Hotel Photography Marketing Guide
Hotel photography is a powerful tool in the hotel digital marketing world, and great shots of your location can make all the difference to your booking levels.
Weddings are just one example – a single well-crafted wedding photograph can be reused, and eventually result in wedding after wedding being booked at your venue. That’s hundreds of bookings being made and thousands of pounds, euros or dollars in revenue!
But here’s the problem: getting quality hotel photography isn’t always easy. You require an extensive range of photos, including room shots, food images, scenery etc. Also, let us not forget that some photographers don’t understand what’s best suited when it comes down to representing hotels. An architectural shot may be stunning, but may fail to communicate your hotel brand, or may not even be a suitable aspect ratio for any social media campaigns that you might run!
Let us explore different types of hotel photography further…
Why You Need Hotel Photography
The 6 Main Categories of Hotel Photography
Optimising Your Hotel Photography
Why You Need Hotel Photography
Essentially, hotel photography is about selling your guests the moments that they will experience, before they’ve even booked. If a potential guest manages to envisage themselves, their holiday, or their wedding at your location, then they’ve practically completed their booking already!
With exceptional hotel photography, your property can create a unique emotional connection with guests, appeal to their desires and boost your direct bookings. Quality photographs that capture the essence of the guest experience will make sure you stand out from the competition!
The 6 Main Types of Hotel Photography
Architectural Photography
Architectural photography holds the first key to a hotel’s success. Brilliantly lit images that capture unique angles can be an invaluable tool in marketing your property and evoking interest from guests.
It’s the icing on top of a potential guest’s booking decision; showcasing how beautiful and well-crafted each space provides invaluable insight for those considering whether or not they should book their stay with you. However, making this type of imagery effective goes beyond just snapping pictures – proper lighting and thoughtful shot selection will make all the difference in portraying your property as warmly inviting while delivering that extra “wow factor!”
Tips for Hotels
Ready to showcase the beauty of your hotel through professional-grade photography? Hire a photographer with an impressive portfolio specialised in capturing architectural images!
You’ll also nee to ensure each room is ready as every space has its own unique identity. To make sure shooting goes smoothly, anticipate any last minute fixes or set up needs and remember – timing is key.
You can even try finding out who takes stellar shots for other hotels within your compset – then you’ll know exactly which pro to hire!
Lifestyle Photography
Lifestyle photography gives you the chance to invite potential guests into your property, offering them an opportunity to connect with it emotionally. It’s also, albeit arguably, the most effective hotel photography style that converts website visitors into booked guests.
Behind every compelling image to book, lies a complex production requiring models, locations, set design and stylists – transforming ideas into immersive visuals that let people see themselves in the scene.
Tips for Hotels:
Capturing captivating lifestyle photography isn’t something you can compromise on.
When assembling your team, look for a professional photographer and stylist, as well as seasoned makeup artists, hair stylists and wardrobe gurus to bring the concept to life! With state-of-the art technology at our fingertips today it’s easy to get allured by trends that don’t stand the test of time – remember staying timeless is key so steer clear of including too many laptops or phones in your photos – they date quickly. You should also get plenty of video footage while your photoshoot is going on; you can never have too much content to choose from!
While rounding up friends & family might be tempting (and inexpensive!) skip this route; instead seek out experienced models who know how best present themselves in front of a camera which will save valuable time during an already whirlwind shoot day!
Lastly, take some extra precaution before signing off any contracts: review their portfolio thoroughly beforehand + ask about similar projects completed previously – because hiring right guarantees successful photo results every time!
Food & Drink Photography
Great food photography isn’t just an effective way to convert potential guests, but also draws in non-guests with the promise of a tantalising experience!
For hotels that offer it, showcasing visually appealing images can help persuade travellers looking for more than just your standard stay. Meanwhile, restaurants without dishes have the opportunity to promote their special cocktail nights and create an energetic atmosphere around their hotel.
Tips for Hotels:
Create lasting impressions with a professional food and beverage photographer who has extensive experience in capturing the most tantalising dishes. To ensure maximum impact, plan ahead by selecting which delicious creations you’d like photographed before they reach your plates – timing is key as it’s vital to capture that alluring appeal while it’s fresh! Include the chef so any final touches can be made for an extra wow-factor effect.
The result?
A stunning portfolio of photos ready to make mouths water!
Wedding Photography
A picture is worth a thousand words, and never is that phrase more appropriate than when it comes to hotel photography for weddings. With the right wedding photography, your venue’s digital presence can demonstrate a space for producing magical memories and heart-warming experiences.
