Photosynth for Hospitality Industry

Ensuring that your hotel, motel, or guest house is enticing to prospective guests is vital. I know of a number of occasions when a hotel has been well situated and has received rave reviews, but guests have been reluctant to book due to the terrible photographs on the hotel website. The photographs make the bedrooms look small and dingy, the carpet grimy, and the bathroom moldy. Would I like to stay there? No thank you!

However, it is also important to be realistic. How many times have you looked forward to the bright blue, luxurious, fifty meter pool only to discover a ten meter bathtub upon arrival?

When consulting a small to medium sized establishment on marketing and customer service, one of the first items on the agenda is the website, and most importantly the way in which the hotel or guest house is portrayed by the website.

If the photographs do not tell the real story, I source a photographer to provide the hotel with the shots they need to advertise their product and services, and to entice guests with ease. However, this can be expensive; the shots can still be unsuccessful, and the true story is rarely ever told. Whether we like it or not, photography has its limitations.

Until now…

I have been playing with a gem of an idea called Photosynth by Microsoft Live Labs. It allows you to share places and things using the cinematic quality of a movie, the control of a video game, and the detail of the real world. With a collection of photos, Photosynth creates an amazing new experience for your prospective guests.

Photosynth provides the ability to reconstruct a scene or object from flat photographs, and then uses technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.

The Photosynth website says,

“Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point each photo was taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.”

At the moment the technology still feels somewhat infantile, and I’d love to hear if there is more advanced software out there, but I really do believe that this could be the answer to a hotel marketers prayers.

Take a look for yourself here!

Best regards

Emma

I am still on a search for the best hotel booking system for small to medium sized hotels. If you know of hotel booking software that can beat HotelSystems.co.uk for ease of use and functionality then please contact me on eharradine@hotmail.co.uk