The beginning of the year 2020 brought an unprecedented global health crisis in modern history. The hospitality and tourism industry were severely impacted across the globe as numerous challenges amid COVID-19 pandemic were encountered. Consequently, the use of online platforms and virtual communications have been on the rise. Social media travel influencer is a particular niche that gained popularity in the past few years since the beginning of the pandemic. This study aimed to address pandemic fatigue and parasocial interaction to examine the dynamics of the relationship between consumers and brands in the hospitality and tourism industry by focusing on social media travel influencer platforms. Drawing upon social influence theory, the current study focused on content creators who share travel related experiences on YouTube and Instagram. In addition to the extant literature, the current study differentiated influencer channels from social media platforms controlled by brands to examine how platforms unrelated directly to the brands affected the consumers’ cognitive and affective motives. Stimulus-Organism-Response Model was utilized as a framework to understand the relationships among pandemic fatigue, social influencer credibility, parasocial interaction, perceived information quality, sense of belonging to virtual community, consumer-brand identification, and purchase intention. A total of 908 valid responses were collected via Amazon MTurk using a convenience sampling method. The results indicated that both pandemic fatigue and social media influencer credibility positively affected informational and normative influence. Informational and normative influence had direct relationships with parasocial interaction, sense of belonging to virtual community, and perceived information quality. Also, mediating impacts of informational and normative influence were observed between pandemic fatigue and sense of belonging to virtual community, as well as between social influencer credibility and perceived information quality. The findings suggested that sense of belonging to online community was strengthened by social influence that occurred on travel influencer channels, which in return resulted in significant consumer-brand identification and purchase intention. In this regard, this study contributed to the hospitality and tourism industry literature by demonstrating the role of social media influencer communities in shaping consumers’ brand perception.