopamine hit. By calling out for them to share the content they just enjoyed, it gives them the reminder they need to actually share it with the person/ people they want to experience this with. Then they can keep scrolling. 

It's a simple reminder that drastically improves shares. Sometimes, viewers just need a little nudge in the right direction.

Nick: Amazing. When you're creating Instagram content, particularly Reels, are you generally targeting new audiences or existing ones? If it’s new audiences, how would you recommend keeping existing audiences engaged?

Ben: With Reels, we’re targeting new audiences. Reels typically hit non-followers.

Your Reel might only get shown to 10% of your audience, so concern of tiring the audience with same content over and over is a little overblown

To keep existing audiences engaged, we post Instagram Stories. These show up on our followers’ story feeds and are less focused on sharing and virality.

Nick: What kind of Stories would you recommend posting to keep followers engaged?

Some common Story posts we share are:

• Seasonal content

• Special offers

• Packages

• Experiences

• Showcasing different unit types

• Promoting a new Reel / influencer giveaway

• Guest reviews 

• If founder-led and/or staff-centric, you can lean into day-in-the-life stuff to keep building authentic, personal connection with followers  

Nick: Have you ever gone to a site and thought you did everything right, but the content just didn’t perform initally? And how did you figure out the answer in the end?

Ben: We had some issues at Onera Wimberley actually. The beautiful Hill Country view didn't translate as well in images/video as expected. 

We ended up finding virality with golden hour shots. Think the lighting up of the spyglass units, more than shots of the view itself. 

Also, because these units are exposed to peak Texas sun, most of the day the images/videos look washed out. You really need to shoot just after sunrise and just before sunset to get the optimal lighting and warm vibrant colors needed for best chances of virality. 

There are so many nuances to good video. It's as much art as science…sometimes it just takes testing/playing around to figure out what works!

It took us a couple months at Alila as well, but we ultimately cracked the code a couple months in.

Nick: Final question. If you could only give one piece of advice to unique stay operators for marketing their resort, what would it be?

Ben: Go all in on social media video content. That's literally it!

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📰 The Posh Report

After closing the cap raise in April and opening the booking calendar for Location 1 in May, we’re officially in Phase 2 of Posh Outdoors.

Here’s what we’ve been up to lately:

• Crossed $300k USD in booking receipts for Location 1, Skyridge Glamping (updated website coming soon)

• Ordered another 4 units to go to Skyridge Glamping, taking the total Posh unit count to 9

• Closed a $250k private placement, and received verbal commitments for a further $150k

• Started permitting discussions for Locations 2 and 3, both in the US

• Commenced work on a Posh Outdoors website (all previous traffic went to our WeFunder page)

We’ve well and truly “arrived” after months and months of toil. I can’t wait to see what’s next.