How to Write a Killer Vacation Rental Listing Description
Does your vacation rental description pass the skim test?
How often do you receive the same questions from guests over and over again? Or you're receiving questions from potential guests that are already covered in your description.
If you've experienced any of these, it could be that your description isn't passing the skim test.
I'll review three common mistakes that I see in vacation rental descriptions and I'll also cover four steps that you can implement today to improve your description and increase your bookings.
Avoid These Three Common Mistakes
Description Mistake #1:
Your description is too short. It's not giving enough information that your potential guest needs to see to actually evaluate if your home is a good fit for their needs.
Description Mistake #2:
Your description is too dense. It reads like a novel and it just makes potential guests' eyes glaze over. You definitely want to make sure that you're not putting so much information and real lengthy paragraphs that a potential guest is just skipping it altogether because it's too much to read.
Description Mistake #3:
Overdoing it with caps, exclamation points, and bullet points even. It can really be too much for a description. So you'll really just want to make sure that you're using these things but you're using them very carefully because if it's too much, it just really looks like an oversell.
4 Steps to Creating a Better Description
Step 1:
Write for your audience. Your first sentence should really capture their attention immediately and really draw them in as to what makes your home unique and why they should choose your home.
Step 2:
Set expectations. At the beginning right after your intro sentence, provide three to five bullets about what people will absolutely love about your home.
You can even title it, 'What You Will Love About Our Home', and then place the bullets right underneath that. So this should really nicely summarize what makes your home such a great choice for that.
Also, if you have something about your home that you might hear complaints about but you cannot change it, you could also set those expectations at the beginning as well with a bullet or two. This may look like your home is on a gravel road, for example. That's not something you can change.
If that is going to cause someone to leave a negative review, you want to just deter them from the beginning and make sure that you're sharing that information about your home that you cannot change.
Step 3:
You want to gather specific information about every room in your house. Be sure to address things like the appliances that you have in your kitchen, the size of you bed, the TVs in each room, you just want to make sure that you're as detailed about the amenities in your home so that your potential guest can find what they're looking for.
Step 4:
Make it skimmable. This is probably the most important piece of updating your description and its how you avoid that mistake that I covered earlier about your description being too dense. This is where you'll just want to make sure you have one to two sentences in each paragraph and use subheaders throughout to really break up all of that text.
Conclusion:
You can create a great Airbnb description for your vacation rental by avoiding these common mistakes and following these four simple steps to make your description skimmable and easy to digest.
Let me know in the comments...will you be updating your description?
Need a Little Marketing Help with your Vacation Rental?
Whether you're just getting started with your vacation rental or you've been in the game for a few years but need a little help with the marketing, I'd love to help you on your journey.
That's why I created the Vacation Rental Marketing Roadmap.
This is a seven-step guide to help you walk through all of the essentials that you need to do when setting up an optimized listing (as well as the most common mistakes I see vacation rental homeowners making).
