Heads In Beds Show - Mastering Property Detail Pages & Property Descriptions To Get More Direct Bookings

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

In this episode Conrad shares the audio from his room-filling DARM Presentation: Mastering Property Detail Pages & Property Descriptions To Get More Direct Bookings. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingConrad's Course: Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing 101Video version & blog post🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagram🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Hey there Conrad here, got a fun solo episode for you. This is a version of a talk that I did at the Data and Revenue Management Conference back in November, excuse me, back in December of this year. The title of it is Mastering Property Detail Pages and Descriptions to Get More Direct Bookings. The premise of this talk was going into a lot of detail about the property detail page itself, where you, I make the case, actually make or break your ability to get a direct booking. So, it's a little episode today. If you enjoy it, please do let me know these things.

There are some visuals on the screen that maybe might benefit you if you were to potentially see the visuals along with the audio version. So I will put a link in the show notes here on the podcast detail page over to the video version on our YouTube channel. Check that out if you're interested. Otherwise, I think you'll get a lot of value out of listening in on this talk. Thank you so much for listening. Appreciate it. And we'll be back next week with a normal episode. Thanks so much. Welcome to Mastering Property Detail Pages and Descriptions, How to Get More Bookings, Lessons Learned from Millions of Dollars in Direct Bookings. So this is a Payless Shoe Source Store, hard to say. I'm curious

how many people listening in or perhaps watching have purchased shoes from the store. The reason that I ask is that as a kid I went to Payless shoes right before school, typically in August, and my mom would pick me up two shiny brand new pairs of shoes that I was more than excited to go in. And although the shoes weren't necessarily the most amazing quality you've ever seen, they were affordable. My mom would bring me there. I'd be able to try on 50 different pairs of shoes, and when you're nine years old that's pretty amazing. So it turns out the Payless isn't really that notable or successful at this moment of a shoe brand. Amazon and kind of the online shopping experience has kind of put a major dent in them

and sent them packing and they're now bankrupt. They basically sold cheap shoes for bottom dollar pricing and my mom was never that thrilled because she'd buy these two pairs of shoes for me, and they wouldn't often even last through the school year. But, you know, it was kind of close to us, it was there, it was cheap, so that's where we went. But the reason I start with Payless is that a few years ago, they did what I believe to be one of the most fascinating marketing experiments that I've ever seen,

and they opened a secondary store. Now their secondary store was called Paylessy, so it's spelled P-A-L-E-S-S-I, so it kind of looks a little bit different, so it's spelled P-A-L-E-S-S-I, so it kind of looks a little bit different. And it's basically a fictional brand name, it was just done for the stunt, if you will, but they made a real storefront with this brand. So Paylessi was entered in, or they built it out in this high-end shopping mall in a

major US city. And what was interesting about Paylessi was that they weren't trying to go up market and sell really high-end designer shoes, they actually took the same exact products that were at Payless shoe stores and put them into Payless. And the premise was, could we see what people feel like our products are worth or what our shoes are worth if we put them into a very high-end looking retail environment? So the experiment was just shot and basically filmed as almost like a commercial, like a 31, 32nd or one minute spot that you could go look up. If you go on YouTube, you can search the Payless experiment and it'll come right up.

And the video shows this high-end retail store and there's a launch. They invite all these social media influencers to come and look at the shoes and they film their reaction to what they think these products cost. So as they're showing the products off to these different people, they say, hey, would you be willing to pay $400 for this pair of shoes? And the people happily reply, absolutely I would. In fact, there's a woman in the graphic here on the screen who was willing to pay $600 for this pair of shoes and does just that swipes her credit card and does just that. Now, again, you know this, but the person when they were filming did not know that this exact shoe model was just down the street

at the Payless shoe store for less than $50. They could buy the same exact product for $45 or $50. They were paying $600 for it as a part of this kind of marketing stunt. So the stunt was obviously not successful in saving Payless the brand. As I mentioned earlier, Payless, the brand has sort of, you know, folded by the wayside. But it was quite a notable and interesting marketing story, an advertising story. So the marketing campaign was quite successful, not in quite saving the brand of Payless shoes, but as an actual real and kind of rare glimpse into consumer psychology and brand perception.

So when people went to the Payless store and they saw this high-end retail experience with these super models, male, female super models, helping you try on shoes and giving you this very white glove experience and the branding all looked very clean and nice, people assumed and people were willing to pay significantly more for what those shoes

actually, you know, cost than if you were to go to the pay less shoe store and buy them. So this again is not necessarily the newest phenomenon, right? You could point to other examples or other studies that have been done on wine, where folks who are served wine and the person serving the wine has white gloves on, and they open it very carefully, and they tell you all about how rare the material is, you know, that the cork is made out of and the fact that this wine comes from this region of France that is was undiscovered for 100 years, that person will think that that wine is much higher quality, even if it's a $20 bottle that you could buy anywhere, that perception can become their reality for a brief moment in time. So it's not necessarily

a new insight. It was just a new way and had not been done previously in shoes. The way that many shoes are merchandise is kind of looks like this. So if you're listening in later on, it's sort of a mess of a store. There are shoes all over the floor. Everything's a disaster. For those of you looking at the video version of this right now, obviously you can see that this looks pretty crappy. This is like our typical Ross store.

