As you vacation and take your digital pictures and video, think about how you can benefit from what you’ll be doing.
We spent a month in Europe in the summer of 2006. With over 9,000 pictures and 20 hours of video tapes, we're still digging through the best of them. Two places we stayed at stand out in my video memories... Florence and Rome.
Trip Advisor is a great travel planning website and, after our trip, I was one of the first to exercise their new feature of posting videos made by travelers like us.
Here's a link to the video I uploaded about the Hotel Ungherese in Florence. You can see from the stats at Trip Advisor that it's been viewed almost 2,000 times in the 16 months it’s been online, and rated high by viewers... tagged as a professional video by Trip Advisor.
http://www.tripadvisor.com/ProfileGallery-i15729828.html [Figure1]
Trip Advisor rejected the submittal at first, saying they wanted videos made by travelers, not professionals. I accepted it as compliment and discussed things further. In the end they changed their policy to allow professionally made videos in also. They are great people to work with.
On the same trip we stayed in Anne's Place, a B&B outside Rome... this video has almost 6,000 views and is equally well rated.
http://www.tripadvisor.com/ProfileGallery-i15746469.html [Figure2]
I didn’t do either video for a fee to the owners, but got a couple bottles of wine from Sabina and Leonardo.
Armed with those experiences and being nudged forward by the world-wide interest in digital video, my vacation video planning this year has an added dimension. When or after making a hotel reservation I ask if they are interested in a similar video on Trip Advisor. So far I’m 2 for 3 for the hotels we’re reserving in Italy.
Florence - “… About your updating, please we are very interested….”. This is the same hotel Ungherese, but now under a different owner, so I asked if they were interested in refreshing the video.
Venice – “… yes I'm interested in your video work…”. We stayed in the same place the last time, and have lots of pix and footage, but hadn’t put a video together yet. I could actually dig out my existing source material and put one together before we go.
The fee or discount I’m asking for is modest but reasonable, but so is the amount of effort in putting together a video that I’d be doing anyway as part of our vacation memories.
We tend to stay in smaller hotels/B&Bs managed by the owners. This approach might not work well with chains like the Holiday Inn or Hyatt. But it doesn’t cost anything to ask.