Spotlight Sojourns

Want to make your location a must-visit bucket-list destination?

We can help with that.

"If you are looking for storytellers to draw visitors to your destination look no further than Marilee and Paul.” (Kathryn Cotter, Director of Marketing, Discover Albany)

We're Marilee Kostadimas, CMP, DMCP, and Paul Kostadimas, founders of Spotlight Sojourns.

We’re creators and visual storytellers for travel, tourism, and hospitality brands – including arts, cultural, and historic organizations.

And we're also advocates for authentic, immersive, experiential travel.

In other words: Meaningful travel.

It's all about meaningful travel.

Spotlight Sojourns inspires and connects a global community of meaningful travel do-ers and travel dreamers with travel, tourism, and hospitality brands through visual storytelling.

Meaningful travel is the:

Purpose to broaden horizons, create connections, and deepen understanding (our love language is experiences).
Passion to collect moments that echo in memory (moments > things).
Path to seek beauty and find joy, wherever you are (even from an armchair).
Perspective that WHY you go matters more than WHERE you go (bucket list > checklist).

Because meaningful travel is part of a meaningful life.

And stories enrich the meaning.

Meaningful travel is indeed part of our own story from the very beginning.

Here's what we do at Spotlight Sojourns.

We create Showcases, our signature digital portfolio series.

Showcases feature:

Eye-popping, jaw-dropping visual content.
Expert, engaging narrative context.
Resonant, relevant subtext.

Showcases focus on:

Authentic experiences.
Genuine connections.
Candid recommendations.

We craft Showcases through our proprietary frameworks. These derive from deep expertise and lifetime travel experiences.

Professionally for the world’s biggest companies and blue-chip clientele. Personally for ourselves.

Correspondingly, for 20+ years, we’ve partnered with countless destination marketers (DMOs / CVBs / TPAs, Chambers). As well as hoteliers, venues, and brands of all kinds.

We publish Showcases via newsletter, blog, and social platforms. Clients, of course, receive the digital assets, too.

The results augment your marketing plan...

Amplify your word-of-mouth...

And increase your relevance.

Here's what that looks like.

Maybe you’ve watched a video, read a blog or an email, seen a social post about a place, a hotel, a museum.

And you’ve said, “Wow, I have to go there.”

Then maybe you’ve forwarded that video, blog, newsletter, or social post to someone else.

Now, of course, they have to go there, too.

That’s what we do:

We create the “wow’ that you forward.

But the “wow’ is more than a pretty shot.

It’s a cohesive end-to-end visual story.

The kind of visual storytelling that stirs emotion…

Motivates action…

And helps keep your reservation agents busy with advance bookings.

"They are helping us build a new audience and spark interest in our part of NYS. I highly recommend working with Spotlight Sojourns and can’t wait for our next project together!" (Sarah Calero, Director of Communications and TV/Film, Oneida County Tourism)