Professional Hotel Photography

Five reasons why a hotel needs professional hotel photography

by Michelle Chaplow

As a professional hotel photographer with more than 20 years of experience, I travel on assignments around the globe with my team to photograph the world’s most beautiful hotels. I have been fortunate enough to capture everything from brand-new multi-million-dollar projects to boutique properties and historic, family-run hotels.

Amazing as it may seem, in today’s modern world where we’re constantly bombarded with visual content, some sales and marketing departments can struggle to convince their colleagues in finance of the absolute necessity for fresh, visually appealing images. Believe it or not, many hotels still don´t even have a line item in their budgets specifically for professional hotel photography.

So here we list five of the top reasons why hotels need to invest in quality hotel photography.

1.     Guests can check out of your hotel before they check in, if your photography is not up to scratch

 Ask yourself: when you are browsing the internet for a hotel, how likely are you to choose a place portrayed in poor quality, blurred or dark photos? Guests can decide not to stay at your hotel based on the quality of your hotel photography, so they are literally checking out before they’ve even checked in – and that means potential lost revenue.

2.     Editorial features about your hotel

Think about journalism: a picture is worth a thousand words, and visually arresting, professional hotel photography will sell a hotel´s story. All journalists prefer to have their text illustrated with beautiful imagery: hotel stories are positively enhanced by original, intriguing visuals. Which pitch will a travel magazine, or travel vertical editor, choose to run in their glossy? The one with most appealing photos, of course.

3.     Visual Story Telling

The human brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text; 90% of information is visual. Furthermore, we look at photography before reading text, as it takes longer to process each letter, being an individual picture that the brain converts into a word. Photography can instantly convey an exciting, emotionally-engaging message in terms of hotels: “Take me there!”. Therefore it goes without saying that the photography on a hotel’s own website, Social Media pages, and mobile-friendly websites should be of the highest quality. In short, quality photography plays an important role in creating conversions and reservations.

4.     Social Media

Your Social Media audiences want hot-off-the-press, freshly-juiced news, and for that you need professional, quality images.  A comprehensive digital picture library with more images than you have ever needed or used before. Just as a printed picture is worth 1,000 words, so in SM an image can be worth 1,000 or more “engagements” (in other words, likes, retweets, shares, and other interactions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc). That’s 1,000 prospective guests being won over by an eye-catching photo of your property. Imagine if you were to put out several such beautiful visuals every day…

5.     Your brand assets

Professional Hotel photography should be at the very core of a hotel´s brand assets. However, the value of photos is not easy to quantify in economic terms. Take the $10,000 convection oven used daily in your restaurant kitchen: its productivity is easily quantifiable. But a digital image file, one single item on a hard drive made up of 000s and 1111s, is less so. Yet it will form the central feature of your hotel´s showcase website, as well as appearing on many OTAs and social channels. Quality photography is paramount to the visual image of your hotel: an invaluable asset, it will tempt new guests to your property, and encourage previous guests to return.

Conclusion

Hoteliers need to see professional hotel photography as a key investment that will enhance the perception of their property, drawing in potential guests, whether the images capture the hotel’s stunning setting, historic façade, stylish interiors, or all three.

Standards of Hotel Photography are always improving, as more hotels reap the rewards from presenting high-quality images of their properties. In today´s online world, the constant need for exceptional, visually engaging images which grab the attention of travellers, thereby ensuring that your property stands out from the crowd, is greater now than ever before.  Simply put, you can’t afford not to.