Exclusive Feature: How many times have you admired the photos your guests have taken from their hotel room window, or their table in your restaurant?
Remember that stunning sunset shot from the beach, or the artsy glass-of-wine-posing-by-the-fireplace photo that got dozens of likes on Instagram?
Now, one hotel company is helping guests enhance their favorite travel photos, thanks to a little fancy enhancements in their mobile app.
The Ritz-Carlton is giving guests the power of photography as part of their updated app. As part of the luxury hotel group's enhanced app, the Ritz-Carlton is allowing guests to ability to create their own personalized travel posters, complete with a destination stamp and social media sharing.
“A picture is worth a thousand words and a beautiful way to hold on to the memories we want to preserve” said Ed French, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, L.L.C.
Through a new travel poster feature in the hotel group's mobile app, Ritz-Carlton guests can transform their own photos into unique, vintage-inspired posters capturing their travel memories and sharing them with friends and followers in their social media networks.
To help achieve this, the app allows guests to create their own travel poster using special filters, effects, and basic photo editing skills like cropping. Once finished, guests can add their destination name and stamps, creating a vintage-style poster that can be shared across social media.
I gave it a try using some of my own photos, taken just steps from the Ritz-Carlton, Boston Common Hotel. The process was simple. Upon opening The Ritz-Carlton App, I chose the "travel posters" feature. The app accessed my phone's photo album, and from there I could choose the photo I wanted to use.
Using the photo editor on the app, I was able to crop my photo, adjust the lighting, and add a frame to it. Using the destination stamps, I added "Boston" to my poster and hit save. I added a caption, inserted some hashtags and shared my photo on my social networks.
The Ritz-Carlton added their own #RCMemories hashtag to the saved image, as well. This super simple add-on keeps these photo "postcards" branded to the luxury hotel group, and allows the Ritz-Carlton to see what guests are posting from their hotels.
The photos tagged with #RCMemories are then shared on the hotel's Instagram channel and on a newly-created web page called 'ritzcarlton.com/yourmemories.'
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Melanie Nayer is a hotel reviewer and expert on luxury travel around the world. She has covered all aspects of hotels including corporate restructures, re-branding initiatives, historical aspects and the best of the best in luxury hotels around the world.
Melanie writes a weekly exclusive column for 4Hoteliers.com