Hotels and Photography

Copyright Infringement

It may be coincidence but several of our hotel customers have been caught out using copyrighted images on their website and have incurred considerable fines. It simply is not safe doing a 'google image search' and copying images on to your website.

However, every hotel needs images for ongoing marketing efforts (usually at the last minute, encouraging the tendency to copy images from Google!!!). We would recommend that hotels take an hour to buy 20 or so images from one of the online digital sales company, ie xxxxxxxxxx and store them on their office hard drive with the folder title something like 'Safe Photography'. Making them available at a minutes notice for any type of promotions, safe in the knowledge that you will not fall foul of copyright violations.

Topics you might want to cover with the photos include. Walkers, Golf, Families. Christmas, Couples, Valentines, Easter, St Patricks Day, Halloween etc

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Guidelines for useful Hotel photography.

Are you looking at getting some new photography done?. Most hotels would probably benefit from better photography, the outlay seems expensive but keep in mind that they can be used across ALL web platforms and marketing (ie not just your website but the OTA's too).

Consider passing on these standard guidelines below to any photographer you are thinking about engaging;

A. 1 or 2 good outside photos so people can get an impression in an instant of the type of hotel (New 'Ibis' Old 'Country House' etc)
B. Photos of every room type (With some 'set-up' ie ‘Maid cleaning room’, ‘breakfast tray on bed’, ‘man working on laptop’ etc).
C. Photos of any other areas in the hotel, ideally with people in the image (ie not an empty bar or restaurant).

Its probably worth saying that the amount of photographers who truly understand what hotels need are few and far between.