Part 1 · The value · Lesson 1 of 13
It's a trade, not a favour
One shift in posture, and every message you send afterwards reads differently.
4 minute read
We've read a lot of first messages to hotels. The ones that get ignored almost never fail because the writing is bad. They fail because they read like a request when they could have read like an offer.
That's the whole lesson. Everything else in this course is detail on top of it.
Why it works
A hotel isn't really in the accommodation business. It's in the occupancy business. Every empty room tonight is money it can't get back — nobody ever sold last Tuesday.
To keep rooms full it needs a constant supply of pictures and video. Instagram, the website, the booking listings, the ads it runs in February, the newsletter, the rate sheet the sales team leaves with a travel agent. That supply has to come from somewhere and it's expensive: a commissioned shoot means a photographer's day rate, often a videographer, sometimes models, plus licensing on top. Most independent properties can't do that more than every few years. It's why so many hotel accounts are still posting a photo of the pool from 2019.
You're offering to help with that, in exchange for something they already own and can't put in storage: a room on a night they haven't sold.
The one thingYou're not asking for a stay. You're proposing a trade, and both sides are giving up something real.
Three things worth unlearning
| What you might be thinking | What we'd say |
|---|---|
| “I need more followers before anyone takes me seriously.” | You need something concrete to offer, and there are two candidates: content they can keep and reuse, or an audience that books. Plenty of people land stays on the first alone. If you have the second too, that's worth real money — lesson 2 gets into it. |
| “A free stay is free.” | It costs you a shoot day, an edit day and a delivery. Price it honestly in your head and you'll stop apologising when you ask. |
| “They said no.” | They probably said nothing. Silence usually means the message landed with the wrong person, in the wrong month, without anything specific in it. |
What a vague message looks like
Read this the way a marketing manager would, on a phone, between two other things:
There's nothing in there they can act on. No dates they can check against the calendar, no list of what they'd end up with, no link to anything. Creators with forty followers write this message. So do creators with four hundred thousand, and great ones. Size has nothing to do with it.
Here's the same request with the details put back in:
Same ask. Completely different conversation. And the second one can be forwarded to whoever actually decides without anybody having to explain it first — which turns out to be the thing that matters most.
Be honest with yourself about the cost
Before you can be honest with them. A hosted stay is work:
- Half an hour to an hour a day on the property, shooting. Not the whole trip. But the good light is early and late, which are also the nicest parts of a holiday.
- Three to five hours choosing and editing when you get home, per property.
- One delivery email and one testimonial request.
Call it a day and a half of professional work. So when somebody offers you a single night in return, you'll know exactly why the maths doesn't work — and lesson 10 has the words for saying so nicely.
Do this now
- Write one sentence for what you make. “I make [what] for [what kind of property].” No adjectives about yourself.
- Work out what a day and a half of your time is worth. You don't have to say the number out loud. You need it as a floor.
- Reread your last outreach message. Could someone forward it without adding a sentence of explanation? If not, that's the fix.