Your Listing Photos Are a First Date
Your photos are making a promise. Is it the right one?
When a guest books your property based on your listing photos, they are not simply selecting a place to sleep — they are entering into a small, implicit contract with you about what their experience is going to feel like, and the degree to which reality matches that contract will determine almost everything about how they review you. This is why the advice to simply take better photos, while not wrong, is also somewhat incomplete. Better photos of a misrepresented space just make the gap land harder.
The question worth asking about your listing photos is not only whether they are beautiful, but whether they are honest in an aspirational way — whether they show your space at its genuine best rather than at an idealized fiction of its best.
Your first five photos tell a story— make it an honest one!
And of course there are also those listings where the photographs kill the listing— If a photograph makes even you want to look away, please seek help. (Conversely, as a traveller who know far too much about STRs, I sometimes find insanely awesome Airbnbs that have been photographed horribly. They tend to charge a lot less than they could, and have dark photographs and five star reviews. If I stay there, I try to pull the owners aside for a little talk…)
The host who photographs every room in the most flattering light, removes every trace of the slightly dated bathroom tile, and angles every shot away from the one window that faces a parking lot is not doing herself any favors, even if the photos look polished, because the guest who arrives expecting something slightly different will feel the discrepancy before she can name it, and that feeling tends to show up in the review.
After 14+ years of hosting and a fair amount of time helping other hosts with their listings, I've come to believe that the most effective listing photos do three things well: they establish the mood of the space in the first two or three images, before the guest has scrolled to any individual room; they show the spaces where guests will actually spend their time, prioritized over the spaces that photograph well but matter less; and they include at least one or two images that capture the small details — the coffee setup, the stack of good books, the outdoor chair angled toward the view — that signal a host who has thought carefully about her guest's experience.
Those detail shots are the ones that make people feel, before they've even booked, that someone is going to take care of them.
Set clear expectations, meet those expectations. That’s how you rise to the top in your market.
I've written about all of this at more length , including some specific guidance on editing and sequencing your photos in a way that tells the right story.
And as always, if you want a second set of eyes on your specific listing, that's something I love doing with mentees — there is nothing quite like the outside perspective for catching the things you've stopped seeing because you see them every day.
