Consumers across the globe are finally feeling safe enough to resume travel. While this is great news, travelers are scrutinizing their destination and hospitality options more closely and are more selective when deciding on a service provider.
The hyper-selective consumer means travel and hospitality providers must instill confidence in the mind of the potential client/guest and generate a desire to book. One proven tactic that entices would-be travelers to book is developing video experiences that inspire.
While video creation, curation, management, and delivery can be more complex compared to other media there are automations available that can make a world of difference.
Photos are great, especially user-generated pictures – after all, nothing sells better than “word of mouth,” but many travel-hesitant consumers need that extra push only video can provide.
While online marketplaces for short-term homestays like Airbnb and Vrbo have revolutionized hospitality, the digital experiences they provide are largely tied to photo galleries. Video experiences are better ways to engage renters on the fence or inspire the digital nomad looking for the perfect place to work and experience a new city, culture, language, etc.
“We’ve found that when hotels use video really effectively to tell a story, customer engagement jumps by five or six percentage points.”
Tarun Goyal, Founder & CEO, Simplotel
Benefits of video:
- Consumers rely on video as a main source of storytelling, driven mainly by the adoption of social media platforms, influencers, and 24/7 streaming. (See infographic below)
- Viewers take what they see at face value, inspiring confidence in what they’re booking.
- Video creation is available to anyone with a smartphone, not just rental owners or professionals, also to happy customers motivated to post user-generated videos.
All brands, from luxury to discount, want their name and mark to be synonymous with quality. Travel and hospitality companies are no different in this regard. What makes the travel and hospitality industry different is that they crave positive user feedback, typically in the form of video testimonials, as proof of quality and to attract new customers. The dilemma is, most user-generated video is low-quality or may contain parts not suitable for all viewers. To maintain quality standards companies need the ability to elevate this content, bring shots into focus, deliver crisp images that are scaled correctly, adjust sound levels, and edit out inappropriate content.
Challenges in delivering perfect video:
- UGC. It’s great that anyone with a smartphone can create a video, the quality of user-generated videos is less than desired and requires a tremendous amount of time inspecting videos for quality and appropriate content.
- Scale. Getting a video up is relatively easy, but scaling video is hard and time-consuming. For example, hotel chains that want to highlight multiple setups in a room or travel guides that want to educate travelers on one route but in multiple languages.
- Social Media video specs. Once a video is created, there are multiple steps required to size and ensure a video meets the technical spec requirements for a variety of social media platforms and a brand’s mobile app, online, and IoT devices.
- Live streaming. Live streaming and a recorded version of a live-streaming event for video-on-demand (VOD) is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. But it is hard to ensure high-quality video live, and it’s even more complicated when editing it down for VOD, adding subtitles, translations, moderation, and more.
Video is incredibly impactful but can be time-consuming and difficult to produce. Cloudinary’s automated media solution, Cloudinary Media Experience Cloud, intelligently scales and optimizes video for leading brands.
Cloudinary’s solution greatly improves workflows for companies of all sizes, managing tasks through automation and freeing up developers and content teams to focus on more pertinent work rather than scanning user-generated videos for bad language.
Cloudinary’s video optimization feature smartly crop videos, optimize them for size and quality, no matter the user’s device and bandwidth, and ensure smooth adaptive bitrate streaming. Cloudinary’s Media Experience Cloud is an API-driven solution that fits any composable tech stack to store, transform, and optimize media assets.
Travel and hospitality brands can benefit from an automated media solution:
- UGC. End-to-end delivery and management of user-generated videos, including optimized uploads, transcription, thumbnail creation, security features, and more — all automated.
- Social media delivery. Brands can upload videos for social media through Cloudinary, automatically transforming raw videos into high-quality content.
- Video On Demand (VOD). A Cloudinary media upload widget helps brands upload recordings, adjusting content to fit any platform from Twitter to the website, automatically fitting the necessary aspect ratios and media specs.
Cloudinary is helping travel and hospitality brands put the excitement back into seeing the world. Contact us here to learn how automation can save you time and deliver fast, high-quality, impactful videos that entice travelers to book with you.