I don't know if you have a Ross store near you, depending on where you are. Um, in the country or abroad, maybe you have one of these types of stores and everything's very cheap. You know, you can put those, put those $50 shoes I talked about earlier, um, in this environment and people might not even be willing to pay $50. Maybe they're only willing to pay $20 for those same shoes. And in the pay less you store, they're willing to pay 600 and in the pay less they're willing to pay 40. So it's the same product, but because of the perception and the environment around that product, people are willing to pay and purchasing it for very different

prices. Now, I know if you're listening to this, you're probably not part of my audience that sells shoes. I can't imagine there's anyone that sells shoes. But I think the lessons from this actually apply to pretty much any brand or any company that's talking about how we want our brand or how we want the perception of someone purchasing from us to feel or learn or see maybe is a better way of describing that. So what did we learn from this? I think we learned two things. Number one, yes, it's relatively easy to trick social media influencers, I will say that. But regular people went in the store and did the same thing. They went into this Payless shoe store and paid maybe not $600, but they paid significantly more for the same shoe that they could have got cheaper

somewhere else. So we learned that people's behavior can absolutely be changed and modified based on how the merchant or how the presentation of the actual product is that they're considering. So for us obviously we're not selling shoes, we're selling vacation rental. So this is kind of my claim that I want to prove to you over the next few minutes. The way that a property is presented influences how a guest wants to proceed or not and it also influences what a guest is willing to pay or not pay for that property and when they book their vacation rental. So today we're covering just that, how to master property detail pages to get more bookings.

So if we haven't met before, hello, my name is Conrad O'Connell. I'm the founder of Buildup Bookings or a digital marketing agency that focuses specifically on the vacation rental industry, serving search, social, and email marketing services out to our clients. Last year I wrote a book

called Mastering Vacation Rental Marketing, and it became an Amazon best seller in the direct marketing category, which I'm quite proud of. It's been distributed now, I think, to like 19 different countries. So it's been, it's been out there and people have been enjoying it, which is awesome. I spent the last nine, almost close to 10 years working directly with vacation rental managers and our campaigns over the past 12 months have driven $50 million in direct bookings

on our clients websites. So we've seen a thing or two and we kind of understand what it's like to get someone to that guest journey process and get them to potentially proceed or not proceed and make that booking. So let's talk about the guest journey for a moment. So at the end of the day, there's kind of this idea that a lot of people have that people book in a funnel that they enter in the top and then everybody kind of funnels their way to the bottom and they make a booking. I've never liked that analogy, to be honest with you, because a funnel everything you pour in the top of

funnel, assuming you don't overfill it goes right to the bottom without any leakage or spillage. In fact, one would argue that's the point of a funnel. But that's not really how a vacation on the website works. Well, really, how it really works is that people come in at the top and there's almost like it's almost like a funnel, but with a bunch of holes drilled inside, which is that people fall out of the process and fewer people make it from step to step. So if we define the booking process as these steps, which is someone going to a homepage or some kind of category page, someone entering in dates to look at a specific date range that they want to travel, someone going and looking at search results that are returned

from your website that show what properties are available for those dates. They might also be filters on that page to narrow down to specific listings or attributes in a property. Then someone views either a single or multiple property detail pages. Then they start a checkout and then they finish a checkout. So we think of these six steps again, homepage dates added search results, property page view or views, start checkout, complete checkout. Each of these you can optimize and figure out how to get more people from one step to the other.

But there's not a linear amount of people who go from each step to each step. In fact, every step here, a certain number of folks will fall out. A certain number of folks will go to the home page and then never put in dates. A certain number of people who start the checkout won't finish the checkout, and so on and so forth. So I've never liked the idea of a funnel. I've looked at it more as a booking process. There's these kind of six steps or six pieces in the journey, and our goal is to figure

out how we can get as many people as possible, hopefully, to proceed and want to proceed with each one of those steps. So let's talk today, we're focused today I guess I should say maybe, on just this one portion, the property detail page. Yes there's five other portions and yes in a perfect world we want to optimize all those but let's spend our time today focusing on this property detail page. So I've put together what I believe to be sort of some of the nine elements or some some critical elements of a property detail page. There's the hero section, images and videos on the top of the nine elements or some critical elements of a property detail page. There's the hero section, images and videos on the top of the page. There's pricing availability and calendar. So that would show you once you enter in dates, what the price of the property is.

Um, you know, including any taxes, fees, cleaning, all that kind of stuff. There's a property description, typically a text format, obviously describing what's in the property. There's an amenities section or potentially it's part of the property description. But at some point we make a list or breakdown of what the amenities are. There's location details. So we actually tell the person on the page or we should, or the property actually is their social proof.

