Shooting for AirBnB

Photographing holiday lets for Air BnB or Booking.com is identical to real-estate work with a slight difference. I shoot a good few of these in the local tourist hot spots, and until recently, I shot beautiful work for a Northumberland boutique agency with a portfolio of luxury lets - until they were bought up by a nationwide business, and converted into one of those that just exist for profit. There are 30+ brands now incorporated into the corporate fold. Subsequently, their imagery seems to have been changed over to largely owner-generated stuff - usually poorly exposed pictures taken with mobile phones. The verticals are wonky, windows blown out, colours all over the shop, and so on.

Before being ghosted (what’s new?), I was forced to increase my liability/pro indemnity insurance credentials as if I was a large construction firm carrying out structural building refurbishments, and then was forced by their compliance requirements into paying to rejoin an industry organisation (BIPP) to prove my competency. I bent over backwards, and was still booted into the ether after years of service without a missed heartbeat. Never mind, that’s the nature of modern business unless you happen to be me.

So, now I’ve expanded into shooting holiday lets for private clients. I approach the work in the same way I approach an estate agency job, but as well as doing multiple angles of the rooms, I photograph some of the details within each space. It just adds a bit of interest, and the shots can be rotated and replaced every so often. Looking at the Air BnB and Booking.com sites, it’s clear that there’s a need for professional imagery out there given the state of some of the pictures.

The images shown here, were shot for a property in Alnwick being prepared for marketing as a holiday let. As you can see, the room shots are the same as those I would take for a sale, and then the other images are simple details of things around the place. How much does a full shoot of a holiday let cost? Two Hundred quid including vat. Do it now, before the peak summer season hits, and make it look a million times better.