Hotels & Getty Images

Barbara and I travel a lot, especially as we escape the summer heat of the California desert. This travel almost always involves stays in moderate hotels…Nothing like a Motel 6 or Route 66 time warp, but also nothing like a Ritz Carlton. Tents have been out of the question ever since I surprised her with a 40˚ experience in the Nevada desert. We got closer for the wrong reason that night. We switched to a Class B Mercedes and the travel trailer a few years back, but that has also gone by the wayside. By myself I can opt to sleep in the back of my Jeep at remote locations, but when we are together it’s all hotels (or timeshares) for us.

The best situation for me would be to check in late in the day, take a quick shower, then crash into the mattress of the day for around seven hours. In the morning I’d put on fresh clothes and grab a “well-urned” lobby coffee, some powdered eggs and a blueberry mini-muffin. Then I rush out to beat sunrise. With Barbara, however, everything slows down. That’s what happened on the latest road trip to Taos, with a stopover back in Prescott where we lived for six years.

We stay away from motels that have signs like "Free TV" and "Free Coffee". But there are some expectations for our hotel choices. Cleanliness for starters. That’s pretty much the first thing one notices…before the scratchiness of the towels and rather recent predominance of refillable bottles stuck on the shower wall. There is extra credit for hotels that still have those small disposables. Hotel rooms like everything else changed a lot with Covid. No more pens and pads of paper. No nightly turndowns.

Once I heard commentator-comedian Dennis Miller on a late night show talking about his life on the road. He stayed at Marriotts. Our usual night spots won’t ever get us to Platinum Elite status. But we have had exceptional stays at a few nice hotels on special occasions. You would think Miller’s experiences would all be great. But Dennis tells the story of sitting on the end of his bed to trim his toenails. As can happen, one big toenail clipping fell to the floor and he could not find it for a proper disposal. Two nights later he checked into another Marriott in another city while on his tour. He was again sitting on the end of the bed, this time to rub his tired dogs after his stand up show. He couldn’t believe it. There on the floor was the toenail he had lost two nights earlier at a completely different hotel! His point was that all hotel rooms are pretty much the same.

Okay, so my problem with our hotels is not toenails, even though I am always on the lookout. It is sameness. There may be variation of the mattresses…either too firm or too springy. But those laminated nightstands and desks get are boringly similar. If you can find an electrical outlet for your computer charger, it is pretty much guaranteed the worn receptacles won’t hold the weight of the charger. Unless the room has just been remodeled, there will be cracks in the caulking around the tub. Cheap, cup-at-a-time coffee makers make something far less tasty than my Keurig cups at home. We get to wonder whether the previous occupant used his emptied cup from his first brew to dump water in for his second serving.

All of those things are annoying, but what really grinds me are those damn pictures on the wall.

The photo below was on the wall next to our bed. I recognized the location in Antelope Canyon since I have photographed there many times.

As a photographer, I always look at those pictures, especially when they are photographs, and the process for getting them to the walls. In most cases, hotels put up pictures that reflect the surrounding area. A seaside hotel has breaking waves, Landscape photos, my bailiwick, are most common, but botanical images might also be present. In Taos, there were photos of the Taos Pueblo and strangely for New Mexico, photos of the Grand Canyon. As I write this, we are in our previous hometown of Prescott, Arizona. The hotel has about 150 rooms. Our room has one large picture and four small pictures arranged loosely in a square. Having stayed in some different rooms of the same hotels multiple times I know that each room in this hotel is likely to have the same five pictures. Perhaps there are two different sets just for a little variety. Sometimes the same pictures are strategically placed in the hallways, restrooms and across from the elevator.

So where do these pictures come from? Why didn’t some designer contact me for my images which are obviously of superior quality? The answer is Getty Images. Or Shutterstock, or some other website (Unspash.com, istock, Adobe Images, etc.) often owned by one of these companies. The reason is cost. The hotel hires a design firm, or has its own, and gives them a budget to completely decorate the walls of their hotel. The design firm makes the most money by paying the least they can for prints, has the prints made at a discount by printing hundreds of copies and buys cheap MDF frames in the same manner.

Now, the frame company does okay. By selling hundreds of frames, that company can still retain some profits. But for the photographer, it is a different matter. The designer pays Getty Images perhaps $200 for a digital image. The photographer gets somewhere between $30 and $75 for the unrestricted printing of this image. That picture of a slot canyon would make the photographer around 25 cents per room! Unless you know you will be featured in a 5000 room Las Vegas hotel, I would say to keep your nice work off Getty and those other sites.

In my head I am trying not to be jealous that my images aren’t on the walls of these hotel rooms. But then I start calculating in my head. I am paying about $200 a night for this room. The hotel likely runs at 80% occupancy, which means they collect $60,000 for the year on this one room. If the picture stays on the wall for four years, my 25 cents would equal 0.0001% or 1/1,000,000 of the hotel’s receipts for the room. No thanks! I'm no longer jealous.

Looking back through my images, I discovered a similar image, just with a bit less harsh lighting. While not in my top 10 slot canyon images, I still favor it over the one on the wall of our room.

Compare that to what I discovered using Google’s AI search tool. A hotel room washcloth has a life cycle of about four months. Barbara and I have a knack for picking hotel rooms nearing the end of those four months! There are at least two in each hotel room. Each washcloth costs about $1 when purchased in bulk. So for this 150 room hotel, they will spend $4000 for washcloths during the five years my image hangs in the hotel. My gross (not net) for those 150 rooms would be around $50.

Using the same Google tools, I discovered this hotel would spend about $45,000 over the same period for toilet paper! The softer stuff would be about $90,000 but this isn’t that nice a hotel. The toilet paper expense is certainly okay with me because t.p. is one of the more important items in my life as I age, and in quantities greater than when was young.

A hundred years ago, an outdated Sears catalog was quite valuable on my grandparent’s farm. I just can’t handle the comparative value of photography in a hotel room. But if there is another run on t.p. like there was during Covid, I have an idea about what those hotels can do with those old prints.

Further evidence of hotels skimping was on the edge of their print. It had obviously been dropped by someone (a potential thief?), revealing the MDF foam core. For recommendations on frame choices, visit this page.

0 Comments

Hotels & Getty Images

Leave a comment

Archive

RESOURCES

PORTFOLIO PAGES

BLOG

HIRE ROB STRAIN