Request: Mandatory Phone Show-Arounds

I have watched a lot of hotel promo videos. And I can now confirm, with some authority, that every property on earth is the dog’s bollocks.

How do I know? Because they all show me the same film. A white woman in a bubble bath, outdoors, gazing at nothing. Close-up of some beads. Close-up of some different beads. An elephant. A few lions. Some dude strolling barefoot along a beach, grinning like they’ve just been told threesomes are mandatory. Slow-motion wine pour. Fade to logo. Maybe a voiceover or quote telling me that my life is shit if I don’t go.

Lovely. Tells me nothing.  I literally know nothing, other than how good your videographer was.  I know nothing about the room. I don’t know if the pool overlooks the staff car park. I don’t know if the furnishings are made of discarded cardboard from a crack den.  The woman in the bath doesn’t know either. She’s too busy grinning.

The fix

Every hotel should be forced by law, on pain of public flogging, to post one unedited iPhone walkaround. Front door to bathroom, one take, no music, no one in a bath. Ideally no one in the toilet either. Show me the view from the bed, not from a helicopter. Point the camera at the path to the room and the corner of the pool nobody ever films.

If the place is genuinely good, it’ll survive a wobbly phone video. If it only looks good with a camera crew, three cuts a second and a model marinating in bubbles, I’d rather find out now than on arrival.