How to Increase Your Bookings & Profits With Catchy Airbnb Photos
Airbnb is quickly becoming a competitive and diverse game. Many hosts use various ‘tactics’ from catchy listing names, to unique photography with the aims to increase their bookings, profits and margins. Understanding how you can use professional photography to help create a story and make your listings more attractive and noticeable is of paramount importance in the rapidly expanding Airbnb world.
First, let’s get into how exactly professional Airbnb photography can help increase your bookings and then afterwards we’re going to show you a few easy tips you can implement immediately to bring you an increased amount of interest on your listings right now.
How does professional photography captivate your audience’s attention?
The key here lies in one of our deep subconscious biases as a human, our love for listening to a ‘great’ story. A great story can help influence, inspire and excite one by targeting our most basic emotions. I want you to go ahead and imagine the difference these two types of pictures would create.
- A large beautiful home, well lit, with the look of a gorgeous green and vibrant garden outside, with children playing together off in the distance;
- A large empty house, with its photography taken in black and white. Dark wooden floorboards and the look of a large withered tree draping out windows with an empty old tyre swing hanging from it’s branches.
Can you see how just by imagining the two different scenarios you can go ahead and create your own story of what experience that home might offer? Ask yourself, if you were going away for a relaxing holiday, where you’d like to visit the beach each day and drink cocktails, which of the two homes would you choose to stay in? Don’t underestimate the power of beautiful visual photography and the story it can help create for your listing and your potential customers. So, first you must start with a story in mind, what sort of story would you like your listing to portray? Next, you’ll want to go ahead and capture some great shots that help accentuate that story and bring your home to ‘life’.
Tips for Taking Incredible Airbnb Photos
- Start with a story in mind – As explained previously, you want to know exactly what type of story you are trying to create in your customers mind. This will help making the specific targeting, marketing and pricing of your listings easier;
- Generally, you want to brighten up the inside. Taking well-lit photos of your property with bright lighting will help make your property look more expensive, bigger and cleaner. This is the number one most important factor in all forms of photographer – get the correct lighting;
- Stage your property. Make sure that your property is staged for how you want the photos to look and the ‘vibe’ you want to create. Far too many people have photos with homes that haven’t even been cleaned before the shoot. Stand out and make sure your home is staged correctly and clean before taking your photos;
- Highlight the unique. People’s attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter by the day in this busy age of rapidly increasing technology. Make sure the photos you take, are of the most important and noteworthy parts of your property. Too many photos of irrelevant objects will cause your onlookers interest to drop and thus your profits will follow. Highlight the unique and leave the rest for your daily social media promotions.
