Most hotel content gets planned the way a small building project gets planned.
There is a date, a photographer, a shot list, a week of tidying up rooms that nobody will sleep in that day, and three months later a folder of images that look good and look like every other property in the destination.
I am not going to argue that the produced stuff is useless, because it isn’t.
What I keep wondering is why the other half of the job, the cheap and slightly strange half, is almost never attempted by anyone.
Which is a difficult thing to wonder about in the abstract, right up until you watch somebody doing it for the price of a coffee.
What a restaurant did with a webcam and a free coffee
Here is the whole thing, and it really is the whole thing.
A restaurant put a webcam at the entrance.
If you walk in dancing, you get a free coffee.
They record what happens and turn it into light, funny content, and the entire production budget is a coffee.
I don’t know how long they have been doing it or what it has done for their business, so I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What caught my attention is that the idea is completely portable, and a hotel has considerably more room to run it than a restaurant does.
Before porting it anywhere, though, it is worth being precise about which part of it is actually doing the work.
The mechanic has three parts, and the dancing isn’t one of them
Strip the example down and you get a fixed camera on a point everybody walks through, an action small enough to do without thinking, and a reward you can hand over on the spot.
The dancing is just the version of the action they happened to pick, and it is the one thing you can swap for anything else.
The three parts underneath it are load bearing, and my read is that most attempts die on the action or on the reward rather than on the camera.
That last bit is reasoning rather than something I have measured, so treat it as a hypothesis.
If the action takes longer than a few seconds, or if it requires the guest to go somewhere, wait around, or be judged by other people, participation collapses.
If the reward arrives later, in the form of a discount code or a prize draw, it stops feeling like a reward and starts feeling like admin.
A coffee handed over on the spot works because nobody has to think about it.
All of which ports to a hotel almost perfectly, up to the point where it doesn’t.
A hotel is not a restaurant, and that cuts both ways
The advantage is obvious once you say it out loud.
A restaurant has a customer for one meal, while you have the same guest for two or three days, with a lobby, a pool, a breakfast room, a bar, a lift and an exit, all of them points that people walk through more than once.
The constraint is less obvious, and it is the reason half of these ideas die on contact.
Your guest is on holiday and did not sign up to be part of anything, and if your mix leans corporate then a good share of the people crossing your lobby will actively resent being put on the spot.
That single constraint splits the whole field in two, and the split is probably the most useful thing in this article: mechanics that ask the guest for nothing, and mechanics that ask the guest for something small.
Start with the first family, always.
Mechanics that ask nothing of the guest
Nobody performs, nobody is interrupted, and nobody has to be asked for permission, because the camera is looking at objects rather than at people.
In the EU that last point is the difference between hanging a sign and collecting signed consent, so it is worth knowing which family you are in before you plug anything in.
- The plate camera. A fixed camera above the buffet exit, pointed only at the trays. What people genuinely build for breakfast is stranger and funnier than anything a copywriter would come up with, and the supply refills every single morning.
- One lost and found video a week. What guests leave behind in rooms is the best piece of unclaimed content in your building. It costs nothing, nobody has to do anything, and unlike almost every other idea here it never runs out. If I had to pick one of these to start on Monday, this is the one.
- The special requests you received this week, anonymised. Front office already collects them, they are already written down somewhere, and half of them are wonderful. This one doesn’t even need a camera.
- A fixed timelapse on the pool or the view. One frame every few seconds, all day, every day. What makes it interesting is the second half of the mechanic: a guest can ask you for the clip of the day they were there, which gives them a reason to come back to your own channel after they have gone home, instead of drifting back to the platform they booked through. Keeping that contact is where a direct booking strategy quietly begins.
None of these need an agency and none of them need a budget line.
They sit much closer to the zero cost marketing end of the scale than to content marketing as it usually gets sold, which also means nobody will stop you from testing one this month.
The second family is where it gets more interesting, and considerably more delicate.
Mechanics that ask something of the guest
These are more fun and more fragile, and they only work if saying no is genuinely easy.
- A bell at sunset. At the exact minute the sun goes down, the bar rings a bell and whoever is standing there gets a small glass on the house. The camera catches the room reacting rather than any one person, which keeps it comfortable for everybody, including the two people who would rather not be filmed at all.
- A note in the room for the next guest. Each guest leaves one instruction, one recommendation or one warning for whoever comes after them, and you film the notes instead of the people. You would obviously filter out the insults and the nastier jokes before publishing anything, but done in good faith it builds a chain that people genuinely want to follow.
- A photobooth with silly props. The kind you see at weddings, with a physical Polaroid the guest either keeps or pins on a wall in the lobby. The wall becomes the content, and it works because the guest walks away with an object rather than with a request.
Notice what those have in common: the guest is choosing, and there is no cost at all to walking straight past.
One of them, though, does something the other two don’t.
The one that pays for itself
The sunset bell is my favourite of the lot, and the content is the least interesting reason why.
Think about what it actually does to the bar.
You are moving people to a specific place at a specific time, usually one of the quieter parts of the day, and you are handing them something for free the moment they arrive.
Somebody already sitting there with a free glass in their hand and a sunset in front of them is considerably more likely to order something afterwards, partly because they are settled and partly because a small gift creates a small obligation.
The clip is almost a side effect.
That gives you a test worth applying to any of these before spending an evening on it: would this still be worth doing if the camera broke?
If the answer is yes, you are looking at a piece of product, and the content is a bonus.
If the answer is no, you are looking at a piece of content, which is perfectly fine, as long as you know that is what you bought.
It is the same distinction that separates a genuine extra mile from a gimmick, and it raises the obvious question of why so few properties have one.
Why almost nobody does this
The cost of trying one of these for a month sits somewhere between nothing and the price of a case of wine.
The risk to the business is close to zero, because a mechanic that nobody engages with just gets quietly unplugged.
So the reason can’t be money, and I don’t think it is effort either.
My honest guess is that it sits too far outside what an operator recognises as hotel work, and doing what everybody else does works less well while feeling much safer, which is a trade most of us take without ever noticing we took it.
You see the same thing in pricing, where the property that follows the compset down is rarely punished for it, and you see it in positioning, where sounding like the four hotels around you is the least criticised decision available to anybody.
Nobody has ever been called in by the owners to explain why the Instagram account looks normal.
Relaxing, and almost never fun
Which brings me to the part I find more interesting than any of the seven ideas above.
Independent hospitality sells rest extremely well, and almost never sells enjoyment.
The language on our websites is calm, the photography is calmer still, and somewhere along the way fun got handed over almost entirely to the resorts with waterslides and to the cruise ships.
That strikes me as a strange thing to give away, because enjoyment is one of the very few axes a small independent property can still differentiate on without touching a single wall, and the blue ocean tends to sit exactly where everybody else has stopped competing.
A camera at the bar and a free glass at sunset is not a strategy, I know that, but it is a very cheap way of finding out whether your guests would enjoy your hotel being a bit more fun, and whether your team would enjoy working somewhere that is.
If you had a fixed camera to put up tomorrow, where in your property would you point it, and what would you be willing to give away to get people to walk in front of it?
