Hotels have known for years that video converts significantly better than photos. Production costs made it impossible for all but the largest chains. Polaris Holdings, with 60 properties across Japan, just handed an AI startup the job of making every one of them cinematic. No crews. No budgets. No excuses left for the rest of the industry.
In the lobby of a KOKO HOTEL, there is no film crew. There never was.
The video playing on the booking page, the one that shows the rooftop at golden hour, the conference room filled with 200 delegates, the couple arriving for a weekend that has not happened yet, was generated from photographs. In days. By a platform built by a handful of people in Munich.
That platform is Strana AI. And Polaris Holdings, the Tokyo-listed operator behind KOKO HOTELS and more than 60 properties across Japan, has just handed it the keys to its entire video content operation.
The deal is not a pilot. It is not a proof-of-concept. Polaris, a company with 9,400 rooms, a Tokyo Stock Exchange listing, and a target of 100 hotels, looked at the technology and made its decision in weeks, not quarters. The deliberation was brief because the logic was not complicated. Japan welcomed a record 42.7 million international visitors in 2025. Polaris has an aggressive expansion plan already in motion. And a content production challenge that traditional film crews simply cannot solve at the speed or scale required.
Polaris went first.
What the Deal Actually Looks Like
Under the partnership, Strana will produce video campaigns for KOKO HOTELS in Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, and additional languages from a single production run. No crews. No location scheduling. No hired models. For a hotel chain that consolidated three separate brands under a unified identity in 2025 while simultaneously targeting 100 properties and 15,000 rooms, the appeal is not just cost. It is velocity.
The multilingual angle alone would justify the economics. In the traditional model, producing a single marketing video in five languages means five separate voiceover sessions, five rounds of subtitle production, five quality checks, often with five different vendors. Polaris now gets all of that from one production run, calibrated for domestic Japanese travelers and the international visitors arriving in record numbers. For a country where inbound tourism grew by double digits in a single year, that capability is not a nice-to-have. It is infrastructure.
Kazuyoshi Shimojima, Director and COO of Polaris Holdings, framed the partnership not as a cost decision but as a guest experience decision. “By delivering a more refined expression of a property’s atmosphere, elements that cannot be fully conveyed through photographs alone, we hope to inspire guests’ imagination and heighten their anticipation. From that very moment, the journey begins.”
The video, in other words, is not a marketing expense. It is the beginning of the guest experience.
The Twenty-Year Blind Spot
Here is the part that should make hotel executives uncomfortable. The data on video has been clear for years. Video converts significantly better than static photography. Including video on a landing page can increase conversions by up to 80 percent. Hotels using video in their marketing grow revenue 49 percent faster than those that do not. None of this is new research. These figures have been circulating in hospitality marketing reports for half a decade.
And yet the average hotel website still looks like a classified listing from 2005: a carousel of static photos, a text description, a star rating. The visual format for selling a two-thousand-dollar vacation has not materially changed since broadband was a novelty.
The reason was always the same: production costs. Professional video production for a single hotel property runs EUR 10,000 to 30,000. It takes four to six weeks. It requires closing spaces, coordinating crews, and casting models who bear no resemblance to the guests who will actually stay. For a 50-room boutique running at 65 percent occupancy, that budget does not exist. So the photographs sit in a folder, and the video never gets made.
“Every hotel in the world has dozens of professional photographs sitting in a folder doing nothing. That is not an asset management problem. That is a storytelling failure. And for the first time, the technology exists to fix it at the cost of a room night, not a renovation budget.”
— Jakob Riegger, Co-Founder, Strana AI
Riegger built TrustYou, the platform that became the global standard for hotel guest review analytics across 180 countries over 15 years. He watched the industry go through three distribution revolutions. He has seen how hotels adopt technology: slowly, grudgingly, and usually two years after the data made the case. Strana is his bet that this cycle can be compressed.
