We talk to Andy & Jo about the power of professional photography for your direct booking website. Watch now to get the inside scoop from holiday rental marketing pros.
Thanks for joining the conversation
Thanks for sending in your questions for our AMA: “Photography and direct bookings with ACT Studios”
We’ve added a recording of the event in case you missed it or want to revisit some of the points we discussed.
We’ve also picked out the AMA highlights and their timings below.
Key takeaways:
“Setting up your website and running your property business by yourself is not hard. You just need to set it up correctly from the off. We know that photography and videos make a big difference. This day and age, everyone’s got a mobile phone, anyone can take photos themselves. But it’s quite difficult to take good internal photos, and experience shots that make people think, ‘wow, I want to go there!’. There’s a difference between an iPhone shot and a professional photo shot.” – Andy Dalby
“Our eyes are created to see a far greater range of light exposure than cameras can capture. So what our eyes see is massively different from what the camera can see. What photo editing can do, by bringing all the different exposure levels together, is give a truer representation of how our eyes actually see a space. You’ve got to make sure you don’t go overboard in the editing, because you can, but generally you’re just bringing the technology up to what our eyes can handle.” – Tyann
“Good copywriting is a skill. It’s very much about getting to the point quickly. People won’t waste time reading through reams of information, so you need to be able to create copy that’s engaging and informative and gets to the point, so you don’t lose people’s interest. Also, from an SEO perspective, a good copywriter will understand keywords, metatags, meta descriptions, image alt text, and all that stuff that will help search engines to find you.” – Jo
“You can’t compete with the big online travel agents, so use them. They’ll always come up at the top of the search engine results pages. So get yourself on all the big listing sites – it adds some trust and increases your visibility. Once people have booked, you can then start to build a relationship with them, and tell them about the benefits of booking direct. You can’t beat Booking.com, Airbnb and so on, so you might as well use them!” – Jo
AMA highlights:
- 01:02 – An intro to ACT Studios
- 01:35 – The key things an owner/host needs to include in their website to attract direct bookings
- 03:36 – Building user trust in your property through your website and your photographs
- 06:40 – See the difference between a smartphone camera shot, and a professional shot
- 07:55 – Andrew demonstrates some of the ACT magic
- 10:45 – The balance of photos which do your property justice, whilst still setting accurate guest expectations
- 16:34 – How many property photos to include on your website
- 17:30 – See an example ACT website
- 19:40 – Making the jump from creating a booking site listing, to creating your own direct booking site
- 23:16 – The importance of professional copywriting for direct booking sites
- 27:15 – How ACT can fit into your budget
- 32:36 – Competing with large listing sites, such as Airbnb and Booking.com