Airbnb Virtual Tour: Should You Add It to Your Listing?

Airbnb Virtual Tour

By The Hospitable Team

Are you looking for a creative way to market your Airbnb and attract more travelers? Create an immersive experience for your potential guests using an Airbnb virtual tour. While beautiful photos and a detailed description can give travelers an idea of what your property looks like, they don’t show every detail travelers want to see when exploring the options.

And a stunning Airbnb 3D tour can help them get a more realistic picture of what to expect when staying at your vacation rental home and convince them to book your listing. In this blog, we’ll discuss virtual tours’ benefits and how to create one for your Airbnb.

What Is Airbnb Virtual Tour?

A virtual tour is a simulation made up of a sequence of videos or still images. An Airbnb virtual tour provides a 360-degree, immersive view of a vacation home. This way, travelers can see where they will be living and get a feel of the place before ever stepping onto the property.

Virtual tours are more engaging than static 2D photos, so adding one to your listing will help you stand out from the competition. An immersive virtual tour will keep travelers on your listing space longer, allowing them to visualize their experience to determine if your rental meets their needs.

Unlike an Airbnb video tour, a virtual tour allows travelers to navigate through a property at their own pace and explore every corner of the vacation rental home. They’ll better understand the home’s layout, features, amenities, furniture, and other important details that inform their booking decision.

Although creating a virtual tour takes time and effort (which can be challenging for a busy host), it is worth investing in to include it in your Airbnb marketing strategy. If done right, a virtual tour will present your rental space in its best light, making it more appealing to guests, and help your get more bookings.

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Airbnb 3D Tour: How to Create It and What to Include

The easiest way to get an immersive 360° virtual panoramic tour is to hire a professional service. Then a professional photographer with specialized skills and experience will create your virtual tour for you, and you will be more likely to have the most realistic representation possible.

If you’re creative and have strong production skills, you can also create the virtual tour yourself. But you’ll need good-quality filming and editing equipment to give travelers a true-to-life preview of what they’ll experience during their stay.

Suppose you are planning to upload your virtual tour to several different platforms. In that case, it’s essential to ensure that it contains all relevant information to convince viewers to book your rental. You should include a property description with primary location, size, and type information.

You need to show each room to help travelers explore the entire home and get a sense of the layout. The good idea is to show off some of your house’s exterior, too, especially if you have a swimming pool or a beautiful garden.

Airbnb currently doesn’t support embedding virtual tours into your listing. You’ll have to upload your virtual tour elsewhere and direct your visitors there. You can add a URL of that site in the description, which travelers can copy and paste into their browser, or a QR Code in the image gallery that they can scan.

If you hire a third-party company to create your virtual tour, they can often host the tour on their servers. And if you decide to create a video tour yourself, you’ll have to find a place for the tour online. For example, you can include your virtual tour on your direct booking website.

If you don’t have your website yet, maybe it’s time to build one and grow your short-term rental brand. You don’t need any coding skills to do that. With Hospitable, you can have the fully functional direct booking website up and running within minutes.

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Our system will ensure your calendars stay synced with OTAs, and your guests get the best experience.

Airbnb Video Tour

Is hiring a professional photographer or purchasing your own equipment too pricey? Then you may start by creating a video tour to market your property. You can film a simple Airbnb video tour using your smartphone in the meantime and invest in creating a professional virtual tour later.

Do your best to tell a story that appeals to your potential guests. You should also ensure that your video shows off your entire rental property, including outdoor areas, to avoid surprises after check-in. Highlight your most unique amenities that could convince travelers to choose your listing as a place to stay.

Currently, you can’t add a video to your Airbnb listing because the platform doesn’t have such a function. But you can upload the video tour to third-party platforms, such as YouTube or Vimeo, and include a link in your listing description using a URL shortener. A safer approach is to tell the name of the video on YouTube without giving a link. Your potential guest would have to look up the video themselves, but you shouldn’t be questioned by Airbnb moderators, who usually don’t get excited when seeing hyperlinks to third-party websites.

Final Thought

An Airbnb virtual tour will allow your guests to experience your rental property as if they were really there and helps build trust. By adding it to your Airbnb listing, you can give travelers an opportunity to virtually walk through your home before booking. That helps travelers make more informed booking decisions, ensures that their expectations will be met, and leads to better reviews from happy guests.

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