By showing couples what their special day could look like at your property in beautiful photos, they’ll be able to envision themselves surrounded by family and friends celebrating their cherished life moments – your website visiting couples should be able to feel the potential of their special day jumping out of their computer screen!
Tips for Hotels:
Celebrate your hotel’s ability to cater to your clients’ special day before it even happens!
Put on a mock wedding full of fun and festivities, with professional photography to boot. Get creative by arranging agreements between local bridal businesses who can provide stunning assets from actual weddings. You can work together with them to share in the hotel wedding photographs you’ll receive at the end of the project!
Focus on detail shots, bride and groom shots and of course, the decor of the wedding itself! These images will work nicely in your hotel marketing bundles both digital and hard copy for potential guests.
Seasonal Photography
Seasonal hotel photography applies to certain hotels more than it does others. If your hotel involves destination marketing, then it’s a must have for any hotel! However, if you aren’t involved in destination marketing it is still a highly recommended step for your marketing efforts.
Put it this way: the more seasonal photos you have now, the more assets you have for years to come. Obviously, barring any dramatic changes in your hotel’s physical appearance these assets can be reused time and time again on social media, marketing campaigns, brochures and more!
Tips for Hotels
Go professional. Any other way will result in sub-par content that will need to be redone as soon as you have the chance.
With a professional photographer that is experienced with hotel seasonal photography, you can work together to get a whole range of shots throughout the year.
However, while you plan ahead with your photographer you must remember one thing; plan ahead and coordinate with them! Your seasonal photography wouldn’t be genuine if your team hasn’t already set up the correct decorations. You should also set aside a time window rather than a specific date, as unusual weather can severely disrupt the quality of your seasonal photography!
Social Media Hotel Photography
We’re pushing the boundaries with this one a little bit, let’s explain why.
Technically speaking, all the assets you’ve previously can and indeed should be used on Social Media. So why have we added this as a separate category as well?
Because social media needs to be current. We’ve arrived at an age where a hotel’s instagram page acts as another landing page; it’s that effective at hooking guests! But only if it stays up-to-date.
Your lifestyle images should be timeless, classy and elegant. However, with the content that you push out on social media, you’ll run out of these images rather quickly. Social media photography focuses on snapshots of guest experiences; and you can use the latest trends and tiktok dances to do it.
Tips for Hotels:
Be regular on social media. If it’s once a week, keep it at once a week. If you have the content to post every day, then keep posting every day. Regularity is more important than volume.
Use social media hotel photography according to your hotel. If you’re a high-end hotel, you’ll need a team of professional photographers to meet your needs and set the scenes that you need to portray. If you are more of a boutique hotel, you can likely leave it in the hands of a single talented, young photographer. We’re not ageist, but younger people tend to stay up-to-date in terms of the latest trends. A viral TikTok or two can boost your direct booking immensely!
More often than not you can rely on small, local influencers who look for discounts or to enter affiliate marketing with your hotel. They can focus on driving business and maintaining content while you run your hotel to the best of your ability.
Optimising Hotel Photography
High-quality pictures are necessary across all forms of your hotel photography, but that isn’t the end of it.
If you post these gorgeous images all over your website as they are, you’ll face problems:
- Website page load speed will be atrocious, leading to more bounces
- Aspect ratios will not fit into your pages perfectly
- Overlays and other hotel web page features can adversely affect the pictures
- Alt text on images can fail to capture the hotel website traffic you need
Overall, you can even end up damaging your website if you do it yourself. That’s where a digital hotel marketing agency comes in.
We have an experienced team that covers all facets of hotel marketing. Our resident photography experts can work with professional photographers and define the exact shots that you need taken with the lenses that work best.
Our in-house web development team optimises your hotel photography and your hotel website to complement each other until they fit like a glove.
We have an entire hotel SEO department dedicated to ensuring that your hotel web pages rank highly on Google with target keywords on image alt text.
In summary, it’s a full digital hotel marketing team that increases your direct bookings and keeps your rooms full. We’ve successfully handled the marketing for a range of successful hotels across international borders and continue to do so every single day.
Get in touch with a member of our hotel marketing team, or request a free audit of your hotel’s online marketing presence. We’ll arrange a one on one meeting with you, and send you the entire report once the meeting is complete! Remember to check out our list of hotel marketing guides so that you can keep up on the latest trends and tips to stay ahead in a competitive market!
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