The Best Advice Being Given in the Hospitality Industry by Marilynn Taylor

No. Again, so great. So many takeaways. Now, something I've noticed from yourself is you now help other accommodation owners with their listings. Out of all the ones that you have done. I do something similar. I do a thing called a marketing review, where, again, I see what people do and put it into. I give them advice. So all the reviews that you've done and all the hosts that you have helped with, what is the most common advice that you see that you are giving at present to these people and what they can do to improve, just in case there's somebody else here who is literally making the same mistake?

I approach everything from an aesthetic point of view, so that is my forte. So while you are a tech and marketing guru, right, and you know how to get, like, the structure and SEO and all that fun stuff, that's not my brain I'm going to look at. My clients are coming to me because they want the presentation not only at their home, but their marketing to match their home. Right. It's branding. And I would say the most common thing that I have to help people correct is their photos. It's not just the quality of the photography, but it's also the order that they put them in. It's the captions, it's the way that they present it. It doesn't tell a story. It doesn't walk people through the home. When I order my photos on my listings, I always think about what room are they going to see first and then where are they going to go from there. And in my captions, I try to give some idea. Okay, you're upstairs. This is a hallway bathroom. So they can look at the main photo. Go, oh, that's where the hallway is. That door must be that bathroom. And they can get an idea of the layout and how it's going to feel in there. Because I used to get complaints about, oh, we didn't realize that all the bathrooms were upstairs or the full baths, you know, and there's only one half bath downstairs. So then I started incorporating floor plans into my listings, which really, really helps. So that's, I would say, photography, it's so important.

I love that. And just to circle back on captions, so many people don't utilize captions. And they are there for a reason. They are there, like you say, to tell a story, to guide the guest. Now, captions is key, but I'm really intrigued about the order. What order do you sort of recommend going? And when we're talking about order, let's just say we're on Airbnb. Now or on booking.com or VIO or whatever or you're on a listing site that you're paid to be there. We're not talking about your website here. We're talking about a place that you list your property on. When you're talking about an order, obviously the first one has to be, well, the best one and then so how do you sort of go from there? So that's the first six. How are you sort of breaking it down just generically? Obviously everybody's going to be a little bit different but how do you like to structure it?

So for me and my properties I always use a photo of the interior. I have toggled back and forth and done what they call split testing or ab testing. On one listing I'll have a photograph of the master bedroom which is probably the most spectacular design wise. And in others I have a photograph of the living room as the first photo and I've been testing to see which one works the best.