One of the most important parts of marketing your vacation rental is writing a great vacation rental description. Your description, along with your pricing and listing photos, are the key elements of a solid vacation rental listing. Here are some tips for writing a great vacation rental description.
Gear your Vacation Rental Description Toward your Audience
You are not writing a great vacation rental description for yourself or for the pure joy of writing. You are writing for your audience, which are prospective renters. Put yourselves in the shoes of someone that has never been in your vacation rental before and ask yourself what would you want to know before renting.
Guests will want to know useful information such as what size beds are in which bedrooms, in addition to what makes your vacation rental so great. It’s OK to have some marketing fluff in your description. You should be proud of your vacation rental! Just make sure to include the practical information that anyone who has never set foot in your house would need to know.
Highlight your Vacation Rental’s Best Attributes
The most marketable features of your vacation rental should be emphasized early and prominently when writing a great vacation rental description.
Your home may have a beautiful private swimming pool or a beachfront view. Don’t wait till the last few sentences of your description to describe these features to your potential guest. Any features you feel are strong selling points should be mentioned right away.
Be Truthful
Being truthful when advertising your home on a vacation rental listing site should go without saying, but sometimes owners omit certain facts about their property without realizing.
Let’s say your 3 bedroom urban apartment only has one parking space and everyone else has to use a pay parking lot nearby. Be upfront with your guests and include some verbiage addressing this in your vacation rental description. It has been my experience that guests can be incredibly understanding of a property’s shortcomings, as long as they are properly informed before booking. They can also be incredibly upset if they feel they have been misled.
The potential vacation rental guest looking at your property description will appreciate your honesty. Being truthful will also properly set guest expectations and help you avoid negative reviews.
Use an Attention Grabbing Headline
Your headline is one of the first things guests will see. They probably wont even bother to read your description if your headline does not grab their attention. Consider these two examples of real headlines from vacation rental listings I have seen on Homeaway.
Cute house for rent near the beach
Spacious and newly remodeled family friendly home just steps from the beach
Obviously the second example is much more attention grabbing. The proper use of adjectives such as “spacious” can make your headline stand out. “Just steps from the beach” is much more powerful that simply saying it is near the beach. Your potential guest will envision walking out to the beach from your vacation rental and hopefully book it.
Be Informative Yet Concise
You will want to fully describe the important features of your vacation rental, along with any other facts that you feel guests should know, but be careful of being too wordy.
Readers tend to scan content quickly and look for the most important or interesting content. Travelers in particular can have short attention spans. They may simply click to another vacation rental listing if they can not find what they are looking for quickly in your description.
Use short sentences and paragraphs and avoid rambling or including unnecessary details.
Be Specific and Avoid Too Many Vague Adjectives
Adjectives such as “spacious” or “cozy” can be great ways to describe a vacation rental. Just make sure you use them with care. Some adjectives can be vague and subject to interpretation. Spacious will mean an entirely different thing to someone from a large city as opposed to someone for a rural area.
Make sure you use specific language that adequately describes your home rather than too many vague adjectives that can weaken your message. Too many capitalized words and exclamation points can also take away from the effectiveness of your vacation rental description.
Use Active Voice
Writing in active, rather than passive voice, means getting to the point and speaking directly to your readers. Any good author, newspaper writer or blogger will tell you that your words convey more meaning when you use active voice. I even have a handy little program that analyzes my blog posts and tells me if I am using too many passive sentences!
“Our lovely balcony overlooking the ocean is always greatly appreciated by guests on days that are warm and sunny” is wordy and passive. Instead be direct with “You will love the views from our oceanfront balcony on a warm summer day.”
Write a Rough Draft
Writing a great vacation rental description is a little bit like writing a term paper or essay. It is a process. Draw up a rough draft. Then have someone else read it over and give you their take. Make any edits and check for proper spelling and punctuation. Then you are ready to post it!
