Note: The following is an article Christine and I wrote at the request of the New York State Hospitality & Tourism Association regarding the considerations in creating hotel photography. It was published in the fall 2014 issue of their magazine FOCUS. I just came across the article again and thought that it would be of interest to the readers of our blog.
A hotel’s photographs create it’s curb appeal and if thought out and created properly, should result in a focused and effective visual marketing portfolio that helps you sell more rooms, draw guests to the restaurant and starts the conversation with the meeting planner.
Your photography is the only thing your potential guests see of your hotel before walking in the door. This makes it one of the most important investments in your property. Your multi-million dollar renovation is irrelevant until you can show and charm prospective guests with it.
How a hotel markets itself is ever evolving and those that adapt well, will succeed those that don’t. So keeping abreast of the new marketing practices in the hospitality industry is essential and one of the key changes is the role of your photography.
While your photography is a key part of your marketing scheme, how it is implemented is changing with technologies that continue to evolve. Currently some of the best practices are driven by the following concepts.
Define your property
No matter how talented your photographer is, they can’t effectively design your photographs unless they have a clear idea of who you are selling to and how. Images designed to market to a young leisure couple will be different from those aimed at business travelers. A Northern fishing lodge that sees a lot of business in the spring and fall may want to look cozy, versus a Caribbean hotel that wants to look bright, airy and sell the views. Every single property has specific marketing needs that should be integrated by the photographer.
Since it’s essential to start out by defining these points, I have a questionnaire that I provide my clients that makes this an easy process, but you can easily put together information without it. Simply define who you are selling to, as well as where you would like to expand your demographic. Define how you are selling to these groups. Prepare a short statement on what you want people to know about your property at a glance. Add any historical or architecturally important information about the property, if there is any, and run down the important information about your position relative to your competitors. All of this will be complemented by additional questions from your photographer. Keep current technology in mind
Almost half of all journeys start out on a mobile device these days. What this means to the photographer is that we have to create images that engage and charm prospects on a small screen. It is important to keep in mind that the graphic lines should lead the eye in the image at this scale and often fine details cannot be distinguished on a small screen. Therefore keep it simple, eliminate clutter and make sure your photography shows the elements you want people to notice. A good example of this concept is trying to show a large fitness center with free weights, cardio machines and a universal machine etc. all in one photograph. To do this the photographer may back up and use a wide angle lens to include as much of the fitness center as possible. What results is a photograph of a lot of very small machines with no defined focal point and a lot of floor and ceiling. Now shrink that down to 2x3 inches and the image is dominated by the floor and ceiling with a line of clutter in the middle. This is better represented by choosing a visually dynamic camera angle that says “we have a great fitness center” and showing more detail. If it is important for you to show all of the equipment it may benefit you to have the hero photograph, then include an additional image to expand what you offer.
Keep them engaged
Another truism for our age is that we are selling to an audience, with an increasingly short attention span and they will dismiss your hotel with the swipe of a finger if you don’t engage them. This makes the quality of the photography you present much more important than burying your prospects in large quantities of images. Often a fine line has to be decided in situations like the fitness center mentioned above. Larger resorts can have a 100+ possible shots to properly represent all they offer. To keep images manageable to browsers in large properties, you have to create a user interface that divides the image galleries by interest or type. Make sure your websites, whether mobile or PC, all load images quickly and have intuitive navigation. Any frustration in easily finding what they want is an impediment to selling and reflects on the hotel.
Don’t waste a pixel
Sometimes backing up and showing as much of a space as you can is called for, such as when you are emphasizing luxuriously large rooms (or making sure smaller rooms don’t look too small), but an effective photographer will also know that showing too much ceiling or floor is wasted real estate in a photograph. Unless there’s a reason, such as a chandelier or vaulted ceiling, it’s usually wasted space and keeps the attention off of the things that matter in the image. This goes for images in most areas of the hotel. Most often it weakens guest room shots and the hotel’s exterior shot, where photographers, in an attempt to show as much of the hotel as possible, back up until large parts of the image are give to pavement or sky. This can be avoided by keeping these issues in mind or adjusting the aspect ratio of the image (crop) to better represent the shot.
Be prepared
Once you have defined your marketing message, chosen you photographer and created a focused shot list based on you marketing goals and unique selling points, it’s time to get down to creating the images. Determine a shoot schedule with the photographer and ensure that each area is prepared when the photographer is arriving to create each shot. Any time spent by the photographer lining up the chairs in a meeting room, takes them away from spending their energies on your photograph. Many experienced hotel photographers will have a list of suggested preparations that they will send ahead to help your shoot go smoothly and will supplement this with specific points during the pre shoot walk-though.If you are a franchised hotel you will also want to get the most up to date photography guidelines from the brand and both familiarize yourself with them and make sure the photographer has a chance to review them well ahead of the shoot date. Even though photographers serving the hospitality industry are quite familiar with multiple brands’ requirements, they do often get updated.
Think small
Much of what you want to do with your images is charm the potential guest. Of course, what I call the “explainer” shots, that show your guest rooms, lobby etc. are the foundation of your portfolio.
But these shots set the stage for the “atmosphere” images that show the intimate details that create the charm of your property. These are the images that tell guests that you have something special and have invested in making their time at you property exceptional. They can be photographs of almost anything pretty in your hotel and my favorite way to create these images, is to simply set aside some hours to roam the hotel with my camera and shoot a bunch of shots, then edit them into a defined grouping. I think of them as little vignettes that romanticize your property. 
Keep it Fresh
Now that you have a fresh, brilliant and well crafted portfolio of photography with images that are designed to work together, take a moment to remove out of date images from you galleries. Dated and lower quality images presented alongside your new high quality photography can undo all of the positive impact in addition to wasting a browsers attention.The images you present to the world in your marketing have the ability to separate you from the competitors and elevate your perceived value in the eyes of prospective guests. A professional hotel and resort photographer knows how to create a portfolio of marketing images that work together to engage and entice. Creating an effective visual marketing portfolio has the capacity to sell more rooms and increase ADR as well as making every dollar you invest in future marketing more effective.
