Double your bookings in a flash

By Bill Furlong, CEO

I spent some time this weekend looking for a vacation home in Austria for some friends who are planning a vacation (they apparently think I am their "personal shopper" when it comes to vacation rentals).  As I powered through a lot of vacation rental listings on Friday night, I could see a clear pattern about how I was making instant decisions -- filter as much as possible to get down to a manageable number of possible homes and then make instant decisions based on photos.  With hundreds of homes to look through, my brain was looking for three things: 1) are there enough photos, 2) does the place look nice and 3) is the photo quality decent?

Given that, I thought it would be interesting to go to the data and see if there is any corellation between the number of photos a unit has and the number of bookings a unit gets per year.  The results are a lot clearer than many of the photos you see for vacation homes!

 

So, are you interested in doubling your bookings per unit per year?  Well, then you might want to get out your camera (or even spring for a professional photographer).  As the chart above shows, vacation homes that have 0-4 pictures get less than half the bookings as those that have 20 or more photos.

Sure, getting those photos done is a hassle.  You have to drive all over the place.  You have to invest in some equipment.  You have to learn iPhoto or some other editing software.  Or you have to hire a photographer.  But think through the napkin math.  How much would it be worth to average 14.7 bookings per year instead of 6.4?  If you have 100 homes under management and get $1,400 on average per booking, then we're talking about $1.2 million of incremental booking revenue per year.  If you keep 25% of all booking revenue (including fees), then we're talking about $291k of incremental revenue to your agency.

How many agencies put the effort into having a lot of photos for each unit?  The top two categories above -- units with 15 or more photos -- represent 20% of all units in our sample.  At the bottom end, units with 4 or fewer photos also represent just over 20%.  Agencies with a fifth of the units out there have a clear opportunity to improve their listings and their bookings by increasing the number of photos.

Sure, photos alone might not drive your bookings per unit from 6.4 to 14.7.  But it is hard to argue with the clear corellation in the chart above.  If the reality is even a fraction of those numbers, investing in a large number of high quality photos is almost certainly worth it.  If you have any doubts, then spend next weekend shopping for a vacation home in some place you don't know like I did.  And stop to see how much you rely on the photos to narrow down from hundreds of options to a handful.  I think you'll find that your experience matches the results above. 

Comments

[McFads]

Excellent post. The number one question we get is "are there more photos" when a home does not have at least 10 photos.

I wonder if videos will also help increase bookings? I just purchased a HD Flip camera (http://www.theflip.com/) and it's amazing how easy (and cheap) it is to create high quality videos. Granted they aren't professionally edited but they at least have great quality.

[Bill Furlong]

Thanks for the comment, Mike. I'm a big fan of the Flip video camera as well (in fact, we give them out from time to time as part of Escapia events). We don't have enough data to see whether video correlates to bookings. I think video probably plays a different role in the process. Great photos get the traveler to stop their scan through hundreds of bookings on your home. Done well, videos can close the deal. But that's purely a guess.

[eve isk for sale]

Excellent post. The number one question we get is "are there more photos" when a home does not have at least 10 photos.

[buy darkfall gold]

I think video probably plays a different role in the process. Great photos get the traveler to stop their scan through hundreds of bookings on your home. Done well, videos can close the deal. But that's purely a guess.

[Gerhard Frank]

Hi , i have 12 Apartments in Vienna, and travelers book the cheapest , not that one with most pictures.. :)

best regards from Vienna

Geri
http://www.govienna.net