In other words, reviews, people who have stayed at the property before who have left comments and feedback on that property itself, there's any like extra details or little small bits and pieces. We'll talk about that. There's a UI UX of that page, how it actually works and functions on a laptop, on a phone, that sort of thing. And then most kind of finally here, there's trust elements.

There's little signals that we give to the user on the other side, the guest on the other side to make them want to proceed. So if we break apart each of these nine areas, I think we can build a pretty solid property detail page. So let's start at the top with this image and video section. So I've got an example up here on the screen of a property detail page. Obviously, if you're listening in, you'll have to kind of visualize this or go look at the video version. But anyways, a property detail page, almost any one that you go on, whether it's a major OTA or any direct booking website leads off with the photos. I think that's the right call. A lot of our data that we track and a lot of the

screen recordings that I've looked at over the years indicate that most people going to a property detail page want to look at the photos and videos of that property first. The old kind of classic axiom of a picture speaks a thousand words seems to hold mostly true when people come to a property page. The first thing they're doing is clicking through and looking at the photo gallery at the top of the page. So if we think about the hero section as a thing that people are going to spend the most time on, we probably want to consider what we could do best in that section in that particular hero or photo image section. So number one in my mind is we want to have large we could do best in that section in that particular hero or photo image section.

So number one in my mind is we want to have large photos and videos. Now, can you take this too far? Yes, at some point you can make them too large, but most of the time I see most property managers and vacational managers making their photos too small. And sometimes it's done under the guise of page speed or it's done under the guise of, hey, I only wanted to upload an 800 wide pixel image. On a desktop that is just not gonna cut it. You want to make your photos ideally larger or your videos if you have them a little bit larger So that the fidelity and the quality of those is very high now You can run some you know image optimization to make sure that your file sizes aren't too large

Most of our clients I kind of tell them to target ideally be making an image under 150 kilobytes each If you can get it under 100 kilobytes without sacrificing too much quality I think that's a very reasonable approach and you want to have a full gallery of those images. And I define full gallery, typically speaking, as 30 images. Now there's some situations or some examples where, yes, 30 images might be too much for a small one bedroom condo, it's hard to sometimes generate 30 images on a, you know, four or five, 600 square foot space, I realize that. But for a large home, 30 images honestly may not be enough, you may need to actually spend more time if it's a 7, 8, 10 bedroom home to go through each portion

of the property and break it out into that. Consider 30 images a bit of a general rule of thumb, but you could certainly find examples where that might be a little too much or not enough depending on the size and scope of the property and how much amenities are in there. One thing I think that's often underlooked on these image galleries themselves is having some kind of book now button. When they're in those images and looking at them, particularly when they like expand them or make them more full screen, whether that's on mobile or desktop.

I think we often forget about the call to action. What we're trying to actually get them to do, which is make a booking and too many websites that I'm on, um, you're scrolling through the images and you actually have to like, it's a little bit tricky to like exit the image gallery. You have to click a small little X on the top, right or top left hand corner. And then you've got to, you know, go down to the date section, which we'll talk about in a second, you know, put in dates, enter in information, and then make your booking.

I think that's a mistake. I think we should have the book now button more prominently literally on or next to the photos or video assets that people are looking at. Cause when they're watching at one point, if they go, okay, I want to proceed. I want to make that very easy for them to get through. The next piece I think that you want to consider

is a quick price display. So the way that we actually show the pricing and we show the information, we want to give the person looking quickly what that price should be. What's the actual rate that I'm paying when I'm looking at this particular property? So if they've got to the property detail page

and already entered in dates, let's not hide that from them. Let's make that very obvious and prominent what the price is so they can decide if they want to be there. Underneath the images and photos, you also want to include a property name and location. Again, you'd be shocked to often I go to a property detail page for a vacation rental

property and I'm looking and I have no idea where it is. So if I was sent that property page, you know, just from, you know, someone in my family who has said, Hey, do you want to go here? And I open the page and I don't know where it is. That's a huge miss. So underneath the images, you can absolutely include a property name in a perfect world that property name would be unique to you and unique to that property. It would not be used in other places.

That makes it significantly easier for people to find you if they're looking off platform. And most of our clients, when they start to get more direct bookings, their first 10, 15% are direct bookings. It's often just people who are on Airbnb or they're on Verbo or some listing site equivalent to those two. And they look for the name of the property or they look for the name of the property manager and then they just go and find it typically through Google and then click and make a reservation direct to save the guest fees, the reservation fees.

