In search results, your listing is one thumbnail and a price. That is the entire first impression. A guest scrolling a grid of twenty properties is not reading your description, your house rules, or your review count. They are looking at one image and deciding whether to tap.
So it is worth knowing that on most listings right now, you are not the one choosing what that image leads into. Airbnb's photo tour sorts your photos into rooms and presents them as a guided walkthrough. You control the order of your first five photos. Everything after that follows Airbnb's room-by-room layout, which is the same layout running on every competing listing in your market.
You can turn it off. It takes about ten minutes per door, it has to be done inside Airbnb, and there are real trade-offs worth understanding before you do it. Here is the whole picture.
The setting that matters, and the one that doesn't
Airbnb has been adding AI to listings steadily. In the 2026 Summer Release on May 20, it introduced AI review highlights, where AI reads your reviews and surfaces the highlights at the top of your page. Airbnb's help center also confirms that personalization decides which amenities each guest sees first: someone searching for a work trip may see your desk, a family may see your pool.
Hosts often go hunting through account settings for a master switch. There is one documented AI setting, "Help improve AI-powered features," under Account settings, then Privacy. Turning it off stops Airbnb from training on your data. It changes nothing about what a guest sees on your listing.
The photo tour is the setting with actual commercial consequences, and it is not in privacy settings. It lives on the listing itself.
Why "tidy" is the problem
The photo tour looks organized. Living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, in order, labelled. That is exactly the issue. Organized the same way as everyone else is another word for invisible.
Think about what your photo order is supposed to do. A guest who taps into your listing is deciding in the next few seconds whether this is the place. The strongest argument for your property is rarely the second bedroom. It might be the lake fifty feet off your deck, the hot tub, the view from the kitchen window at sunset. Under the photo tour, those get filed into whatever room they belong to and shown in standard sequence.
One thing that catches a lot of growing operators: your PMS cannot switch the tour off. The setting lives inside Airbnb, and Hostaway says as much in its own support docs. We have watched a photo order set carefully in Hostaway show up in a completely different sequence on the live Airbnb listing, for exactly this reason. If you have been reordering photos in your PMS and wondering why it never seems to stick, this is why.
The seven steps
Work in Airbnb directly, not through your channel manager. Go to Listings, choose the listing, then Photo tour.
- Move every photo into "Additional photos," with one exception.
- Leave bedroom and bathroom photos in their rooms, so your bedroom count and the "Where you'll sleep" section still display correctly.
- Leave one room with no photos in it, then delete the other empty rooms.
- Open "All photos" and drag them into the order you want, or use "Make cover photo."
- Add a caption to each photo, since the room labels are gone now.
- Save, then open the listing in a logged-out browser and confirm you see a plain grid instead of a guided tour.
- Repeat for the rest of your portfolio.
The mechanism is simple: the tour only runs when every room has photos in it. One empty room keeps it switched off.
What you give up
This is a trade, not a free upgrade, and you should go in knowing the cost.
You lose the room-by-room amenity tags, the small labels that tell a guest which room has the coffee maker or the ensuite. Captions are your replacement, so write them. After some time has passed, Airbnb may show a "create a photo tour" prompt in place of your photos. And every time you add new photos down the road, expect to walk the steps again. On a single owner-occupied unit that is a minor annoyance. Across thirty doors it is a recurring task, so put it in your listing-audit checklist rather than trusting yourself to remember.
Choosing the five that do the work
Airbnb's help center is clear that your first five photos matter most, because they are the ones shown up front. Treat all five as if any one of them could be the lead image.
The rule we use before touching anything: search your own market first. Pull up the listings a guest would see next to yours and look at their hero shots. If eleven of them open on the same staged living room with a grey sectional, your grey sectional is not going to win the tap. Choose the photo that looks unlike the grid around it.
From there:
- Keep bathrooms and large TVs out of the top five. Neither one makes a guest want to be there.
- A local shot can outperform a mediocre interior. The beach at the end of the street, the brewery two blocks over, the trailhead. You are selling the trip, not just the building.
- Lead with the amenity people actually book you for. A dedicated workspace, a pool, a view. If you are unsure which amenity that is, that question is worth answering properly, and it is the same thinking behind choosing amenities in the first place.
- Clean up your amenities list, because personalization pulls from it. Stale or inaccurate amenities now shape what a guest is shown.
Everything else still lives in the listing. Guests who are interested will keep scrolling.
The counter-argument, taken seriously
There is data pointing the other way and it deserves an honest look. Rankbreeze studied 478 listings and found that listings with photo tours averaged 57.9% occupancy against 51.2% for those without.
That gap is real, and I would not wave it off. I would read it carefully. It is an average across hosts who, for the most part, never made a deliberate choice about their photo order at all. Turning the tour off and leaving a random sequence behind is worse than leaving it on. Turning it off and leading with five photos chosen against your actual competition is a different experiment entirely.
Which means: do not take this on faith, including from me. Note the date you make the change, then watch your views-to-booking conversion and your booking pace over the following weeks. If it goes the wrong way, the setting is reversible.
Check it the way a guest sees it
Your host dashboard is not the guest view. Verify from outside the building.
- Search your own market in a logged-out or incognito window and look at your listing in the grid, not on its own page.
- Search again from a friend's account and compare which cover photo each of you is shown.
- Screenshot the results with the date visible. If you ever need to raise something with Airbnb support, you will want it.
- Read your AI review highlights. They are generated from your reviews, and if one is inaccurate, contact support with the screenshot.
One more confirmed rule worth filing away: Airbnb does not accept AI-generated content as evidence in damage claims. Keep real photos, timestamped, for anything you might need to claim on.
If you are buying your next property
For investors, this belongs in your launch checklist, not your maintenance list. The photo plan should be decided before the photographer arrives: which single image leads, which four follow, what the market around you already looks like. Photography is one of the cheapest levers on a new door and one of the few you can fully control in the first ninety days, while reviews are still thin and your ranking has not been established.
It is the same discipline as screening the deal itself. Decide deliberately, then measure.
The short version
Airbnb's AI is going to keep reading more of your listing, and most of that is out of your hands. The order of your photos is not. Switch the photo tour off, choose five images that look nothing like the listings beside you, add captions, and go look at your own listing the way a guest does.
If you would like a second set of eyes on your listing before you change anything, book a strategy call and we will go through the photo order with you.
This article was inspired by Episode 359 of the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast.