Creating the Gold Standard of About Us Pages

A note before we start: I've been building vacation rental brands from scratch since 2005, and if there's one page I've watched hosts underestimate for twenty years straight, it's this one. Let's fix that permanently.

Part 1 · The stakesThe page you're neglecting is the one that books

Here's the mistake almost everyone makes: they treat the About Us page as an afterthought — a formality, a place to list when the business was founded. But think about what your guest is actually doing when they click it. They've seen the photos, they've seen the price, and now they want to know one thing before they hand over their credit card and their family's vacation: can I trust these people?

That's not a small question. It's the whole game. Trust is the precondition for nearly every booking that isn't won purely on price — and winning on price is a race to the bottom you don't want to run. The About Us page is the one place on your entire site where you get to answer "can I trust you?" on purpose, in your own words, before the stay begins. Roughly half of visitors go looking for it, and a strong majority won't buy from a brand they don't yet trust. Squander that page and you've left your most persuadable visitor holding nothing.

A brand is not what you think it is — it's what your guests feel it is.

That's the one idea to hold onto — and it's exactly why the About Us page matters, because this is the page where that feeling gets shaped on purpose. I won't re-litigate what branding is here; I've spelled that out in full in our guide to creating a vacation rental brand. This guide assumes you've done that work — or will — and answers the next question: once you know who you are, how do you put it on the page that turns a stranger into a booking?

Part 2 · The templateThe Trust Arc: nine beats that book

Here is the gold standard, spelled out beat by beat. You can write these as distinct sections with headers, or weave them into one flowing narrative — both work, as long as every beat is present and they build in this order. The order matters: each beat earns the right to the next.

That's the whole template. Nine beats, in order, each earning the next. Walk a stranger through all nine and you haven't written an About page — you've written a reason to book.

Part 3 · The advanced moveWrite to repel, not just attract

Here's the move almost every host is too timid to make, and it's the one that separates a good About page from a gold-standard one: a great brand attracts your ideal guest and repels the wrong one — deliberately.

An About page written to offend no one connects with no one. When you try to appeal to everybody, you become the plain white cereal box on the bottom shelf — generic, forgettable, and chosen only when it's cheapest. But when you name exactly who your place is for — and gently signal who it isn't — the right guest feels a jolt of recognition. This was written for me. That feeling is what books.

So picture your dream guest and write straight at them. And picture the guest you never want to book again — the one who treats your home like a hotel they can trash — and let your page quietly wave them off toward someone else's listing. Repelling the wrong guest isn't rude. It's how you protect the experience for the right one.

Part 4 · The shortcutThe engine behind the page

Everything above is drawn from a larger framework we built after watching thousands of hosts freeze at the blank page. It's a 12-step brand-messaging system — values, mission, origin story, voice, points of difference, and the rest of the raw material every one of these nine beats is made from. Nail those twelve, and your About page practically writes itself, because you're no longer inventing your brand on the fly — you're just telling the truth you've already worked out.

That's the real secret here. The reason most About pages are weak isn't bad writing. It's that the host never did the branding work underneath, so there's nothing true to say. Do the work first — brand before marketing — and the words come easy.

And here's where it's going: we're rebuilding that 12-step engine as a guided conversation. Instead of staring at blanks, you'll answer a few questions — "how did you get into this?", "what makes your place different?" — and it drafts your brand message and your About page copy from your own answers. The blank page was always the enemy. We're removing it.