So having the property name and location right at the top of the page is pretty optimal for SEO. It's also optimal for the guests to be like, oh yeah, this is the same one I was just looking at over on the platform site. So it's not something that you have to nudge too aggressively. Obviously don't violate any terms of service or agreements you have with Airbnb and Verbo. That's not what I would ever suggest. But if you make it obvious and clear,

then you're gonna connect better for people who wanna go off platform and find your way there. The last thing I'll say on this hero section underneath the images and videos would be having key stats display. So in my mind, that's bedrooms, bathrooms, sleeps, maybe pet friendly, kind of being a very critical amenity

for many of our clients that we're working with. So those key stats matter quite a bit to have there so that people understand again, how many bedrooms, how many bathrooms, how many people doesn't sleep. And there's their one or two kind of killer amenities that really stand out on this one. Maybe oceanfront would be a killer amenity if you're in a beach market. Maybe ski in ski out would be a killer amenity. If you're in a mountain ski destination market, again, maybe pet friendly would be amenity if a lot of your guests are looking for pet friendly listings. So that top of the page is really where I think you're doing the bulk of the work, but

really for the guests that's where you know their research is just starting. So they get down to the pricing and availability section, it might look a little bit like a calendar with you know specific dates highlighted that would indicate that they're available. Many examples, I have one here on the screen if you're listening, I'll kind of describe it for you, have the daily rate shown on that particular card. I like this quite a bit So when someone gets to this stage I want them interested in the property and I want them to know maybe in some cases like this is an example where if you Were to book the 6th through the 8th You would pay

$1,700 a night if you were to book the 10th or the 11th or 12th It would be you know a little bit more money or maybe a give a better example if you're to book the third fourth Those nights they're $2,500 and $1,800 respectively, a midweek is $1,700. So obviously every client we're working with, they're using this dynamic pricing tools. This of course is all the rage nowadays, and I totally understand why, but it's no longer,

hey, this is the rate for the property, or hey, here's the rate on Tuesday. It's gonna change depending on the season, depending on how much demand is out there. So those are all great tools, but sometimes it's confusing to the guest when they don't actually know what they're paying. So I think visually laying it out in this way is excellent because then the guests can look and say, okay, I understand what I'm paying.

I understand the value of maybe booking a midweek versus booking a weekend if that's what I'm trying to do there. So some elements to consider, obviously we want to make sure we have a live calendar of availability as bookings come in that needs to block instantaneously. I don't really see that as much of an issue today as it has been in years past. So I think we've got that pretty dialed in

for the most part, but it's something that does happen from time to time, double bookings. You wanna avoid that if you can. You wanna have in my view, a total price or calculator. So I wanna see, again, talking about the rates that we talked about earlier. In fact, there's been some recent news that I've seen that's come across my my desk about the fact

that the FTC is actually looking at this, you know, if you're not adding in and displaying all your fees and extra charges that you give to a guest between the base rent and what they actually pay, you're not showing that early enough in the booking process, you may potentially be in violation of some of these FTC guidelines that they're they're introducing. So not only is that probably just the best practice from a conversion standpoint, it might very soon be a best practice from a legal standpoint to make sure that you're showing the full and complete price and rate when someone's actually looking on the property detail page and they put in dates. If you're only showing rent and not showing other fees, that may

potentially be a problematic issue going forward. Booking terms, I think this is one thing that you want to have near that calendar. When can I cancel? How can I cancel? How much money do I get back if I cancel? I think a lot of folks that we work with try to hide that information or make it hard to find. I guess maybe they think, oh, if I don't let people know how restrictive my cancellation policy is, they won't cancel. But that's not true at all. What they will do is not book because they don't understand how and if they would get their money back if they needed to make a cancellation. So I never liked the idea of hiding booking terms or making them inaccessible.

If anything, I wanna make them more obvious and more accessible so that people feel comfortable when they make that reservation of what exactly they're getting into. Maybe you have a little bit less forgiving cancellation policy than other people do. That's understandable. Maybe you have to do that for some reason,

but I would argue the more friendly you can make your cancellation policy and then therefore the more proud you are of putting it next to your pricing and calendar page on your websites on your property detail pages, the better your conversion rate tends to go in my experience. Is there a special offer that applies? So if I show a special offer on the page, maybe it's that these dates have a lower price, maybe there's a discount if I book a

midweek stay, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, on top of the base rate, you know, adjustments that you may make there. Maybe I get a military discount, maybe I get an extra night free if I book five nights instead of four nights or three nights or something like that. So obviously the number of specials, I could spend an hour just doing that. But if you can put special offers right there

on the property detail page or people can access them, I think you can drive a lot more demand. Urgency in my mind is a pretty underrated element to include on property detail pages. I've seen some pretty good iterations of this lately where people actually go to put in dates and it may say something to the effect of, you know, 85 other people have looked at this property

recently, maybe in the last week or so, you've had 85 page views on that property detail page. That can create someone to be like, oh man, 85 other people are looking at this property detail page. Maybe they're looking at the same dates I am. Oh boy, I better book this. I better go ahead and book this

or I'm gonna lose this property potentially. I'm not gonna be able to secure that reservation. And the last thing here am. Oh boy, I better book this. I better go ahead and book this or I'm going to lose this property potentially. I'm not going to be able to scare that reservation. And the last thing here, this sounds simple, but some of these calendar widgets can be quite hard to use on mobile. I think that's a small underrated piece of the puzzle here. Make that calendar, make that pricing page where people can see the dates, easy to tap on mobile, test it on your phone. You certainly don't want something. And I've seen this quite a bit, unfortunately, where you tap it and it opens like a keyboard view when you're trying to enter in dates. If it's tappable and I can put in a check in and check out through my you know through my thumb on mobile do that you know the data tells us that 55 to 65 percent of people who are coming to a property detail page on most of our clients

