359. How to Turn Off Airbnb's Photo Tour (And Pick Your Own Photos)

Tim Hubbard (0:00)

A while back, we had one of our partners reach out to us and say, hey, why is the picture of my arcade game in front of the picture of the beautiful lake? So, of course, this is something our team does with each and every property we manage today. We turn off that photo tour, and we make sure those photos are organized to sell the reservation. If you're new to the channel, well, welcome. We've got hundreds of episodes talking about how our team operates several hundred properties in over 50 cities. This is real world advice. We've been doing it for a long time. If you want to learn more, you can go to coorsley.com, torzly.com.

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Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage, and scale your portfolio.

I'm your host, Tim Hubbard.

All right, so how do we actually turn off the photo tour? Well, let's go through step by step. The first thing to do is to log directly into Airbnb. Remember, if you adjust this in your PMS, hospitable or guesty or host away or whatever it happens to be, it's not going to update your photos in Airbnb.

So step number two, we want We want to to move all of our photos that aren't bedrooms or bathrooms into an additional photos area. We do want to keep beds and baths in their rooms so they show up on the where you'll sleep section, and so that they still count towards the bedroom count. Now step number three, we want to leave one room with no photos in it, and then delete all the other empty rooms. Step number four, with the bedrooms and the baths in their rooms, and all of our additional photos in that other spot, we want to click on all photos, and then we get to arrange these the way that we want. Since the room labels are now gone on all photos outside the bedrooms and the baths, you want to make sure that you label those with the best label, really the label that's going to sell that guest on the reservation. And that's it. We can organize our top five photos, we've got our bedroom and our baths in their rooms, and then we have all the other photos organized in the way we see best fit. One last step, we want to log out of Airbnb. Ideally, you log in on an incognito browser, so if you're using Google Chrome, just right click and there's a little incognito. We want to log in, we want to search for our property just like a guest, just to verify that the photos are indeed in the order that we set up. Now, quick catch here, Airbnb wants you to use their photo tour, so after a little while, you're going to see a banner pop up, and it's going to say, use photo tour. Make sure you don't click that again, because all the work you spent organizing your photos is going to go back to Airbnb's photo tour. Side note, I'm going to read off my list here, instructions for you to turn off the AI monitoring your listing. You can go into settings, click on privacy, and turn off help improve AI-powered features. All right, so that's how we do it. Again, Airbnb is going to continue to try to get you to use their photo tour. The first five photos are indeed the most important, but those other ones are too, so let's spend a second talking about the first five photos. The first thing you're gonna wanna do is look at all the photos in your area, see what they're using for their hero photos, and then you wanna choose a photo that's different. It's not a bedroom, it's not the kitchen shop that looks just like the rest of the neighborhood. You wanna find the photo that's different. So our team loves to use photos outside the property. We have properties all over the place now.

For example, a picture in Costa Rica of a sloth. That has nothing to do with the actual property, but it does speak to the area where it is, right? And so maybe it's an awesome beach shot. Maybe it's a map location shot showing that you're right next to the amphitheater where they have amazing concerts. So you really wanna make sure you stand out. The only way you can do that is by knowing what your neighborhood is showing and then choosing something different. We suggest skipping big TVs on these hero photos because they're just really not that warm and inviting. We would suggest having a shot of the master bedroom, right? The person making the reservation is likely the same person that's gonna be staying in the master bedroom. Understand who your guest avatar is. If you've got a property that's perfectly situated for people working in corporate environments, make sure you show workspace. So really it comes down to knowing your guest avatar, knowing your neighborhood, and just being different. If you're new to the channel, we have hundreds of episodes. You can go to strriches.com to find all of them. If you go way back to episode 70, we talk about some must have photos. Those are still photos that we'd highly recommend today. Drone photos, make sure you have professional ones. We have another episode on whether or not your property is well suited to have people in the photos. And there's a lot more content on the channel to help you make sure your property stands out and your property gets booked. All right, just to recap the very last step again, make sure that you're logging in on Incognito Browser, you've logged out and at least logged back in. Just double check that Airbnb didn't magically move your photos back to the way they wanted them. One last thing before we go, a lot of our partners ask us if we should be changing our listing on a regular basis because it tricks the algorithm or it gives you more visibility. The answer is if your property is already outperforming the market, then you have no reason to change your listing, right? You're already getting the visibility you're needing. You're already doing a better job than you're listing next door. And so if your property is not doing well, well that's when you want to come back. You want to make sure you've taken a thorough review of your property, your listing photos and your competition to see what you might be missing. I hope that gave you a little bit more insight. Until next week, I hope you have a fabulous week.