Pictures speak a thousand words and user generated photographs can easily highlight the negatives of your property. Tackle this efficiently instead of trying to suppress their circulation.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but most hotel PR and marketing managers today would be at a loss for words at the plague of user-generated photos out on the internet today.
Hoteliers may need to get used to the fact that competing with their official previews of what to expect presented to potential future guests, could be unflattering visual footprints taken by those that have stayed with them in the past.
It’s no secret that hotels pay thousands of dollars for painstakingly taken, doctored photos that would entice even the most hardened globetrotter to positively drool in anticipation and hit that book button. Great pictures do sell.
Nowhere to hide
Just as the transparency offered by the internet in terms of rates has given many a hotel revenue manager grey hair, the ability to easily share rich media on the web promises to do the same for the marketing ilk.
One only needs to turn to photos posted on TripAdvisor or Flickr to obtain unflattering photos of virtually every nook and cranny of your hotel these days.
The ease with which users can now take and publish photos online virtually guarantees that any dirty rooms, dropped drinks, deteriorating facilities and other ‘oops’ moments get their 15 minutes — or perpetuity — of fame on the internet. As if old high school photos resurfacing on Facebook wasn’t bad enough!
Finding the positives
But is it all bad news? Well, maybe it’s not all marketing kryptonite. With web and mobile applications constantly evolving, the range of tools at the modern traveller’s disposal is mind-boggling (and delicious, for the geeks among us).
In a lot of cases, guests have provided content and filled in gaps that hotel marketers didn’t even know existed! Consider just a few of the things your guest might do when on holiday:
- Research the hotels where they plan to stay, complete with detailed blow-by-blow accounts of previous guest experiences and real photos of the facilities. Comparison shop, obtain email alerts of airline and hotel price drops and get the internet to build their itinerary and share it for them.
- Take low to high resolution photos on the fly with their iPhone, Smartphone or Blackberry. Increasingly, the quality of photos and videos taken by mobile devices is catching up with digicams and camcorders.
- Share or broadcast these photos and videos immediately via email, personal / public blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other media sharing, streaming and photo hosting services.
- Geo-tag photos with a physical location and have them show up automatically on Google Earth, for example.
- Find their way around the local area using mobile GPS, user-generated placemarks and photos, as well as web services like virtual tours, route fly-throughs, Google Street Views and more.
Letting go
These are just a few of the things that can be done — the list keeps growing. Prototype technologies such as Microsoft’s PhotoSynth promise to go even further and do for photos what hyperlinks did for the web — everything!
PhotoSynth literally relies on thousands of user photos to recreate a scene that allows users to experience a virtual, 3D photo and the ability to view detailed aspects of any location without ever leaving their chair.
With technologies like these, the concept of virtual tourism doesn’t seem so far-fetched or relegated to the ranks of agoraphobes anymore.
Rather than tear our hair out trying to keep questionable photos and content off the internet, hoteliers need to listen, watch and engage the community when they create this content and supplement it where necessary.
At the end of the day, pictures will always tell their story as only pictures can: our job is to ensure that roving digital eyes find a story worth telling — one befitting the true potential of our products and services.
Who is Jitendra Jain (JJ)
Jitendra Jain (JJ) is the founder of various online initiatives such as www.hotelemarketer.com, www.thetalentjungle.com and www.younghotelier.com, which aim to connect, educate and share all that is “glorious about hospitality, technology and most importantly, the people that define our times”.
