Your hotel’s digital media gallery is filled with photos, videos and sometimes even virtual tours – but is it filled with eye-catching descriptions?

As we always say, every hotel has its own unique hotel story to share with online travel shoppers. Chances are, your hotel’s digital media gallery is filled with photos, videos and sometimes even virtual tours – but is it filled with eye-catching descriptions?

While a picture can tell a thousand words, just a few words can change its entire story. Having unique and ‘snackable’ descriptions will make your already-stunning visuals even more attention-grabbing!

Personalization, Personalization, Personalization

Personalization is probably the most important point when it comes to creating descriptions for your hotel’s wide array of media content.

It is imperative that every single visual (whether it’s a photo, video or virtual tour) has its own, unique caption – no matter how similar they may seem. Your hotel’s rooms with one king-size bed are not identical to the rooms which hold two queen-size beds, so why should your photo descriptions be? Vividly explaining the benefits of staying in an upgraded room can even entice travel shoppers to upgrade!

Yes, writing a unique text description for each piece of visual content may be time-consuming, but it generally only has to be done once. When you have all your personalized descriptions written and posted alongside your visuals, from then on, you can just sit back and reap the benefits that they will provide to you – like driving positive attention and bookings.

As our Best Practices: Multi-Media Guidelines for Hotel Marketers eBook states, using bullet points and bolding/italicizing key words, to highlight important points, is encouraged and recommended – as it makes the text more visually-appealing and easy-to-read, something travel shoppers that are on-the-go appreciate.

Short & Sweet

Having descriptions is a must, but not long ones that travel shoppers will have to scroll through to find the information they’re looking for. Travel shoppers are known not to spend too much time on a page. In fact, according to the Nielsen Norman Group, a research agency, internet users typically leave websites in 10-20 seconds, so it’s important to succinctly mention your top selling features.

Remember to only include information that is important and relevant to the visual. Think: will adding this piece of information make the travel shopper more inclined to choose my hotel over others? If you don’t think it really will, don’t include it.

Narrate Your Hotel’s Visual Story

After working with many hotels, we truly understand the importance of pairing text descriptions with hotel’s visuals. A beautiful picture does show many things to a travel shopper but can it show free high-speed Wi-Fi? Not really. Descriptions are a great tool that a hotelier can use to further describe their hotel’s unique and captivating story to the travel shopper.

Christine Hopkins, Director of Communications for Hotel Galvez & Spa and The Tremont House, which are both Wyndham Grand Hotels, and Harbor House Hotel & Marina, recently said in our webinar, “We want to be able to effectively tell our [hotel’s] story. One of the ways we set our hotel apart from the competition is by trying to tell this story and we do this through compelling rich media which is, of course, photos and videos, with accompanying text descriptions. We all know that a good picture is important but the accompanying text description help frame our hotel’s story and it also allows travel shoppers to learn what we’re about and what we can offer them.”