How to take better photos of your property
Key takeaway: Property photography plays an important role in helping guests choose a place to stay. To make the most of your photos, you must respect our guidelinesand leverage our best practices where possible. Not sure what photo to choose? Ask for a opinion
Photography guidelines
A conveniently selected and fit-for-purpose property photo gallery can be a driving factor for guests choosing their next place to stay. To help you with your photo gallery, we put together this set of guidelines:
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Keep photos travel-related and useful to guests:
Choose photos that show your property's most relevant features to set accurate expectations for potential guests, such as:
- Facilities and services available at your property
- Decor, location, and surroundings
- Your security features
- Demonstrable cleanliness measures in place, both at the room- and property-level
- Global, regional, and local cleanliness or safety badges, logos, watermarks, certificates in any local language or English, whether issued by government agencies or by industry certification bodies
- Regional and local logos, badges, watermarks, vouchers, and certificates related to COVID-19 government recovery policies in any local language or English
- If applicable, your Booking.com awards
Note: We’ll remove all photos that contain promotional info that encourages direct contact and direct booking. This includes photos about rates, discounts, services, or property contact info such as email addresses, phone numbers, websites, and QR codes.
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Always be appropriate for a global audience:
Help your future guests get the most out of your property photos by featuring quality content that’s appropriate for our global audience. We’ll remove photos that depict unlawful content, illicit materials, and graphic violence.
We’ll also remove all photos depicting or indicating discrimination on any grounds, profanity, indecent nudity of subjects regardless of their age, and sexually implicit or explicit content depicting subjects in the frame.
Last, we’ll remove any photos depicting misleading info that could to harm guests’ health and safety, or breach our animal welfare standards.
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Be yourself – original and genuine:
Only upload photos you’re entitled to use, either because you took them yourself, received official permission from the photographer, or purchased a suitable license to use the photo on our platform.
Refrain from using images for which your property doesn’t own the copyright. This is illegal, and any photos uploaded without proper permission, licensing, or copyright will be removed either automatically by our moderation colleagues or at the request of the owner(s) of the uploaded photos.
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Be respectful of people’s privacy:
Photos of your property are more helpful to potential guests than photos of a person’s private info, so always refrain from using photos that include any personal data.
In this context, personal data can mean photos taken with surveillance devices depicting guests in areas of your property where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy (e.g. bathrooms, bedrooms, changing rooms, saunas).
Note: Any and all photos taken under such circumstances that are uploaded without the explicit permission of the people they’re depicting will be removed at their request.
Based on our Property Photo Moderation Guidelines, the below table provides an accurate understanding of what is and isn’t allowed when it comes to photography.
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Relevant examples that we’ve found include: |
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Relevant examples that we’ve found include: |
Ask for an opinionNot sure what photo to choose? Ask other property owners for advice by starting a conversation in the Partner Community. Many of our most active partners in the Community have been running properties for years - they’ve achieved some high scores with their properties. This is your chance to learn from the best. |
Best practices
Using info from our ongoing research, we’ve created property or hotel photography guidelines to provide suggestions on taking the perfect photo – and the optimal number of hotel or rental property images that attract more guests and increase bookings.
What photos do I need for my hotel?
What photos do I need for my home, apartment, or vacation rental?
What photos do I need to attract more families to my property?
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Your Property Page Content
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