Great photos are the single biggest lever you can pull to increase holiday rental bookings. Here's how to nail them — with or without a professional photographer.
Before a guest reads your description, checks your price, or glances at your reviews, they look at your photos. Research from Airbnb's own data science team found that listings with professional-quality photography earn up to 40% more revenue than comparable listings with amateur shots. On platforms like Vrbo and Booking.com the effect is even more pronounced, because the search grid is almost entirely visual.
Yet walk through any holiday rental listing site and you'll find the majority of properties photographed on a phone, shot in dark rooms with curtains closed, crammed with personal belongings, and uploaded without any editing. This is great news if you're willing to invest a little time and effort — a significant competitive advantage is sitting there for the taking.
This guide covers everything you need: gear, preparation, shooting technique, and editing. Whether you're hiring a professional photographer or doing it yourself, these principles apply.
No amount of photographic skill will compensate for a cluttered or poorly presented property. Before any camera comes out, you need to stage the space.
Remove everything that isn't intentional. This means:
The goal is a hotel-like neutrality. Guests want to picture themselves in the space, not feel like they're imposing on someone else's home.
Empty rooms feel cold. Strategic props make a space feel inviting without cluttering it:
Bedrooms often win or lose bookings. Invest in white or neutral hotel-quality bedding if you haven't already — it photographs far better than patterned duvet covers. Iron or steam the sheets before shooting. Add throw pillows. Pull back curtains fully to maximise light.
This sounds obvious, but windows especially need to be spotless. Smudged glass kills natural light. Clean mirrors don't create distracting reflections. Spotless surfaces show pride in the property.
Light is the single most important technical variable in property photography. Most amateur shots fail because they're taken at the wrong time of day or with the wrong approach to indoor lighting.
The hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset produce warm, flattering light that makes any property feel luxurious. Avoid shooting midday — the harsh overhead sun creates unflattering shadows and bleaches out colours.
For exterior shots, note which direction your property faces and plan accordingly:
For indoor rooms, a combination approach works best:
The professional solution is called 'flambient' photography — blending a flash-lit interior exposure with a naturally-lit ambient exposure in editing. Many professional property photographers use this technique.
A direct on-camera flash creates flat, unflattering light with harsh shadows. If you use flash, bounce it off the ceiling or use a softbox to diffuse it.
The most common mistake is shooting from standing eye level. For interior rooms, the camera should typically be at waist height — around 1.2m to 1.5m. This makes ceilings visible (showing the full volume of the room) and makes furniture look proportionate rather than foreshortened.
For exterior shots, a slightly elevated perspective — even standing on a step or small ladder — often looks more impressive.
A wide-angle lens (typically 16-24mm on a full-frame camera) is standard in property photography because it makes rooms look larger. However, extreme wide-angle distortion can make spaces look unrealistically large and set false expectations — which leads to disappointed guests and bad reviews.
Aim for a natural-feeling wide shot that represents the room honestly but flatteringly.
The best property shots have foreground interest, a clear mid-ground subject, and background context. For a kitchen, this might mean shooting from the dining area (foreground), across the kitchen island (mid-ground), through to a window with a garden view (background). This depth makes the space feel three-dimensional and inviting.
Shots taken in doorways or at room transitions show how the property connects and help guests mentally navigate the space. A shot from the living room through to the kitchen, or from the bedroom doorway showing the en-suite, is highly effective.
A well-structured listing typically needs:
Most platforms let you reorder photos. Put the photos in the order of your best selling points, not room-by-room. If your terrace is extraordinary, lead with it. If the view is spectacular, make it image two.
For most hosts, this is the best investment you can make. A professional will bring a DSLR or mirrorless camera, a quality wide-angle lens, a flash system, and editing expertise. The cost pays back after a handful of additional bookings.
Search specifically for property or real estate photographers rather than general photographers — they understand flambient technique and know how to make spaces look their best.
The latest generation iPhones and high-end Android phones can produce genuinely excellent property photos if you apply everything in this guide. Key things to do:
A used Canon EOS Rebel or Sony a6000 with a wide-angle lens gives you significantly more control than a phone. Combined with the techniques in this guide, you can produce very professional results.
No professional property photographer delivers unedited photos. Even excellent shots need post-processing:
Free tools: Lightroom Mobile (free tier is capable), Snapseed, or the built-in editing tools in Apple Photos.
Avoid over-editing — HDR halos, unrealistic skies, and oversaturated colours signal inauthenticity and erode guest trust.
Reshoot whenever:
Great photography fills your calendar — and once bookings start coming in, you need a system to manage them efficiently across every channel without the chaos. LetPilot gives small and mid-sized holiday home hosts a clean, simple platform to manage bookings, pricing, guest communication, and direct bookings from one place, with none of the per-booking fees charged by the big platforms. Try LetPilot free at letpilot.co — no credit card required.