Over the years I’ve received hundreds of briefs from hotels, resorts and tourism boards, and the difference between the campaigns that performed and the ones that flopped was usually visible in the brief itself, before a single flight was booked. Here’s what the good ones do.
Give the Story Hook, Not the Shot List
The weakest briefs are inventories: film the lobby, the spa, the three restaurants, the room categories. That’s a real-estate listing, not a story. The strongest brief I ever received was one line: “Our guests say the property feels like disappearing, show what disappearing looks like.” Give a creator the feeling; let them engineer the shots. That’s literally the skill being hired.
Define One Hero Outcome
Pick the single thing success looks like: direct bookings from a specific market, repositioning after a renovation, filling a shoulder season. One. A brief that wants awareness and conversions and a new audience and wedding inquiries gets content that serves none of them. Every strong campaign I’ve delivered had one sentence at the top we could test decisions against.
Share the Secrets, Not Just the Fact Sheet
The marketing deck describes what every guest already sees. The content lives in what they don’t: the staff member with the improbable story, the supplier boat at dawn, the roof nobody uses, the dish with the history. Brief your team to open these doors. Properties that share their texture get films; properties that share their fact sheet get brochures.
Fix Usage Rights Upfront
Decide before the shoot: which platforms, which markets, how long, paid or organic. Scoped usage is normal, professional and priced fairly. The alternative, discovering six months later that the hotel is running the content as paid ads worldwide without the rights, burns relationships that took years to build. The best partners treat rights as part of the brief, not an afterthought.
Move at Content Speed
Approvals that take three weeks kill momentum the algorithm never gives back. Agree a review window measured in days, consolidate feedback into one round, and empower one person to say yes. The properties that respond fastest consistently get the best performance, recency is part of the product.
The Red Flags (From the Other Side)
For balance, what makes experienced creators quietly decline: briefs demanding follower counts but no story, approval by committee, “exposure” as payment for commercial usage, and shot lists longer than the stay. The best properties avoid all four without being told.
A great brief is one page: the feeling, the outcome, the secrets, the rights, the deadline. Everything else is what you’re hiring the creator to figure out.
