« 8 Ways to Attract Winter Cottage Rental Guests | Main | Making a Profit on Selling your Vacation Home the Fractional Way »
Using Flickr Photos on your Vacation Rental Website
By CottageGuru | November 30, 2007
Using high quality photographs on your cottage rental website or listing is your most important selling point. Your potential guests look at four aspects of your site in their decision making process – your descriptive text, the list of facilities, the rental rate, and above all – the pictures. Great photos can influence their choice to such an extent that it’s worthwhile spending the time finding or taking the best.
Your photos must illustrate your property accurately. I’ve heard of some owners taking lots of nice stuff up to the cottage to ‘stage’ the pictures for their listing, then removing them after the photos are taken. Putting it bluntly, this is fraudulent practice. Renters expect to find the furniture and furnishings to match what they have been shown in the photos. So, if you change anything radically or dramatically alter the décor, you will need to take new photos and update your website.
Stock photos can be a useful addition to your site, only if you are using them to set the scene, or you indicate very clearly they are not truly representative of the location. For example, I’ve seen some listings with photos of a sunset off the dock, when the listing shows the cottage facing east! If you have a blog to market your property, you can be more flexible with the photos you use, as you’ll probably be promoting the area as much as the cottage, so a wider perspective is important anyway.
So, how much should you pay for stock photos? I use Istockphoto and pay $1 each for most of them. You just need to register and buy a block of credits. You can then download them as and when you need to. Skelliewag posted a terrific guide to finding free photos on Flickr, this morning. Her description of Creative Commons licensing is invaluable.
Finally, beware of using Google Images to find and copy images. Some years ago I used a photo on a website that I’d found this way and it appeared not to be copyrighted. In fact, the designer of that site had breached copyright on the image, as we found out when we received a lawyers ‘cease and desist’ letter requiring us to remove the image immediately. We were lucky. We could have been slapped with a huge fine.
I’m offering three free listing or website reviews in December. If you have a cottage rental website or listing on an advertising site and would like it reviewed on this blog, just email and let me know.
Topics: Useful Resources, Marketing |