Multi-Day Tour Photos & Videos Without Breaking the Bank
This is part 1 of our Multi-Day Tour Marketing Series. You can watch the whole series here.
You don’t need a Hollywood budget to get professional photos and videos for your multi-day tours. That’s the misconception that keeps many operators stuck with mediocre visual content while their competitors attract more bookings with stunning imagery.
Photos and videos aren’t just pretty decorations for your website – they’re working overtime behind the scenes. They inspire potential guests, answer their unspoken concerns, and help them picture themselves on your tour.
When someone’s worried about accommodation quality, a few well-chosen photos of your hotel rooms can put those fears to rest instantly. When they’re wondering what kind of people join your tours, showing guests who look just like them having amazing experiences does the convincing for you.
We’ve all heard the saying that a picture is worth 1,000 words, and while a video is worth hundreds of thousands of words, it’s all this unspoken work that your image gallery and videos are doing for you. Not just on your sales pages and trip brochures, but across all your marketing channels.
Why This Should Be Your First Marketing Investment
Getting high-quality professional images of your experiences is one of the best marketing investments you can make as a tour operator. These visuals help you not only with sales pages, but you can use them across every touchpoint in your business – everything from your website to your Google My Business Profile to paid advertising, to social media campaigns and beyond.
The 50/50 Rule You Need to Know
If you’re just starting out or launching a brand new trip without media assets, you can leverage high-quality stock photos and videos strategically. But keep in mind to always follow a 50/50 rule: 50% of your photos and videos should be of smiling guests and smiling guides. The other 50% can be those beautiful photos of nature, the food you’re eating, the accommodation, and some of the experiences you’re having.
This is called future pacing in sales, where the prospect considering your experience needs to be able to see themselves in these places, in these actual photos. That’s much easier if there are actual people in these photos, especially if those people look just like them.
Tap Into Your Partners’ Photography
Here’s the best practice that many operators miss: when you’re going to a new destination, you can leverage the photography from your partners and suppliers. You can get high-resolution photos from your accommodation providers, from the restaurants, and from some of your activity partners, because you are bringing them business and acting as a reseller.
In most cases, it’s entirely appropriate to put these room and venue photos right on your sales pages, or get permission to use them in your marketing. Your accommodation partners have probably spent a good amount of money getting high-quality photos, and they’re usually happy to share them with operators who bring business their way.
What Makes Great Tour Photography
What makes an incredible photo incredible goes beyond the scope of a simple overview, but lighting, composition, capturing those magic moments, and equipment quality all play a role. The goal is showcasing people actually doing the activities, experiencing what’s going to happen on these trips.
What we want to avoid is that trap of selling our multi-day experiences and having images and videos look exactly like the 50 other, the 100 other competitors who are using that exact same stock photography from those destinations.
The AI Question
You might be wondering about the AI space and whether you can use AI to generate photos and videos. This space is moving fast, and when you’re reading this, the technology will have evolved to the point where we can barely differentiate between what is reality and what is not.
Our general recommendation, at least in this transition period, is to avoid or stay away from some of these AI-generated images. This has to do with that “I” in the VIP Marketing Method™ – our marketing needs to be valuable, it needs to be intimate, it needs to be pervasive. That intimacy is eroded if there is doubt, if there is a lack of trustworthiness.
We’re probably going to be going back to using a lot more smartphone videos – less professional looking the better – where we have a video that is clearly taken by one of your guides wearing one of your shirts in a destination. This type of raw, unfiltered video is going to actually boost your credibility, because it’s less likely that it was generated by AI.
DIY vs. Professional Photography
When the trip is actually going to be running, you need to decide whether you should do DIY photography or hire a professional photographer. Realistically, you need a diversity of shots for effective marketing: wide destination shots, potentially drone shots, close-ups of activities, candid guest interactions, food and accommodation close-ups, team portraits, and those candid shots of your ideal target guests having an incredible time.
If you have a smartphone from anywhere in the last handful of years, and you’ve got a proclivity for taking great photos, or you’ve invested a bit of time and energy, then you can absolutely be taking these photos yourselves. But it’s important to be prepared and come in with a shot list in mind.
You can even use an AI prompt to help you generate ideas for what type of photos and videos you can capture on tour:
You’re a marketing director, and I need you to create a photography and videography shot list for [your business type] targeting [your ideal target guest]. Please include 25 specific shots needed for the website, social media and email marketing for both photos and videos.
When to Consider Professional Help
Consider hiring a professional photographer if you’re on the more luxury end of the space, or almost certainly if you’re going to reuse this itinerary and sell it again multiple times in the future. You can often hire these in destination by connecting with a destination marketing organization who can possibly connect you into a network.
Working with Influencers for Content
Working with influencers in exchange for content can be a great win-win, but it’s important to set the expectations and have signed agreements ahead of time. Many influencers are skilled content creators with pro-level gear who can often capture the kind of photos and videos you’d normally have to pay thousands of dollars for.
Because they’re on the full trip, you can often ask for a lot more. Not only could they get hero shots for your sales pages, vertical videos for reels and ads, and even in-destination guest testimonials, but they’ll be embedded across the entirety of the trip, meaning you’re going to get more diverse content than you can get from a half-day shoot.
But you have to treat it like a creative partnership, not a favor. Always use a simple written agreement that outlines the content they’ll deliver, the formats you’ll get, how long you can use it for, and where and how you can use it.
Don’t Forget User-Generated Content
Your guests create some of the best content because it is authentic and raw. You can set up a Google Photos album for each trip where you can send the link before departure, remind guests during the tour, and encourage the sharing of photos and videos.
Of course, you want to cover all the legalities here, so this might include a photo release before guests come on your tour, where they acknowledge that some of the photos that you or your team might be taking can be used in marketing. If you’re going to be using any of the users’ photos in your marketing, it’s best to get that permission in writing.
Another creative solution is to have photo competitions or contests, where you encourage your past guests to submit some of their favorite photos and are entered into a draw for a prize. As part of the entry, they have to agree to the terms that you can use those photos to market tours.
The Bottom Line
Don’t skimp when it comes to your photos and videos on your multi-day tours, activities and experiences. They’re one of your single most important marketing and sales assets. Too many operators out there are under-investing in this area.
We’ve shared just a handful of ways that you can start inexpensively, leverage some of your suppliers and partners, potentially work with influencers and, of course, your guests. But if you haven’t done so, go and have a look at your upcoming multi-day trips and check: Are you following that 50/50 rule?



