Radisson: fourteen properties, five countries.

This engagement began with an interview, not a scan. A London-based venue platform was hunting for capture partners in India and had a shortlist of twenty-odd providers; somewhere in a long call, the shortlist itself flashed on a shared screen. What won the work wasn't the accent or the portfolio alone — it was fifteen years of corporate operations before the camera, and a working record on Matterport's own programs. The platform offered an exclusive arrangement early on; it stayed on the table. What followed instead was better proof: property after property, for four years.

Day one, Lonavala: the sixteen-hour education

The first property set the terms. An event load-in the next day meant common areas, rooms, and the event spaces all in one stretch — sixteen hours — and the dawn start collided with the 6:30 breakfast service in a hundred small ways: things to move, things to switch on, things to clear, each discovered one minute too late. The second morning ran smooth, because overnight those hundred details became a checklist. That property-preparation playbook — what each department head clears, in what order, before the camera moves — has run ahead of every hotel scan since. The checklist itself doesn't get published; its results do. A brief scoped at one or two spaces finished at a dozen.

The hard rule about people

Hotels in operation come with guests, and the rule here is absolute, inherited from Street View guidelines and years on Matterport's capture programs: nobody appears in a scan — not guests, not staff, not by accident. The rule has a price and it gets paid. At Phu Quoc, the lobby — which opens onto a restaurant that seats five hundred — had to be rescanned entirely the next day because guests wouldn't clear the frame. In Kandy, the same rule produced the opposite kind of day: the property freed an entire floor, and ten-plus rooms were captured back to back with their corridors — a near-impossibility in a five-star in operation, and a measure of how far the properties themselves went to make the standard achievable.

Vignettes from fourteen properties

Shimla came at Diwali, via a wrong turn at Solan and a mountain road; the property's management turned out exceptional hosts, down to borrowing a tripod from a visiting architect when one was needed. Mohali, weeks later, ran schedule-first — the Lonavala lesson institutionalized — with staff smoothly rerouting guests around the camera. Dubai Deira Creek fell during Ramadan, so the tours carry the season's theming, all fifteen dining outlets of it. Srinagar meant a Collection property through a Kashmir winter — the trip that produced the Dal Lake photograph now on Matterport's Wikipedia article. And at Bengaluru City Center, the rooftop's famous diving-man sculpture stayed out of reach: beyond what the current camera could capture from that position, and noted here plainly, saved for better hardware.

The quiet metrics

The loud numbers are easy: fourteen properties, five countries, four brands, two hundred-plus spaces, single panoramas past 50,000 views at Mohali and 26,000 at Shimla. The quiet ones matter more. Phu Quoc came back for a second engagement after villa renovations — rescans only happen when the first scan earned them. A manager met on the Chennai scan has accompanied properties since and referred personal contacts for entirely unrelated work. And the fourteenth property was commissioned four years after the first, through the same platform that once had twenty-four other options on its shortlist. That sequence exists nowhere except in the work.