A hotel marketer explains how storytelling and visual content create emotional connections that drive bookings. He shows how humanizing your hotel through digital channels can significantly boost revenue by engaging guests before they arrive.
So this story began when I was about nine years old amongst all my teachers. I loved this one teacher and the difference was that she showed me visuals, she told me stories. Sam I knew just then that it's a story that I always got hooked onto. I did great in those subjects where there were visuals and there were stories. I got engaged and I realized stories do everything for us. And then many years later, now that I'm a hotel marketer, the most results that we've got for hotels are the hotels which have given us content, hotels which have stories, hotels that have visuals. Almost 8x returns have come out from those hotels where we've been able to use fantastic visuals, fantastic images, fantastic videos and fantastic stories to be able to get amazing returns for those hotels. Another life changing event happened when a few years back, I told my wife, you need to take care of the kids and the family. Give me two months, I need to follow my passion. So off I went to New York Film Academy in Los Angeles to do a course in film direction and filmmaking. It was completely a life changing experience for me. And of course the company that I run today, we learned photography, we learned videos, we learned how to storytell for making big movies. I didn't go on to become a director, but I went on to become somebody who started telling stories for hotels for a living. And guess what happened next? We now started working with hundreds of hotels in different parts of the world where we are telling visual stories. And today things have changed. We're now in 2015, guess what's happening now. We have so many channels to use to give out those stories and make an impact to the guest who will want to choose your hotel because you have a story, you have a human interface and you displaying it out there with everything that you've done so far. So every hotel has a story. When your guest is checking in, he's tired. A business guest is tired, he's checking in and your concierge recognizes him by his name and asks him how his family is doing. He feels important, he feels looked after, he feels recognized. That's the story right there. He's coming back to your hotel because he feels recognized. I've seen people talking to the front office manager, general managers of your hotels coming back and saying, you know why I choose this hotel? Because at the end of a busy day, you are the people who are giving me the opportunity to work with you. You're giving me the opportunity to be recognized. It's a home away from home. Those moments, those stories are what we capture in this project called Hotel Stories from different parts of the World. So while the guest is checking in, while the guest is checking out, while he's going into a spa, while he's checked in with his family for his much deserved, much earned vacation, while he's lying around at the pool and reading a book and re analyzing his life and he goes back, these are memories, these are real life moments which are being lived at your hotels. What great way today better than to capture these stories on Instagram, on Facebook, on all of these channels and display it to the whole world and have this as a 100% revenue strategy so that more and more people understand that your hotel has a human connect. There are so many real life moments, there's so much planning, there's so much life that has been lived by a business or a leisure guest with or without their families in your hotel. Covering them with great photo shoots, covering them with great visual stories, covering them with great social media stories is the key to success for every hotel today to make money. End of the day, Hotel Stories is a project that was started to give more revenues for hotels. And guess what? Most of our success stories.
