Every hotel on this coast describes the same sea.
Owners and asset managers tend to arrive with one complaint, phrased politely: the place isn’t ordinary and the website makes it sound ordinary. Ask what is actually distinctive and a very good answer comes back in about ninety seconds — the building’s second life, the cook who won’t buy fish off more than one boat, the fact that the road ends at the gate. None of it is on the page. On the page there is the sea, a sunset, the word “unique”, and a spa.
That is the commercial risk here, and it has nothing to do with being too expensive. A guest holding four properties on the same coast with four near-identical descriptions has no way left to choose except photographs and price. The description is what makes the rate defensible.
Written in Sofia, for guests who arrive from everywhere
This is the one segment where the studio’s address is an argument rather than a fact on a page. A Black Sea hotel, a restored building in Plovdiv, a development selling to buyers in Munich and Tel Aviv — the copy has to work for someone who has never been to the country and does not want a geography lesson before they get to the rooms.
We write that in English, natively, from inside the region. Bulgarian as well, written rather than translated, for the domestic audience and for the signage and small print that usually goes through a machine and stays there.
In practice it buys you place names stressed correctly, no accidental exoticism, and a plausible answer when someone asks how long the drive from the airport really takes.
What gets bought here, and in what order
Narrative first. Booking copy is easier once a narrative exists and noticeably worse when it doesn’t.
- Positioning, before a word of it is written
- Who the place is for, and who it is politely not for. A hotel holding a wedding market and a solitude market in the same sentence will lose both. €4,200, with the deliverables listed on brand positioning.
- Brand narrative and tone of voice
- The document that stops a brand drifting every time a new marketing manager, agency or booking platform writes on its behalf. Register, vocabulary, and the things this brand does not say, with example sentences instead of adjectives. €3,400, or €7,600 with Messaging Architecture — see brand voice guide.
- The website, including the pages nobody writes
- Rooms, rates, the restaurant, arrival instructions, the cancellation page. Those unglamorous pages are the ones a guest reads hardest, usually late at night, and they are the ones left to whoever was in the CMS last. €4,800 for five to eight pages: website copy.
- An opening or a release
- A new property, a renovated wing, eleven flats going to market at once. Launch Copy is €6,400 and covers the page, the sequence and the ads as one job, which is the only way they end up saying the same thing. Scope on launch copy.
Written to show method. Not delivered client work.
An invented boutique hotel on the Black Sea coast: fourteen rooms, a converted building, trying to sell October. The opening of the homepage, with the version we would not send put next to it.
the version we wouldn’t send
Nestled on the pristine Black Sea coast, our boutique retreat offers an unforgettable escape where luxury meets tranquillity.
the opening
The road ends here. It doesn’t carry on along the coast to the next hotel, because there isn’t one — the tarmac stops at our gate and turns into a footpath down to the water.
Fourteen rooms. No conference facilities, no entertainment programme, and no attempt to fill October with anything except the reason people come in October: the sea is still warm, the town is empty, and dinner is whatever the boat brought in that morning.
Two decisions, both of them refusals. Opening on the road rather than the view, because the view belongs to every property on that coast and the road doesn’t. Then spending the second paragraph on what the hotel hasn’t got. Someone paying a high rate out of season is buying absence — quiet, space, no groups — and absence has to be itemised as precisely as a facility list, or a reader files it as a shortcoming instead of the product.
demonstrates website copy
What owners ask, usually late in the call
There is no client list on this site and we are not going to invent one. What you can judge instead is the demonstration writing on work, labelled as demonstration writing every time it appears, and the reading on this page of what actually goes wrong with property copy.
If the guests are Bulgarian and the signage is Bulgarian, we write Bulgarian and that is the work. The mix is worth settling before the brief rather than after: a property selling most of its rooms abroad and the rest at home needs one argument written twice, not one text translated once.
Usually not, and it’s worth being blunt about why. The owner’s version almost always contains the one true detail the whole page needs, sitting in the fourth paragraph where nobody reaches — and tidying leaves it exactly there. We would rather interview you for an hour and start from the top.
Tell us what the place is actually like
Not the facility list. The thing you say to friends when you describe it. Send that, a link if there is a site, and whether this is a rebrand, an opening or a rescue.