How to pitch hotels (without giving your work away)

We see a lot of pitches, from both sides. Creators send them to us hoping we will pass them on, and hotels forward us the ones that landed in their inbox asking whether they should bother replying. After a few hundred of these, the pattern is depressingly consistent. The pitches that fail are not the ones from small accounts. They are the ones that ask for something without offering anything specific in return.

Research the property, not the category

A pitch that could have been sent to any hotel in the country will be treated as though it was. The general manager reading it can tell within one line whether you have actually looked at the place, and that single judgement decides everything that follows.

Name the thing you noticed. The way the courtyard catches light in the late afternoon. The fact that they are quiet in November and full in August. The restaurant that is clearly the heart of the property but barely appears on their feed. You are demonstrating that you have thought about their business, which is the entire job.

Lead with their problem, not your reach

Hotels do not have a content problem in the abstract. They have specific, seasonal, commercial problems: a shoulder season that does not fill, a new suite category nobody knows about, a spa that locals do not realise is open to them, a restaurant doing serious work that reads as a hotel restaurant.

Open with the gap you can close for them. Your follower count is supporting evidence, not the argument.

The structure that works

• ✦One line on why this property, specifically, with the detail that proves you looked.
• ✦One line on the commercial gap you have spotted and can help with.
• ✦Exactly what you would deliver: number of assets, formats, whether they get usage rights, and when they get them.
• ✦What you are asking for: nights, dates, whether you need a fee alongside the stay, and what is not included.
• ✦Two or three links to comparable work, not a media kit with fifteen pages of demographics.

That is a short email. It should be. The pitch is not the pitch deck; the pitch is the reason to open a conversation, and the conversation is where the detail belongs.

What to charge for, and what to include

A hosted stay in exchange for content is a fair trade when the content is scoped and the stay is genuinely worth what you would otherwise pay. It stops being fair the moment the deliverables expand past the value of the room, which is usually what happens when nothing was written down.

Charge separately for anything that is work rather than documentation. A full vertical edit for their channels is work. Stills shot to their shot list is work. Appearing in the content as talent, on camera, on brief, is work. Posting to your own audience on your own terms is the trade. Keep those categories distinct in your own head and the pricing conversation gets much easier.

The clause most creators forget

Usage duration. Almost every creator remembers to specify what the hotel can do with the content, and almost none of them specify for how long. A hotel that has perpetual paid usage of your best work has bought a permanent advertising asset for the price of three nights, and you will watch it run for years.

Twelve months of organic usage on their own channels is a reasonable default. Paid usage should be a defined window, priced separately, and renewable. Whitelisting, where they run ads from your handle, is a different thing again and should never be bundled in quietly. If someone objects to putting a duration on it, that tells you what the content is worth to them.

Following up without eroding your position

Hotels are slow. Marketing decisions sit with people who also have a property to run, and a two-week silence usually means nothing at all. One follow-up after ten working days is professional. A third message discounting your own rate is not; you have just told them the first number was invented.

The creators who work consistently are rarely the ones with the biggest audiences. They are the ones whose emails read like a business proposing something to another business. That is a lower bar than it sounds, and clearing it puts you ahead of almost everyone.