PLAINFIELD, IL, JUNE 1, 2021 — As a hotel owner, it’s essential for you to follow design trends in the hospitality industry. After all, a guest’s stay in your hotel isn’t just to sleep, it’s also to have an experience. By making that experience memorable and “Instagram-worthy,” a hotel creates a deeper connection with that guest, plus gives you free social media promotions. Making photo-friendly elements a central part of a hotel’s design will boost the chances of attracting new guests and maintaining repeat business from Instagram’s one billion users.
“On Instagram and other visually-driven social media platforms, hotel guests share photos with tens of millions of people, so the stakes are high. This underscores the importance of designs that are unique, photo-worthy and full of surprises,” explained Sam Cicero, President of Cicero Construction Group, a general contractor specializing in the renovation of hospitality properties. “Nearly 90 percent of millennials now use social media to decide where they are going to vacation and what hotel they are going to stay at. An interesting design can go a long way in increasing the number of posts featuring your hotel that they’ll see.”Cicero offers a few tips to help hotel owners have their property featured more frequently on the “gram”.
- Use Mother Nature to encourage photography. Blur the boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces, while maximizing natural lighting throughout your hotel. Also, use raw natural materials, natural ventilation, organic building materials and landscaping design to make the hotel a part of nature.
- Create themed spaces to compel visitors to mention your hotel on Instagram. The themes can be anything from simplistic to artistic, but the idea is to create a difference in the minds of guests. Consider integrating quirky murals or adding neon quotes to walls. Small details, from furniture to fixtures, fuel the aspirational lifestyle content Instagram runs on. Create spaces that don’t just allow but actively encourage Instagram photography.
- Local experiences are a huge trend in leisure travel that can be used to influence every aspect of a hotel’s design and services. This includes using local art, materials and décor to make hotel rooms and spaces reflect local culture, adding local cuisine to the menu, and offering sightseeing tours for local events and points of interest that make great visuals for Instagram.
- Provide eye-catching amenities like no other hotel. How about an outdoor bathtub stationed in the lap of nature or a floor with a live aquarium running beneath? Create an experience like no other for your guests.
- Everyone loves a beautiful tiled floor, and tiles draw in a huge number of Instagram users. Tiles provide a visual connector throughout a space and, in addition to enabling the perfect feet-and-floor shot, also look great when photographed in perspective.
- Unique wall coverings create a canvas for hotel guests to compose a shot, whether with people or as a standalone in itself. Pineapples, birds, leaves or urban graffiti – as long as it’s distinctive, you’ve got a Instagram goldmine.
- Hotels can invite popular Instagram travel bloggers and influencers to stay at their property and as a consideration, request them to post about their experience on Instagram. These influencers have millions of followers as compared to the guests that visit the hotel.
As Instagram’s influence snowballs, hotels, new and old, are increasingly relying on photo-worthy features to lure new business. It’s free advertising since a paying guest takes and shares the photo on social media.
Thankfully, creating a great design and Instagram-worthy space doesn’t have to mean installing wildly expensive design features – it can be much more subtle than this and many hotels are grasping this design trend. Some creative thinking and an eye for photographic scenery translates into social media success.
To learn more, visit www.cicero-construction.com.