websites are on mobile so you know we we all you know if we're working maybe we have our desktop you know with us or we're using our desktop quite a bit but that can get us in trouble if we don't think about the mobile experience of what it's like there. All right, property description. So I have an outline here of what in my mind a solid property description looks like. You've got a headline, you've got a short description, which kind of gives you an overview of the property at a high level. You've got accommodations detail, the space, what is specific about each room, each layout of the bed configuration, all those kinds of things. You've got other things to note. I'll talk about that in a second. You've got the neighborhood. Hey, what's around here? You've got how to get to the property. You've got what interaction you will

have with the guest, which is kind of boilerplate across all your listings, most likely. You've got about the host or property manager. Again, probably boilerplate across all your listings there as well. And then finally, you've got a guest access section. So we've probably written, I can't even count, hundreds, if not thousands, you know, several thousand property descriptions over the last eight or nine years. And this is the format that we've kind of, you know, leaned into and had a lot of success with.

So the headline in my mind for most of our clients is in fact just the name of the property. And maybe you could include some extra quote unquote so-called keywords, you know, on that section itself. But for the most part, the headline is, you know, often the property name itself. The property snapshot or the, the headline is, often the property name itself, the property snapshot or the overview is kind of what I call that,

kind of gives people all the high level details. I'll go back to a comment I made a few minutes ago. When someone's going to a property detail page, I think the safest thing you could do on a platform site is say something to the effect of, welcome to Julian's Getaway, managed by Conrad School Cabin Rentals. That's your first line in the very top of the description.

And if you want platform bookings to come your way from Airbnb and Verbo, that is a very safe and compliant way from our understanding to do that. Welcome to Name a Property managed by Name a Property Manager. That little property snapshot, you can lead off of that. And then of course, go into the detail of what that listing actually entails. The space is where, like you would imagine, you give all that information about the space. It has this amenity, it has this amenity, it has this king bed, it has this queen bed, it has this bunk bed, whatever the case may be. Obviously

people want to know that information as they're doing their planning. Special notes or other things to note, these section in my mind, not every property is perfect. And I think that if you try to present every property as being perfect and having no flaws, you will end up potentially getting more bookings in the short term, but killing your results in the long term as people might leave negative reviews and you didn't let them know kind of what the small negatives might be about the property. So if you've found the perfect property that has no problems or no potential negatives, then good for you. You're doing better than 99.999% probably of, you know, short-term rental hosts and property

managers out there. But for the rest of us who need to consider, hey, what are some negative things about this property? I think you want to put that very clearly and obviously in the property detail page, and I think you build credibility by saying what the truth is about the property itself. So for example, this property is located on the side of a busy road. Although we provide earplugs for your comfort, expect some reasonable level of noise if in this day throughout the time that people are driving around

throughout the day or something like that. Right? So I think there's little crumbs that you can leave that indicate honestly what the condition of the property is or what the potential negatives are of the property without killing your conversion rate, because then you've set the right expectations. And then if you need to, you can certainly refer back to that. If a guest was upset, hey, it was right here in the very top of the property description. You didn't read that you didn't consume that information. And I know that yes, some people don't read yes, some people aren't going to consume it

all or they're going to complain anyway, but at least you've done your job and your due diligence to let people know. And then finally, neighborhood guides. I think these are pretty underrated. I don't really see a lot of folks doing these, but I think that depending on the area that you're in, this can be quite useful. Hey, what's within walking distance of the property? What's within a short drive distance of the property? Obviously, this is going to heavily depend on the property itself, your location, all those things. But I think that neighborhood guide is an underrated piece of the puzzle. All right, let's kick over to amenities.

So amenities in my mind, right, is where we're giving often a checklist format of kind of what these different things might look like, indoor amenities, outdoor amenities, what are some special features about this property? I like the term practical amenities. That's something that I've come up with a little while ago, because some things are not exactly the most, you know, eye popping things that you really care about. Maybe it's not the cool, unique pickleball court that's in the backyard, that's gonna really pop in a photo

and you don't necessarily even need to list it, you know, or I mean, you should list it, but it's not really gonna make a difference whether I see it in the checklist of the amenity description, but practical amenities in my mind is like, what do you include? When I book the property, what am I getting? You know, because there is really no standards in our space

and there's no standards in our industry, people might book two properties of a similar look and feel and get a very different what I think of as practical amenity experience inside those properties. For example, things like towels, things like toilet paper, things like the speed of the wifi, things like the agreed upon, you know, air conditioning standards and property if you're in a warm climate. These kinds of practical amenities sound simple, but I know that guests will often book things based on things like just practical amenities sound simple, but I know that guests will often book things based on things like just practical amenities.

