Making Your Vacation Rental More Bookable
How would you feel about your vacation rental being critiqued by industry experts in public? At the 2024 VRMA Spring Forum, one host in New Orleans had their Airbnb listing reviewed live!
Follow along for what experts look for in a vacation rental listing and discover how actionable recommendations (some are really quick fixes!) can optimize your property for success and take your listing to the next level, complemented by insights from your friends at Lake.com.
“Fix My Listing New Orleans Edition: Expert Critiques to Boost Your Listings,” a panel hosted by Jeff Iloulian, CEO and Co-founder of HostGPO, explored:
- Making improvements in key areas of your vacation rental to get more bookings
- Enhancing your listing’s appeal by being strategic with furniture to attract potential guests
- Understanding the importance of a well-designed website to showcase your rental and create a positive user experience
Panelists:
Brandreth Canaley, COO, Roami
Rena Pacheco-Theard, Co-founder and CEO, Boutiq
Chad Wise, Founder, HostWise.co
While the listing is no longer active on Airbnb to share with you, the following takeaways apply to any vacation rental host wanting to improve their property listing.
The following criteria are helpful when critiquing a vacation rental listing and were applied when framing the panel’s assessments and recommendations:
- Optimization of your rental to be competitive
- Website
- Listing title
- Listing Description
- First 5 Photos
- Photography
- Interior design
- Market performance
- Pricing strategy
Here’s what the panel looked at regarding the rental’s online presence:
- Vacation rental’s Airbnb listing
- Vacation rental’s Facebook page
- Vacation rental’s website
First Impressions
The panel immediately noticed that the first photo of the property was very dark and not well-lit. Another observation was that the listing photos looked better than the listing’s review score, which we’ll get to later in this article. While the host had professional photos, they did not lead with their best five photos, which is an easy fix! Always feature your best, most stunning images in your top five. Why? The first five photos can make or break a potential booking on listing sites.
Panel Takeaways:
- Work with a professional photographer for STRs to capture the essence of your space
- Describe your rental using appropriate keywords to help you rank higher in search engines
- Your first photo should be of a group space or an amenity
- Create an intriguing experience for prospective guests so they keep clicking through your photos and, hopefully, convert to a booking
- Arrange furniture in a way that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing
Insights from Lake.com:
- When listing a waterfront property on a platform like Lake.com or Airbnb, always showcase a lakefront image as the first picture a prospective guest sees on your listing.
- You want your guests to imagine themselves in the sun, enjoying themselves by the water. Show pictures demonstrating activities they can do at your property on or near the water. Images of wildlife are a plus!
- Describe how guests can access the water from your property. If you have a shallow sandy beach that is great for little children with their parents, highlight that fact. If your property rests atop a cliff and is unsuitable for swimming, mention that, too! You need to know your audience and prepare them for what your property offers.
How Ratings and Reviews Affect Future Bookings
The property listing had a 4.17-star rating. Some members of the panel were surprised that it was still listed. Remember earlier when we noted that the rating score was curious, given the great photos?
Negative reviews, for the most part, focused on the daybed and how it did not meet expectations. People frequently mentioned how uncomfortable it was.
Panel’s Immediate Advice to Follow:
- Reviews tell you what you need to fix. Listen to them!
- For this host, the recommendation was to remove the daybed, get a better one, and do something because that daybed is repeatedly causing the host bad reviews.
- Hosts are encouraged to reply to bad reviews by listening to the reviewer’s comments and making changes.
- Just like on Amazon, Airbnb allows you to search for worst-to-best reviews, making it easy to determine why guests are not thrilled with their vacation rental experience. Address negative reviews right away and solve whatever the source of the problem is to prevent similar reviews in the future.
Staging and Presentation Observations from the Panel:
- The listing only had 11 photos. Present more pictures and more intention to make yours a property guests can see themselves at.
- Show all the features and rooms, not just some.
- Having the same thing (decorative object, piece of art) in each picture can look tacky. This listing used the same fake plants, traveling from room to room.
- The images were watermarked/branded with the property manager’s logo. While the panelist was not opposed to the branding being there, the watermark moved around in the photos and was distracting.
- There was a hole in the room visually, as if a coffee table was missing to fill the gap.
- Don’t put objects in weird places; for instance, a vase does not belong on top of a microwave.
- Highlights of homes in NOLA are beautiful architectural features. Yet, the home’s frontage was not shown in the listing photo. Ask yourself if not showing the whole front of the house is detrimental to the guest. They don’t have a clear picture of where they are staying (and in this case, showing the entire frontage would illustrate the neighboring houses being so close together)
How Guests Book a Vacation Rental
Panelists revealed that while hotel bookings happen in minutes on mobile, vacation homes are booked within days or weeks on desktop. Did you know that it is a multi-tab, researching, multiple decision maker, desktop activity to make a booking for a vacation rental?
Here are some ideas that will help take a prospective renter to a guest with a reservation at your property:
- Show your features in photos to attract guests
- Set appropriate expectations so guests know what they’re going to get when booking your place
- Include an infographic map of where they are in the city, other info about the property, and the experience they are going to have with you. In the listing, say, ‘This is what we offer.’
- Showcase what you invested in, or showcase what you don’t have.
- Keep your vacation rental’s interior decor current (your bedroom photo should not look like an apartment or dorm room someone lived in ten years ago!).
When working on your title and description, make it punchy, descriptive, and factual. Your description helps you rank in Google and other search engines. Be sure to include keywords about what makes your property unique in your listing’s title.
Are you short on ideas? You can use ChatGPT or a similar tool to help you build your listing (but fact-check it before publishing!).
Women Love Details
One of the panelists shared that female travelers like to dig into the details. You’ll want to give the goods with bullet points that guests can read in a couple of seconds. Be sure to serve it up to them nicely, along with key features!
Airbnb Updates for STR Hosts to be Aware of
The panel also discussed how Airbnb deprioritized the title and shortened it to 40 characters. Along with that change, Airbnb also removed the ability for hosts to add emojis. Review responses are one of the algorithms that Airbnb is prioritizing, so make sure that you reply to both good and bad reviews.
To get more visibility for your listing, try running a promotion. At the time of this conference panel (Tuesday, April 16, 2024), if you were to have done the 20% promotions, the algorithm elevated your listing in the search significantly. By significant, we’re talking about moving up two pages.
That said, overreliance on promotions erodes your margins, so don’t use them much. However, this strategy might be good for launching a new listing.
Whatever you do, keep all communications on the platform, be it Airbnb or otherwise, and use their messaging tools to communicate with guests.
Platforms do not allow extortions or bribes for reviews, so don’t do that! If you’re trying to get a review from your guest, a follow-up message such as “We hope you had a 5-star stay!” or “If you haven’t had a 5-star stay, reach out to let us know so that we can do better for the next guest” is appropriate.
Motivated To Give Your Listing a Makeover?
If you’re not seeing many bookings, and you know your place is amazing, maybe your listing (and the elements therein) is the culprit.
Updating your listing to feature and describe new amenities, refreshing your space, or going all out on a new photoshoot for your vacation rental may open the door to new bookings and a fresh lease on life for your vacation rental.
Review the criteria in this article to see how your listing compares to similar property listings. You might just find some quick wins that could make your listing more easily found, competitive, and true to the experience you aspire to provide.
