Hospitality, Hotel and Resort Video Content

What actually drives a booking decision on screen, why property tours underperform, and the asset set a hotel genuinely needs.

Hospitality video is unusual in that the audience is deciding how to spend leisure time and money, which makes the decision emotional and comparative at the same time. A prospective guest is imagining themselves in the space while simultaneously comparing three properties on a booking site. Content that serves only one of those modes performs poorly.

The standard hotel film addresses neither well. It opens with a drone shot of the building, tours the lobby, shows a room with the bed made, visits the pool and the restaurant, and ends on the logo. It documents that the facilities exist, which the photographs on the booking page already did, and it conveys nothing about what staying there feels like.

The research points toward experience rather than inventory. Veloso et al. (2024), studying social media content strategy in hospitality, examined the impact of experiential posts and response congruence on engagement, hotel image and booking intention. Chen et al. (2025) found that typicality in luxury hotel brand storytelling affects booking intention. Together these support a structural point: content that conveys an experience and a coherent story outperforms content that lists what the property contains.

Visual presentation carries measurable weight in this category. Amin et al. (2021), examining the impact of visual presentations and online reviews on hotel booking intentions, studied how these elements shape the decision. For a hotel this justifies treating imagery as a commercial asset rather than a marketing expense, and it explains why properties with weak visual content underperform properties with comparable facilities and better photography.

The moments that actually sell are specific and small: the light in the room at a particular hour, the view from the balcony as someone steps out, the texture of the linen, the first sip of coffee on the terrace, the sound of the pool. These are sensory rather than architectural, and they are what a guest is trying to imagine. A film built from ten of these moments outperforms a comprehensive tour of the whole property.

Sound does unusual work in hospitality because so much of the appeal is atmospheric. Birds, water, distant conversation, cutlery, wind through palms. Peng-Li et al. (2021), studying sound evoked consumer food choice through visual attention, demonstrated that auditory cues influence choice in a food context, and the hospitality equivalent is familiar to anyone who has watched a resort film with the sound off and then on. The soundtrack is not accompaniment here; it is a substantial part of the product being conveyed.

People in frame are a decision that should be made deliberately. Empty rooms photograph cleanly and feel sterile; occupied rooms feel alive and require the viewer to identify with whoever is in them. The practical compromise most properties use is implied presence: a chair recently moved, a book open, a robe over the arm of a sofa, a hand entering frame. This suggests occupation without casting a specific guest the viewer must relate to.

Generated imagery has a narrow legitimate role in this category and a serious risk. A guest books based on the film and then arrives at the actual property, which makes discrepancy immediately verifiable and directly damaging. Kirk and Givi (2025) found that perceptions of authenticity shape consumer responses, and a hotel is the clearest possible case: the room either looks like the film or it does not. Generation belongs in atmospheric, abstract and campaign material, never in depicting rooms, views or facilities.

The asset set a property actually needs is broader than one film and mostly short. A ninety second brand film for the website, room type specific pieces of thirty seconds each for the booking flow, vertical cuts for social, a silent loop for the lobby and lift screens, seasonal and event versions, and a library of stills pulled from the same production. Producing these together from one properly planned shoot costs far less than commissioning them separately across a year.

The measurement available in hospitality is unusually good and rarely used. Booking site engagement, direct booking conversion, time on the room type page, and enquiry volume are all measurable, and a property that runs its film on the room page and watches conversion has a real answer within weeks. That answer, rather than view count, is what should determine the next production.

References

Veloso, M., Ieva, M., & Gómez-Suárez, M. (2024). Social media content strategy in hospitality: The impact of experiential posts and response congruence on engagement, hotel image, and booking intention. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, 33(1), 57–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/19368623.2023.2241041

Chen, F., Cai, R., & Xu, X. (2025). The effect of typicality in luxury hotel brand storytelling on booking intention. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 131, Article 104337. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2025.104337

Amin, D., Mahomed, A. S., Ab Aziz, Y. B., & Hashim, H. B. (2021). Examining the impact of visual presentations and online reviews on hotel booking intentions. Tourism and Hospitality Research, 21(4), 402–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/14673584211021900

Peng-Li, D., Mathiesen, S. L., Chan, R. C. K., Byrne, D. V., & Wang, Q. J. (2021). Sounds healthy: Modelling sound-evoked consumer food choice through visual attention. Appetite, 164, Article 105264. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2021.105264

Kirk, C. P., & Givi, J. (2025). The AI-authorship effect: Understanding authenticity, moral disgust, and consumer responses to AI-generated marketing communications. Journal of Business Research, 186, Article 114984. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.114984