Hospitality

Flip Your Airbnb Local Guide Food Recommendations

Hint…the restaurant's name doesn't go first.

Sound Familiar?

Pesky Problem

Your local food recommendations aren’t intuitive to your Airbnb guests.

When you pick up your local guide and scan through the food recommendations, you can instantly picture each place. You can visualize the food, the environment, and the drive to get there. You could easily pick out which place you’re in the mood for right now. In short, each restaurant’s name means something to you, and so that’s how you’ve ordered your list for your Airbnb guests: by name.

But to your guests, the local restaurant names don’t mean a thing. They carry no shortcut associations. Yet the name is what you have in big, bold letters. The description might be buried in small text or, more often than not, there’s no description at all. Figuring out where to eat like this requires a whole lot of Google searching and a fair amount of frustration. (After all, folks are getting hungry.)

Let's Try This

Bite-Size Solution

Lead with a short description instead of the restaurant’s name.

Think about how you’d make a local food recommendation if you were actually talking to your guests. You’d start by asking what food they’re in the mood for, and then offer a few descriptions of different restaurants. Only after they’d pick the place, would you give your guests the name and address.

So to make your local recommendations truly useful, the restaurant’s name and description usually need to be swapped. Let me give you an example. We grew up in Kansas City, BBQ Capital of the World. (Or at least we like to think so.) Here are three popular BBQ restaurants in town.

Quick: pick one!

Jack Stack
Joe’s KC
Gates

Difficult, right? Now try this:

Upscale BBQ, reservations recommended → Jack Stack
Delicious BBQ in bustling, order-at-counter joint → Joe’s KC
Fast food style BBQ, 70+ year history → Gates

Much easier. Guests want to skim descriptions. That’s the little missing piece your guests need as they sift through your recommendations looking for the right fit. The name only matters at the end when they’re plugging the location into the GPS.

5 Minutes

Here's Your First Step

Write a four to six word description for each recommendation.

Time to write some short and sweet descriptions! Push yourself to limit these to just a few words each. These are your headlines, after all, and remember guests will be skimming quickly. Of course, you can always add a more detailed description beneath. But the goal for your punchy headline is to highlight the big picture elements that will help guests immediately say: “Yes please!” or “Nope, that’s not right. Keeping looking.”

Here’s a breakfast example:

Upscale brunch with big patio
Classic diner breakfast, local legend
Delicious bakery with limited seating

You get the idea. Now go write! And finally, if you want to guide indecisive guests to a great experience, call out your personal favorites too with a small asterisk or bolded text. That little concierge touch goes a long way.

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