Is professional hotel photography worth it?

Yes, for most hotels, B&Bs, agriturismi (farm stays), and vacation rentals in Italy that take bookings online, professional hotel photography is worth it. It pays because it moves three numbers you can check: how many guests click on your property in search results, how many of them book, and the rate they accept without asking for a discount.

Guests can’t touch the sheets, taste the breakfast, or try the shower before they pay. They decide on what they see on a screen, usually a phone. Until check-in, your photos are your property.

Do professional photos increase bookings?

They do, and there is real data on it. A study published in the journal Management Science in 2022 followed 7,423 Airbnb properties over 16 months. Properties with photos taken by Airbnb’s photographers had 8.98% higher occupancy than properties with photos taken by the host. The researchers also measured what set the professional photos apart: composition, color, and how clearly the subject stood out from the background.

It’s one study, on Airbnb rather than hotels, so read 8.98% as a direction, not a promise. Guests choose the same way on Booking.com, Vrbo, and Google: photos first. And think of good photos as a hygiene factor: nobody books you because your photos are sharp, but plenty of guests skip you because they aren’t.

Where the return comes from

A shoot pays back in four ways.

More bookings from the same visits

Once a guest opens your page, the gallery does the selling. With no way to check the place in person, guests look for clues. Photos of a bright room, a breakfast table set for two, and the terrace at the right hour make them expect care everywhere. A dark, crooked phone photo doesn’t tell them you saved on a photographer. It tells them nobody takes care of the place, and they extend that to the sheets, the cleaning, and the welcome. Psychologists call this the halo effect.

A higher rate and fewer discount requests

Picture two bottles of the same wine. One has a clean, well-printed label. The other has a crooked label with faded colors. Which one would you pay more for?

Guests read your photos the same way. When the photos don’t show the value, price is the only thing left to compare: guests assume there’s room to negotiate, they ask for discounts, and they weigh you against the cheapest place nearby. Photos that show the value let you hold your rate, and they attract guests who come for the experience, not for the lowest price.

One shoot for every channel

The same photos work on your website, where they push direct bookings, and on your Google Business Profile, Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo, social media, newsletters, and ads. That’s why photos come first in the small hotel marketing strategy I recommend: the website, Google, social media, and ads all reuse them. Plan the shoot with those channels in mind, and make sure your usage rights cover all of them.

Hotel photography ROI: do the math for your property

You don’t need a study to decide. You need your own numbers. Here is a simple example. The figures are an illustration, not a forecast, so swap in yours:

Your average rate is €100 a night.
With better photos, you charge €15 more and sell the same number of nights.
For one room sold 100 nights a year, that’s €1,500 more. At 200 nights, it’s €3,000.

Now take what a shoot would cost you (my guide to hotel photography pricing in Italy has typical ranges) and divide it by the extra €15. The result is the number of nights you need to sell at the higher rate to get your money back.

This counts only the higher rate. It leaves out the extra bookings from more clicks, the direct bookings your website brings in, and the discounts you stop giving. And the photos keep working until you renovate or change the rooms.

Are your photos costing you bookings?

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Signs your photos are costing you money

Do any of these sound familiar?

Guests often ask for a discount.
You get plenty of inquiries, but few turn into bookings.
Your rates are lower than those of similar places nearby.
Guests arrive and say, “It’s so much nicer than the photos.”
You struggle to fill rooms in spring and fall.
You often feel you have to justify your prices.

If two or more apply, your photos are probably holding your rates down.

Look again at the fourth one. “Nicer than the photos” sounds like a compliment. In fact, it’s the most expensive thing a guest can say. It means you’re selling your property for less than it’s worth, and the guests who would have paid more never booked, because they stopped at the first photo.

“My rooms are full every summer anyway”

I hear this from a lot of owners, and in Tuscany it’s often true: in July and August, plenty of places fill up whatever their photos look like. But a full summer doesn’t tell you three things:

At what rate. If you’re full months ahead, you could probably have charged more.
With which guests. Weak photos attract guests who shop on price. They’re more likely to ask for discounts and leave lukewarm reviews, which makes it harder to raise your rates next year.
For how many months. Before and after the summer peak, photos decide who gets the booking.

I saw this myself on a vacation in the Dolomites. I stopped at a well-known mountain pass: a large parking lot and two hotels facing each other. The first had bright, recent photos. The second had old, poorly taken ones. Out of professional curiosity, I stayed two nights in each. Both were 3-star hotels with almost the same services, and in person I found no real difference: similar rooms, similar food, similar welcome.

It was September 1, still high season up there. The first hotel was always full. The second still had rooms available at short notice. Same mountain, same price, same real quality. What separated them was how each one looked online.

Is it worth it for an Airbnb or a vacation rental?

Usually even more than for a hotel. A vacation rental has no lobby, no reception, and no staff to make a first impression: the listing does all of that. Guests compare many homes on Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com, and they judge each one by its cover photo. The study above was run on Airbnb listings, so it speaks directly to this situation.

If you list the same villa or holiday rental on several sites, one good set of photos serves all of them. What changes from site to site is the cover and the order: see Airbnb photos that get bookings and Booking.com photos that get bookings.

Can’t I just use my phone?

A phone is fine for a quick update or a social media post. For your main photos, the problem is rarely the camera. It’s light, angles, and consistency across the whole set. The typical do-it-yourself result: different light in every room, colors that shift from photo to photo, cut-off ceilings, reflections in mirrors, one bed in shadow and the next one washed out by the window.

What you pay a photographer for:

The right tools: wide lenses for small rooms, a tripod, and control of bright windows.
Timing: rooms in mid-morning and the terrace at sunset, not whenever there’s a free hour.
Context: aerial shots where the setting sells the stay, like an agriturismo in the hills.
Consistent editing: one color palette, so the whole set looks like one place.
A plan: which photo becomes the cover, which ones go on the website, which on social media.

When professional hotel photography is not worth it

A new shoot is not always the right move. Wait, or spend the money elsewhere, if:

Your photos are recent, professional, and still match the property. Change the cover and the order first. That costs nothing.
You’re about to renovate. Shoot after the work, not before.
The photos would sit in a folder. If they won’t be on Booking.com, Airbnb, your website, and Google within a couple of weeks, they can’t earn their cost back.
You’re full all year, at the rate you want, with the guests you want. Then the return is small, and a shoot can wait.

How to check that it worked

Write down your numbers before the new photos go online. Here is where to find them:

Booking.com: in the Extranet, open Analytics and then the Ranking dashboard. It shows search results views, click-through rate, property page views, and conversion.
Airbnb: go to Insights, then Performance, then Conversion. It shows how often guests saw your listing in search, clicked through to it, and booked. If you don’t see the Performance tab, turn on Airbnb’s professional hosting tools first.
Your own website: inquiries and direct bookings per month.

Then compare the months after the new photos with the same months a year earlier, so the season doesn’t fool you. And change one thing at a time: put the new photos online first and raise your rates a few weeks later, or you won’t know which change did the work.

Where to start

Open your own listing on your phone, the way a guest who doesn’t know you would. Look at the cover for three seconds. Does it make you want to see more?

If you’d like a second opinion, I can help. I photograph hotels, B&Bs, agriturismi, and vacation rentals in Tuscany and across Italy, and I plan every shoot around where the photos will be used. Here is how I work with hospitality businesses.

Is professional hotel photography worth it? Where the return comes from