So I myself have kids, I don't have any really, really young kids at the moment, although that's going to change soon. Um, and when that does change, I want to make sure that there's a crib available or that there's, you know, a pack and play, and I want to make sure it's not something that's, you know, ancient. I want to make sure it's something that's high quality and comfortable. So if you're saying, Hey, um, we have cribs and everything available for a baby. That's going to make someone want to book.

If that is their reality, practical amenities, having the right coffee maker in there. You know, some of our clients now I think are doing like multiple types of coffee makers, you got some people that are the pod people, some people hate the pod people, they're not pod people. So we got both there, why not? It doesn't take up that much counter space. So we've got both different types of coffee makers there that potentially gets you, you know, that extra little, you know, person that goes, Oh, nice, we got both our coffee makers there, just what we need when we wake up in the morning of our, you know, first day on this vacation rental. So I think having practical amenities there,

talking about the standards of what you include or not including the property, particularly if you do go above and beyond, I think that can make, you know, make you stand out from the crowd. Who likes a host or a manager that skimps on toilet paper or skimps on towels? Nobody. So if you do well in those areas, I think calling it out and putting it in that section could be quite solid. These next two, visual clarity and organized by type, I'm gonna give you actually something to look at here. So this in my mind is something of what not to do. So for those listening, it's basically just a bullet point list, just kind of amenity list after amenity list after amenity list. It doesn't actually really have any like structure or order to it. So for example, next to bird watching and ecotourism is

you know, things like essentials, you know, towels, bed sheets, soap, toilet paper, there's a smoke detector, I'm happy there's a smoke detector. I don't know if that's amenity per se. Maybe that's just something that we include as part of our, you know, standard checklist that we talked about earlier. There's internet. Okay, good. I would be surprised if there wasn't internet in a property nowadays, but how fast is it, right? I think the way to do it is to group these or organize these. So maybe say it's close to amazing golf courses, it's close to the beach,

or it's close to these other things, but just listing everything out here in kind of what feels like a random order, I think is not the way to go. I think you wanna give a little bit more context in that amenity section. All right, location details, where a good job in that top section,

like we talked about a few minutes ago, but tell me exactly where it is, or at least with some level of fidelity, tell me roughly where it is. I like the idea of an interactive map, a Google map, where I can look and see local attractions or points of interest. So if I'm traveling and I'm going to Paris,

I probably wanna know how far is this thing from the Eiffel Tower? That's gonna be the local attraction or point of interest that I potentially could be interested in. You may have your own version of that. Maybe your local attraction or point of interest is just the beach. I've seen some amazing property detail pages out there from some large

property managers that say, this is 900 feet to the beach. This is 400 feet to the beach. This is on the beach. You know, this is 50 feet from the beach, that sort of thing. Same thing, of course, could apply to a ski market, ski in, ski out, how far are you from the lift, and so on and so forth. I really like too this transportation or how to get here section. It could be small. It could even be collapsed by default. It doesn't have to be something, anything that's too notable or large, but I think that you can get a lot of value

out of describing just where it is and how to get there. I think people have anxiety. They don't know if they've never been to this destination before, they don't know maybe the best way of getting there. They don't know how far it is from a major city. And if you can do that research for them and just put it right there on the property page, I think you could potentially get, you know,

more reservations from them. If you're creating content, why not make an area guide? And why not link the area guide that you have in some form or fashion on the property detail page? Yes, I don't want someone distracted. I see that kind of argument potentially forming in your mind, but I do wanna inform people. I'm there, I'm the local property manager.

I wanna tell people what makes this place great. This is the best five places to go to the beach. Click here to read this article about it. I don't think you have to hurt or harm any of your performance to get the area guide information in front of people, as long as you're giving them useful information, and then they can quickly go back and look at that property detail page

and make that reservation. And nearby listings, this is a big one. I mean, if someone gets the bottom of a property detail page and they didn't find what they were looking for, for whatever reason, unless you only have one or two listings, why not show nearby listings or similar listings? Maybe you can make the case for kind of both here. Hey, here's other three bedrooms

that are within two miles of this listing. Awesome, show those to me so I can potentially do some more digging if I get all the way to the bottom of this page. And then, you know, I think there's kind of always this battle of how detailed do we wanna be? Most of our testing would indicate to us that the more detailed you are, generally speaking,

the better that conversion rate tends to be. But I do think that that can fall apart at a smaller listing scale. So if you've got a large property where people are spending eight, nine hundred, a thousand dollars a night, I think you've got to do a lot more work on the property detail page to build that trust, to give more detail, to give more information. If you've got 150 dollar per night condo, sometimes you don't have to be as detailed. Sometimes you can be a little bit more high level, let the photos do the talking, and get people into that booking flow. So you might

need to do some testing in your world to kind of consider what's right here. This is a map example in my mind that probably has a little bit too much fidelity. I can see the road names here. I can see exactly where the home is. This could potentially create some issues. I know we've heard some unfortunate horror stories over the years with clients that we've worked with where people look for blocks in the calendar where no one's staying potentially for a week or two and they go break in the house and, you know, say they're guests.

