HotelChatter || Make a Video of Your Hotel Experience and Get a Free Stay...Maybe

Guess what? Next time you shoot a quick video of your hotel room and then send it into the vast expanses of the interwebs, you might score a free stay at that hotel! Also, next time you buy a lottery ticket you might win the lottery. But we digress.

According to USA Today, the video = free stay thing can happen:

Aaron Schwartz, an executive recruiter in Fairfax, Va., wanted a nice memento of his vacation in Aruba. Using his video camera, he filmed his stay at the Marriott Renaissance Ocean Suites last June -- shots of the beautiful beach, flamingos along the water. He uploaded the video to his MySpace page and YouTube.
He then received a call from the resort's general manager, who liked the video so much that he offered Schwartz a free seven-day stay."

So, turns out, hotels are watching your videos in an effort to monitor their online images (smart!) and even going as far as to reward amateur media-makers for helping their brands look pretty.

Since there's really not much a hotel can hide in a guest's video (and since there's much commentary to be made in the space of a two-minute YouTube clip), hotels are getting smart about this and producing their own video content.

Intercontinental, Starwood and Holiday Inn Express, among others, have already launched websites or YouTube channels dedicated to video footage of their properties.

Now, excuse us while we dig up the most flattering video footage of every hotel we've ever visited. We could use a (free) hotel stay because we just splurged all our money on shoes.

[Photo: Alex Lehmann]

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