From Static Photos to Cinematic Storytelling
Strana’s platform trains a model on each property’s specific photography, learns its visual identity down to the last detail, and generates video that shows the actual hotel, not a generic stand-in. AI-generated guests can be matched to target demographics: families for the resort campaign, couples for the romantic weekend package, business travelers for the MICE pitch. Seasonal atmospheres can be created on demand. And the platform produces shots that are physically impossible to stage with a traditional crew.
That last point is what closes deals. A conference venue shown at full capacity for an event that has not happened yet. A ballroom set for a 200-person wedding reception, complete with guests, decor, and atmosphere, without hosting the event first. A rooftop bar at golden hour in peak season, when the hotel cannot afford to close the space for a film crew.
“Hotels don’t hire us because AI is cheaper than a videographer. They hire us because we unlock shots and stories they could never afford or physically create with traditional production. That is the real value. Not cost savings. Capability expansion.”
— Jakob Riegger, Co-Founder, Strana AI
Every video produced by the platform passes through a human creative director before delivery. It is a deliberate design choice, not a concession to AI’s limitations. The platform integrates the best available AI models from providers like Google, OpenAI, and others, continuously updated as the technology improves. But the human review is what makes it publish-ready. “No hotel marketing director should have to become an AI quality inspector,” Riegger said. “Publish-ready means publish-ready.”
For guests, the difference is visceral. Scrolling through a photo gallery gives a flat impression of a room. Video conveys atmosphere, energy, the feeling of being there. It is the difference between reading about a destination and experiencing a glimpse of the stay itself.
The Wrong Question
The skeptics in the industry are not wrong to ask hard questions. But they are asking the wrong ones.
The question is not whether AI-generated video works at scale. Polaris, a publicly listed company with over a century of history, just answered that by deploying it across its entire brand portfolio. Not as an experiment. As infrastructure.
The question is why the rest of the industry continues to leave bookings on the table with a visual format that has not changed in two decades. Video converts significantly better than static photography. That data is not new. What is new is that the cost and logistics barriers have collapsed entirely. A production that once required EUR 30,000 and six weeks now costs a fraction of that and delivers in days. And most hotel groups are still running committee reviews about whether to schedule a pilot.
There is a secondary effect that the industry has barely begun to grapple with. AI-powered search and recommendation engines are reshaping how travelers discover hotels. Google’s AI Mode already generates trip itineraries. Booking.com is partnering with OpenAI. The term gaining traction is “agentic commerce”: autonomous AI agents that complete purchasing flows on behalf of users. Properties with structured, rich visual content will surface in these systems. Properties without it risk becoming invisible to the platforms that increasingly decide who gets booked.
A Signal, Not an Anomaly
The Polaris partnership arrives at a pivotal moment for hospitality. AI investment in the sector surged 250 percent in 2025 versus the prior year. But the bulk of that spending went to chatbots, dynamic pricing, and operational automation. Content production, where the largest ROI gap sits between what hotels spend and what they could gain, has been largely overlooked.
The practical impact extends beyond marketing. Polaris can now produce localized promotional content for specific traveler segments, seasonal campaigns that launch in days rather than months, and property showcase videos for new openings before the first guest arrives. For a chain adding properties at the pace Polaris is, that means every new hotel opens with a full video marketing kit, not a placeholder page with stock photography.
The travel industry has spent two years absorbing a wave of AI announcements while most operators ran cautious pilots and waited for someone else to commit. The Polaris deal is a different kind of signal. Not a chatbot integration. Not a dynamic pricing dashboard. A publicly listed company deploying generative AI at full portfolio scale, for a purpose that directly drives bookings.
“Video has always converted significantly better than photos. Hotels have known this for years. Now there is no longer any reason not to have it.”
The more interesting question for the rest of the industry is not whether AI-generated video is ready. Polaris settled that. The question is how many more quarters of static photo carousels hotel groups can afford while their competitors start telling stories that move.
