I don’t know how it is called in other areas.
I replaced all my flooring with this stuf.
Looks good, feels good, durable and low maintenance. For private use there are other criteria and better choices, but for STR this is the best there is.
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Why would you want to make a space look larger than it is? That is false advertising.
Successful marketing isn’t about luring people in with misleading representation. It’s about identifying your target markets, and playing up the features you offer that would appeal to them.
Real estate is not the same as an str. When people come to view a place to buy, they don’t have anything to lose, except their time. If they feel they were misled by the photos, they can just leave and cross it off their list.
Guests pay for their bookings up front. If they arrive and realize they were misled by the photos, they either have to live with it, or cancel.
I just don’t understand the concept of “marketing” falsely.
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It’s not “false” to use a wide angle lens that captures a large portion of a room. As I write this, I can see 180 degrees to the lamp on my left, and the refrigerator 180 degrees to my right. A photo that shows, say, a 120 field of view is not any more “accurate” to reality than a wide angle lens. It’s also a heck of a lot more convenient, as you can get a better sense of the layout of a space.
I’m not suggesting some kind of ridiculous gimmicks, which I suppose some amateur photographer might produce. But in the dozen professional photograph shoots that I’ve hired out to real estate folks, I’ve never had one that did anything like that. They’ve all portrayed the space in a positive, ‘roomy’ way.
I suppose I could under-promise and over-deliver, but our results seem to indicate nobody has a problem with real-estate style photography. We have 99% occupancy and as mentioned, never once had someone complain that it’s somehow false represented.
If you provide photos that make your place look tiny compared to others, you’re going to lose a bunch of business. Pretty simple.
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Gotcha. In our neck of the woods (Oregon, USA) that stuff you show I think would be considered a “glue down luxury vinyl plank”. It’s not as commonly used as the more rigid type, which doesn’t require any adhesive and is supposed to be installed “floating”. I think the glue-down stuff is used on concrete slab floors, whereas the floating LVP is used on wood subfloors.
And yes, it is relatively bombproof, assuming it’s decent quality. You can buy some junk but most of the moderate (or better) quality stuff is waterproof, very difficult to scratch, pretty inexpensive and easy to install (kneepads!). I’d say the only thing tougher would be stone/slate/tile, but the cost of these is way higher (and you can certainly crack tile).
If your photos work for you in terms of occupancy and price targets, more power to you.
I once asked a real estate friend why listing photos are so obviously tweaked – wide angles, no photo of the basement maybe due to creepy or leaky basement, weird angle outside shot possible indicator of something ugly next door, no photo of stairs – could they be spiral death stairs. “Why waste your time and my time as a prospective buyer by not showing everything accurately?” He said , “You don’t understand, the point is to get you into the house. The positives might make the sale even when you see the negatives, or you may refer someone.”
I would think photos of an STR should be different because they don’t serve that purpose – they are a representation of the experience you will have lodging there. So I would err on the side of accuracy.
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Totally off-topic - realtors show bathroom photographs with the toilet lid and seat up. STR hosts tend to show the toilet seat and lid down. I’ve no idea why.
I know a realtor who never, ever shows the toilet at all.
All very strange. 
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I don’t know why, either, but toilet seat up in photos looks tacky and unappealing to me. And I’ve noticed that the Airbnb photos with toilet seat up almost always have male hosts. 
My ex thought that women didn’t like guys leaving the toilet seat up at home because they didn’t like the way it looked. I had to explain to him that we don’t like it left up because in the middle of the night, when we get up to use the bathroom half asleep, and go to sit down, we fall in the toilet. And we don’t like having to touch the toilet seat with their urine spray all over it, to lower it.
There’s a realtor in my town who never includes kitchen photos because he never cooks and apparently doesn’t think anyone else wants to see the kitchen.
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Typical! That explains it. 
I’ve sometimes wondered whether (some) men just don’t realise that toilet seats and lids actually have hinges and can move.
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Or they might think that a toilet lid is just some extraneous thing that’s just there so the toilet seat doesn’t get damaged in transit. Kinda like the lampshades that have cellophane over them that you are meant to remove when you get it home. 
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I tend to leave that on because it is a lot easier to dust and clean that than the linen shade.
Thanks for an off-topic and fond memory. My granny gave me a book with punch-out paper animals when I was bitty and staying with her for a few days. I carefully punched out all the birds and tucked them under the lamp cellophane so they could be “flying” in her living room. She had a devil of a time picking them out, and I was forbidden from installing any more birds on the lamp.
P.S. The plastic coating is just starting to peel off the new fridge I bought for my 2nd home. I just couldn’t be bothered.
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