And sometimes that can be a negative thing. So just be aware of that, just a small thing that I've seen throughout my career. All right, social proof or reviews. Obviously, guest reviews are the most common way that people would have social proof in a listing. I think there's some platforms out there that do a really good job of this.

We've seen some property management systems that actually show if the property is new, obviously it's not gonna have many or any reviews. Why not show your stats or your data? Hey, I'm a property manager, I've hosted 10,000 guests over the past five years. My average rating is a 4.97 out of five. If you look at all the data that I've collected

over the past several years. So if the property itself doesn't have reviews, that can lead to a little bit of anxiety, maybe you're a little bit of someone going, ah, do I really wanna be guinea pig on this property? But if you can show the fact that, hey, this is like my other listings, my other listings have had thousands of guests,

happy guests come through them, say that or show that. I think that's one thing that obviously the OTAs don't always do quite as prominently, but on your own website, I think you can do that. Here's how many guests I've hosted, here's how many five star reviews I've gotten. Maybe the property itself has earned an award or earned something meaningful.

Maybe the property has gotten booked recently, could you show that? John Doe booked this property 27 minutes ago. I've seen some interaction or some clever ideas like that. That can be a clever way to let people know, hey, other people are doing this. They're like you. They're looking at this property as well. They made the booking. Feel comfortable. You can make the booking. I think there's a lot of value there. And either shown booking history or again, number of views. We talked about that a few minutes ago, but that could also be a section on the page where it's like 85, you know, people have looked at this property recently that can also confirm or validate that

You know people are actually, you know interested in it And therefore it's sort of this implied urgency where you might want to go ahead and check it out, too So we want that third party validation where we can love this example This is a guest recommendations a review tab that I've seen on a vacational website So it shows the first name and in some cases the middle name of the guest Just a quick quote from the guest and then just the fact that they recommended this home. It gives some examples and some text from that. Love this example, think it's a good way of doing it.

All right, extra details, FAQ. So these are kind of like grab bag things, don't know exactly where they fit. It may depend a little bit on layout of your pages and where things need to go, but having a house rules section, I think is something that we do might want to consider including,

particularly if you say, hey, this is a large property, but I don't allow parties or or this is a large property, and I do allow the right type of party or the right type of gathering. Here's the kind of guidelines for that. Maybe you have rules or information that you thought of there.

A check-in guide or information. Do I have to go see you? Do I not have to go see you? Remember, a lot of people checking out our products or checking out for the first time, maybe they don't know the fact that they're going to get emailed or sent a door code the day of arrival or the day before arrival.

They don't know that. So if you remind them of that and just show show them that can be a good way to kind of build some trust there packing list or what to bring. So if there's amenities you don't include that, you know, a lot of people complain about, just say that, you know, in my, in my mind, excuse me, in a perfect world, you would include everything the guests would need reasonably speaking, but Hey, many of our guests, you know, complain about XYZ or many of our guests say they need XYZ, maybe that's a better way of phrasing that.

Make sure you put that in your packing list when you're traveling over here to come and stay in this property. And then I think it's just a general FAU section. Excuse me. I've seen this quite a bit on some layouts where people can click, ask a question. And then once that question is approved by you on the back end, you could respond to it and put it on the property detail page itself like that quite a bit.

Are you IUX? We kind of talked about this a little bit over the past few minutes, but the mobile and desktop desktop experiences are often different in terms of layout, but they shouldn't compromise one another. In other words, they should function the same way. I should be able to put in dates, I should be able to put in slide through photo galleries, I should be able to read property descriptions, I should be able to see all the amenities, and it shouldn't just be, hey, I'm collapsing this text down into a smaller view.

That's like kind of the bare minimum in my mind to make a site quote unquote mobile friendly. It's the experience is the same. So that may mean reconfiguring or relaying out your page a little bit for mobile or maybe hiding certain introductory pieces of text and not displaying everything like you might on desktop, but that's kind of something that I think people need to put more consideration in again, 65%, probably 60% of the people coming to your page are coming on mobile. So if we're looking at all this time on our computer, and I'm guilty of this,

by the way, so I'm saying this for myself as much as anybody, we can sometimes not see the forest through the trees and not realize that the guest is experiencing it through the website on their phone, not necessarily experiencing it on a desktop computer. I believe website speed is one of these things where you've gotta get it in the good enough zone.

In my mind, that good enough zone is less than three seconds fully loaded. Chasing much speed past that, I don't really see that there's much of a benefit from the data that I've seen and from the clients that I've worked with over the last few years that have chased speed. There seems to be a spot where it's like,

okay, it's fast enough and additional speed doesn't really seem to move the needle. So as always, caveat, emperor, do your own testing, figure out kind of what's ideal for you there and make sure you've got it dialed in there. One thing that I think matters quite a bit is your interaction with all the data entry is clear. So I mentioned this a few minutes ago,

but when I open the credit card pane, don't open a keyboard, open a number pad, because I'm entering in a credit card number. That's more on the checkout side of things. But when I'm entering dates on a property detail page, again, don't open a keyboard. I'm not gonna type in dates like 11 slash four slash 2025. I'm not gonna do that.

