Selfie-tourism is here to stay.
Long dismissed as a symptom of social media, the selfie has become big business for the hotel industry.
Most obviously, are those hotels with stunning natural beauty, such as the Hotel Villa Honegg in Switzerland. It was made famous thanks to a single selfie that you’ve probably seen thousands of times before.
But even properties without such natural beauty have found a way to court selfie tourists. In 2014, the Mandarin Oriental in Paris launched a ‘Selfie in Paris’ package tour of the French capital, costing more than $1,135 per person.
The service featured a chauffeur-driven Mercedes tour around the French capital, with stops at the city’s biggest selfie spots.
In Athens, the hotel Grand Bretagne has even designated a ‘selfie spot’ on its roof, with the Acropolis in the background.
The Marriot Desert Springs Resort in California – set in the middle of a National Park – does one better, offering guests hotel-branded selfie sticks upon check in.
The selfie trade shows no signs of going away, either. According to consulting firm McKinsey & Company, spend on ‘experience-related services’ surged by 5.3 percent over the last three years (compared to material goods, which rose just 2.5 percent).
Much of that is attributed to the social media Phenom that is the selfie. While expensive experiences might be fleeting (over say, an expensive watch that lasts years) social media allows users to immortalize the experience forever.
