Case study · Kolms Creative · 2023–present
Kolms Creative: selling content to hotels that had never bought it
A four-person content studio for hotels, where I own the commercial side: finding the properties, pitching, scoping the work and keeping the accounts. This is the case study about selling, not about making.
Context
A hotel lives on how it looks, but most independent properties have no one to produce that: the owner films a room tour on a phone, or an agency quotes a yearly retainer they can't justify. Kolms sits in between, a small studio with a video, photo and post-production team, selling defined content projects to four and five star hotels.
I am not behind the camera. I find the properties, run the meetings, scope and price the project, direct what the content has to say, and keep the client afterwards.
What I do
- Prospecting: cold email and Instagram DMs to properties whose positioning is better than their content, plus referrals from clients already served. Referrals close faster; cold outreach is what stops the pipeline from depending on them.
- Pitching and pricing: turning a hotel's situation into a scoped project with a number attached, and negotiating it to signature.
- Creative direction: deciding what the content has to say before anyone shoots. Seasonality, the territory and the experience, not a list of rooms.
- Account management: the relationship after delivery, which is where the second and third project comes from.
Selected work
Full video services, social content and photography for hotels in Romagna, the Dolomites and Austria.
More work: kolmshotels.com · @kolmscreative on Instagram.
Clients
Properties the studio has worked with:
- Roseo Hotel Euroterme Wellness Resort Bagno di Romagna
- Grand Hotel da Vinci Cesenatico
- Grand Hotel Rimini Rimini
- Palace Hotel Milano Marittima
- Hotel Atlantic Rimini
- Hotel Litoraneo Riccione
- Hotel Cesa Tyrol Canazei
- Hotel Waldorf Milano Marittima
- Hotel Derby Milano Marittima
- Hotel Posillipo Gabicce Monte
- Hotel Nautico Canazei
- Hotel Conturina Canazei
- Hotel Lupo Bianco Canazei
- Hotel Astoria Riccione
- Das Post Hotel Zell am Ziller, Austria
One thing most people get wrong
Hotels buy content as a list of assets: a pool video, a room tour, a drone shot. What sells a stay is the experience around those things, and the guest can only picture it if the content is built around a season, a place and a reason to come. Scoping the project by what the hotel needs to sell, rather than by how many clips it gets, is also what makes the price defensible.
The funnel, once I started measuring it
In 2026 I built the thing I should have had from the first month: a tracker with one row per property, its handle, the date of the first DM, the follow-up, and what came back. It covers a list of 243 properties, 143 of them contacted so far.
Show data table
| Stage | Properties |
|---|---|
| Contacted | 143 |
| Any answer | 49 |
| Real reply | 23 |
| Call booked | 10 |
| Signed | 2 |
Of 143 properties contacted, 23 replied for real: 16%. Another 26 sent an automatic reply, which reads like a response and is worth nothing. Of those 23 conversations, 10 became a call and 2 became clients.
Read as rates, the funnel says something I had wrong: 1.4% of contacted properties end up signing, but one call in five closes. The problem was never the pitch or the price. It was that 94 properties out of 143 never answered a message at all, so the pitch rarely got to happen.
That changes what to fix. Not the proposal, not the deck: the first message, the sender's credibility, and the number of conversations started per week. A studio with recognisable work and a referral gets to have the call; a cold DM from an unknown account mostly does not.
What didn't work
The close rate was low, and for a reason I underestimated: luxury hospitality is a closed market that buys on reputation. Arriving by cold email or DM, with a studio nobody had heard of and few followers to point at, meant every conversation started from zero credibility. A 2500€ proposal would often get no answer at all, which is worse than a no because it tells you nothing.
What I would do differently, in order:
- Build proof before selling. Named work, a reference from a comparable property, numbers from a previous shoot. In this market one credible referrer is worth more than a hundred cold emails.
- Make the first commitment smaller. A single shoot with one deliverable and a fixed price is a decision a hotel manager can take alone; a 2500€ project usually is not, and silence is often an internal approval that never happened.
- Treat the quote as the middle of the conversation, not the end. A proposal sent and awaited has no follow-up built in. A proposal presented, with a date already set to review it, does.
- Measure the funnel. I never tracked contacts, replies, meetings, quotes and signatures as a sequence, so I could see that closing was hard but not where it broke. That is the first thing I would instrument now.