I just wanna tap on the screen and I get my data entered into the website that I need to very clearly. Again, this is a really important consideration on the checkout page. I know that's not what we're talking about today, but on the checkout page, I see that mistake all the time where there's a phone field I tap in it and it shows me a text keyboard with, you know, you know, alphanumeric, right? Like it's showing both the numbers and letters together instead of just showing a little keypad where I can put in my phone number if you need that information. Just clear and descriptive.

So as you're reviewing the page, I think this is kind of like the mom test, right? Like, if I showed this to my mom, is she gonna understand exactly where everything is? Could I be more clear? Is there anything that's lingo that I'm using internally? Like, for example, we had a client that did, they would say it's a lockout unit.

Well, some people don't know what a lockout unit is. So we had a description of what a lockout unit actually was so they could understand what it was when they were making that reservation. So it was lingo that was kind of internally that they described the unit as a lockout unit, but that was making its way into the property detail page. And it was confusing guess. When we fixed that, we saw a little a pickup and conversion rate. I didn't know exactly where to put this, maybe in the hero section, but I love save share or favorite functionality on a property detail page. I could particularly share, right? I think, you know, or favorite functionality on a property detail page. I particularly share, right?

I think booking a vacation is typically a pretty social process, a collaborative process across working with different people in your family or potentially people you're traveling with, having a little share icon or share button there. You could do social things. I think a lot of people just share these things through text messages.

So I think the safest thing is tap here and send this to your friend through an SMS, iMessage if they're on phone or Android phone, it's just a text message, that sort of thing. Um, favorite functionality thing can be good if you're saving those favorites and doing something with them. I like that quite a bit. And then the sound simple, but you'd be surprised just having a contact the manager form or

option on the page. So not clicking through to a contact page where then I lose some of that information, but I want a form where I can fill it out, ask a question or just contact the manager, contact the host, contact the property, um, you know, care person for this particular list. I want a book, but I want you to call me to get my credit card number, whatever, let's make that easy. And let's pass those information, the information from the property detail page over to you when that form comes in. So you look at it and go, okay, I got a lead from John Doe and he came in on this particular listing. I'm now 80% of the way there to get that booking. Just some final

items here on trust signals. So having secure booking badge on the page, I think matters quite a bit. Not many sites I review nowadays do not have HTTPS set up. That was definitely a thing a while ago. But just letting people know, hey, your data is trusted with us. We're a local company. We treat your data the right way. Trust us because of these reasons. You could talk a little bit about your, again, number of guests that you've host or number of properties that you manage. There's a lot of things that you can dive into there. Travel insurance, giving those options or letting people know, hey, you can make a cancellation or you can, if a storm hits, you know, you're covered. Just purchase the travel

insurance and you're there. Cleaning protocols. Obviously this was very spiky during COVID. Maybe it's turned down a little bit, but we all want clean listing, COVID or no COVID. We want to make sure that when we were walking into a property that it has everything on a very clean standard. So what are your cleaning protocols? How detailed do you go? How expansive are you when you clean a property? I think that's a decent little spot to put somewhere in there.

Safety features, not to be overlooked. Certainly, I think there's amazing people in our industry that do such a great job, Eric Thibodeau and Justin Ford talking about safety and making it a key part of it. Let the people know that you're doing that work. Let them know that you've got the smoke detectors. Let them know that you've got the smoke detectors. Let them know that you've got the carbon monoxide detectors.

Let them know that you've got, you know, a quarterly safety inspection to replace the fire extinguisher. Let them know those things, right? Like that's a good way to build trust and get that guest to actually consider there. And then if you have a local contact or office, show that or, you know,

shout that from the rooftop somewhere, right? We're here, we're local. We're local to Myrtle Beach. We're local to the Outer Banks. We're local to the Outer Banks. We're local to San Diego. We're local to Galveston, Texas, whatever the case may be. Show a picture of your office. Show on the Google map where it is.

People have been there before and they can trust you that way. All right, so I've got a bonus. So you made it all the way to the end here. I super appreciate your time. Thank you so much for listening. I would love to give you a copy of Mastering Vacation on Demarketing.

So if you scan the QR code on the screen, you'll go to a page where you can then check out the, there will be a little form there, fill out that form. I'd love to give you a copy of my book, Mastering Vacation on Marketing. If you're based in the US, I'd be happy to send you a physical copy if that appeals to you. If you're international, I'd be more than happy to fire over a PDF copy just because we haven't got that international shipping thing figured out quite yet. But I thank you for your time and attention. If you have any other questions or feedback, do let me know in a comment or just send me a note to our contact form on the website, go to buildupbookings.com. We'd love to give you a copy of the book if you made your way all the

way to the end here. Thank you so much for listening in. This was Mastering Property Detail Pages and Property Descriptions to get more bookings. I'm Conrad O'Connell and I'll see you in the next one. Thanks so much.