What Guests Actually Want

[Felix760]

Most guests booking short stays are business travellers, diaspora visitors, and event attendees. Mention proximity to the key areas, entertaining centers and major roads in your listing description. Those are their search terms.

[Fiona256]

You are making assumptions again. Short stay guests are not necessarily any of the kinds you say. It depends on your location.

In my locations, short stay guests are usually those on an Instagram/TikTok/social media show-off tour where they want selfies of themselves in all sort of scenic places or apparently challenging poses while taking no interest in the culture and history of the place they've come to.

I see tourists walking past wonderful historic and fascinating places and all they do is take a photo of themselves with this in the background. They don't want to absorb, understand and learn from it.

Vanity and vacuousness is prevalent. Learning from travel and new experiences is sadly all too absent.

[Felix760]

@Fiona256 , You have hit on a brilliant and incredibly raw truth! I appreciate you checking my assumptions location and target demographic change everything, and you're spot on about this shift.

The modern Social Media guest is a massive reality in global tourism today. Vanity and aesthetic curation have largely replaced traditional exploration for a huge segment of travelers. They aren't buying a cultural education; they are buying an online identity. But from a pure property management and business perspective, that vacuousness is actually an incredibly high yielding goldmine if you lean into it. 

If your location naturally attracts the Instagram/TikTok crowd, the strategy shifts from selling local history to selling The Shot. Experienced hosts in these zones thrive by designing their spaces specifically to feed that demand. Staging Corners, Lighting Optimization and Visual Hooks in the Title.

It might feel superficial compared to traditional travel, but as hosts, our job is to capture the market as it is, not as we wish it would be. If a guest wants to pay premium rates just to take a selfie on your balcony and leave a 5-star review, that is a massive operational win.

You've identified an amazing niche have you tried tweaking your decor or photo layout to deliberately capture that high paying aesthetic crowd?

[Helen3]

Why would you assume that @Felix760 

Can you link to the research you are quoting that shows that most Airbnb visitors fall into these categories?