Maintaining Brand Integrity Starts with Technology: Secure Your Hotel Media Management

Great photography defines a brand. Beautiful photos show off the careful decisions your hotels made to look their best. Don’t put all that at risk by sharing hotel photos by email, Dropbox, or, even worse, USB key. There are asset management solutions specifically designed for the needs of the hospitality industry.   

When a hotel chain thinks about their photos, their primary focus is on how they can get those photos to the channels that generate direct and third-party revenue. That means you may be overlooking that you also have to share this media with: 

• Internal teams who use hotel photography in print collateral and on brand.com 
• PR staff integrating hotel photos in media pitches and marketing campaigns 

• Third-party marketing agencies creating campaigns 
• Media outlets writing news and property features 

Here are four things to look for in a solution to share hotel images securely, while saving you time and money. 

1. Web-Based User Interface 

We don’t like using hyperbole, but if you’re providing photos via USB stick, you’re basically guaranteeing a headache down the line. Relying on hard storage like a USB stick or shared drives is a surefire way to wind up with outdated photos that are impossible to track.   

A web-based user interface means that you can continuously maintain photos. Your team can easily upload new ones and delete old ones so that both internal and external stakeholders only have access to the most current photos.  

What’s more, web-based photo management solutions for hotels ensure that no files are lost or corrupt and image quality is not degraded in the transfer. 

2. Security Features & User Management 

Now that you’ve thrown away your USB sticks and hard drives, you can properly manage who can access your database of photos. Taking ownership of access to approved hotel photos is crucial.  

Ideally, you want a solution that enables you to control access. That means you can add and remove users as required, and you can monitor user activity to see who has downloaded what and when.  

Some solutions allow “guest access” but this should be only one type of user, as you need insight into who is logging in and what they are accessing. Look for an option that has more robust user management features.  

3. Designed for the Hospitality Industry 

Web based? Check. Secure? Check. You also need a solution that is designed with your company’s use case in mind. Following a hotel photoshoot, a photographer may share images with you or the hotel directly via their own white label web gallery.  

While these web galleries are great for delivering images immediately after a photoshoot, they’re designed for photographers. They’re not a viable long-term image management and distribution solution for a hotel or group of hotels. You may lose access to the photos if you don’t download the full resolution photos media library past a certain timeframe. 

What’s more, a media gallery designed for the hospitality industry will allow you to associate relevant property information to each photo. A hospitality-specific gallery sorts by property, has amenity categories, stores text description and valuable EXIF data, and even lets you create collections of relevant photo types. 

4. Integration with Other Technology 

While we’re on the topic of technology design for the hospitality industry, we should acknowledge that there is a lot of it out there. When you’re investing in any technology, it’s important to consider the ways that it integrates with other systems. Why buy two solutions (distribution and galleries) when you could get one? 

A media library controls the distribution of approved hotel images to internal and external stakeholders, but to bring it back to the primary focus of most hotel media, it should also be integrated directly with other media management and automation solutions. That may include the distribution of images to third-party travel websites, feeds images back to your own websites, web galleries, booking engine, and more. 

That’s how our VScape solution works. Store and collect images once, so that they’re ready for use everywhere. VScape can feed media where it needs to be seen: third-party and brand-controlled booking channels, as well as Media Library for asset management. Media Library has all the features a hospitality company needs to securely share media.   

Take a tour of our brand-new Media Library.