How HotelREZ Improved Image Quality for Over 900 Hotels in 30 Days

HotelREZ provides representation services for over 900 independent hotels around the world. As part of HotelREZ, client hotels receive access to Leonardo’s Enterprise platform, VScape, in order to manage their image distribution to 3^rd party travel channels and all four major GDSs.

At the end of 2018, HotelREZ conducted an audit of the hotel images in VScape with their Leonardo Account Director, Vanesha Ramsamy, and discovered that some of the images that their member hotel were distributing to third-party travel websites as provided or uploaded by member hotels in our network were lower quality.

As Leonardo’s customer since 2014, HotelREZ understood the value and importance of media and decided to make this a focus for the beginning of this year. They began to source higher quality photos from their member hotels, and were quickly able to ensure that 100% of HotelREZ’s hotel photos were medium to high quality.

Bowood Hotel, Spa & Golf Resort, represented by HotelREZ

Why Image Quality Matters for Revenue

As Veronica Katsoridou, Creative Director at HotelREZ explains, “Having high-quality photos is not a “good to have,” it’s crucial to sales, revenue, and guest engagement.”

Veronica was confident that high quality, properly tagged images would help meet their goals to:

• Ensure all properties have photos on GDSs
• Improve display on third-party travel channels
• Increase agency bookings

With an eye on revenue and guest engagement, HotelREZ took the initiative to improve the quality of the hotel images for their member properties in VScape.

“HotelREZ understands that image quality improves the travel shopping experience and results in more hotel bookings and revenue. By setting high standards for image quality, they’re giving their hotels an advantage in a competitive travel market,” says Vanesha.

How HotelREZ Updated Media for 900 Hotels in Just 1 Month

Sourcing, uploading, categorizing, and distributing images for an entire hotel chain may seem overwhelming. “With VScape, the task is simple. The first step? Audit. Second step, prioritize by importance, meaning focus what affects sales most, like missing exterior shots, too many images categorized as “other,” and low resolution images,” says Veronica.

“At Leonardo, one of the value adds we provide to Veronica and her team at HotelREZ is custom Image Quality reports as well as media auditing tools. This helps them sort and prioritize which images to update, and correct their image categorization, which is increasingly important to third-party channels and GDSs,” says Vanesha.

HotelREZ began their mission to improve image quality with hotels that were missing photos in key categories, then they used the image quality report to reach out to hotels that needed to improve their image quality.

As they worked through the project, many of the member hotels HotelREZ contacted had high resolution image files—they just had not been uploaded to VScape. “With such a wide variety of ways to share large image files, sourcing high quality image files to upload to VScape is getting easier and easier,” says Veronica.

All in all, this project to source and upload missing and higher quality images took one member of Veronica’s team less than a month to complete in between other day-to-day tasks.

Paresa Resort Phuket represented by HotelREZ

What Brands Can Do For Their Hotels

“Brands need to take control,” says Veronica. “Don’t take for granted that independent hotels have the time to upload and manage their highest quality images. Providing your hotels access to VScape isn’t enough: education and auditing are key.”

Knowing how busy their hotels are, Veronica’s team now sources high quality photos from all new hotels that join the HotelREZ portfolio during the onboarding process. This ensures that HotelREZ will maintain their high image quality score over time.

Veronica also has regular meetings with Vanesha, who provides insights and information on how HotelREZ and its properties can use VScape to maintain high quality images and correct categorization on third-party booking channels and GDSs that increase revenue.

When speaking about the image quality improvement project HotelREZ took on, Veronica says, “I thought it would take longer, but it didn’t. You just need good staff who can use VScape’s reporting and auditing functionality.”

Visit VScape.io to learn more about how to deliver high quality images to thousands of online booking channels.