Food Tourism for Vacation Rentals

Ten years ago I recorded a video for vacation rental owners called How To Advertise A Vacation Rental Property Deliciously. The argument was simple and, at the time, a little strange: there is a term called food tourism, it has become huge, and almost nobody in this industry is using it.

I am writing this page because the argument aged extremely well, and because the gap I pointed at then is still open now. Travelers have spent a decade getting more food-driven, not less. Vacation rental marketing has barely moved. Scroll a hundred listings tonight and count how many contain a single photograph of something you would want to eat.

01I called this in 2016 — then and now

I want to put the receipts side by side, because the point of this section is not that I was clever. The point is that the direction of travel has been obvious for fifteen years and the industry keeps under-reacting to it.

When I made the video, the number I cited came out of Skift's 2015 report The Rise of Food Tourism, which drew on the 2013 American Culinary Traveler Report from Mandala Research: the share of US leisure travelers who travel to learn about and enjoy unique dining experiences grew from 40% to 51% between 2006 and 2013. In the same body of research, US tourism spending on food services topped roughly $201 billion in 2012 — nearly a quarter of all travel income.

A quarter of all travel money going into food, and a majority of leisure travelers organizing part of their trip around eating. That was a decade ago. Here is where it landed.

Read the right-hand column again, slowly. Half of travelers are booking the restaurant before the flight. The dinner is being decided before the transport. Which means for a meaningful slice of your market, the food decision comes before the property decision — and the property that shows up inside the food conversation gets seen first.

This is the same pattern I have watched play out with every trend that eventually reshapes this business: it is visible in the data years before it is visible in the marketing. The owners who move on it early are not taking a risk. They are just reading.

02We buy with our eyes, and food is the shortcut

The line I have repeated for twenty years is that we buy with our eyes — and we tell the story through the images. That is the whole basis of my argument about vacation rental photography: nobody reads their way into a booking, they feel their way into one.

We buy with our eyes — and we tell the story through the images.

What I call sensual marketing appeal is simply marketing that speaks to the senses instead of the spec sheet. Square footage is information. A bowl of local mussels on a terrace table at seven in the evening is a sensation. One gets processed, the other gets felt — and feeling is what moves people.

Food is the fastest sensory shortcut that exists in a photograph. You cannot photograph a smell. You cannot photograph the temperature of the air. But a well-shot plate does something close: people taste it a little bit in their mouths. That reaction happens before language, which is exactly why it works on a scrolling traveler who has not read a word of your listing yet.

Food also does something photography of an empty room can never do — it shows the property being lived in. An unoccupied kitchen is a fact. A kitchen with a meal on the counter and a bottle open is a vacation. Same room, entirely different argument.

03Be specific, not generic: the po'boy rule

Here is where most food marketing in this industry dies. "Great restaurants nearby." "Wonderful local cuisine." "Something for every palate." Those sentences are not recommendations. They are throat-clearing, and travelers skim straight past them because they carry no information and no personality.

I went to New Orleans partly to have jambalaya and a po'boy — to get in touch with the culture through the food. That is not a generic statement. It is a specific dish, in a specific place, that shaped the decision to go. That is how food actually works on a traveler: not "the dining is excellent," but a po'boy.

Every destination has these. The Cuban sandwich. The scallops off the boat. The lobster roll from the shack with eleven parking spaces. The tacos from the truck that only shows up on Thursday. Those are the details that make a traveler picture themselves in your destination instead of a destination.

Your job here is to be the expert who leads guests to the best places. That is a genuine competitive advantage over any listing anywhere, because the platform cannot supply it and a distant owner usually will not bother. It is also the same instinct behind everything on storytelling and brand building: specificity is credibility.

04Side one: put food in your photos

This came out of an expert-panel makeover I did years ago with other people in the industry, and it has stuck with me since: presenting food in listing photography is something almost no one is doing. It is one of the largest unclaimed opportunities in the whole gallery.

Think about what a normal listing gallery contains. Empty living room. Empty bedroom. Empty bathroom. Empty terrace with four unoccupied chairs. It reads like a real estate inspection, and it is being shown to somebody who is trying to imagine a holiday.

One owner I featured on that video had done it properly — a property in Spain with fresh fish on a brick barbecue out on the terrace. It is a photograph of dinner, and it sells the terrace ten times harder than a photograph of the terrace does. You are not looking at outdoor furniture any more. You are looking at your own Thursday night.

The tactics are not complicated:

• Shoot the grill in use, not the grill sitting cold in a corner.
• Set the outdoor table properly for one shot — plates, glasses, food, the view behind it.
• Put a real breakfast on the kitchen island: local bread, local fruit, coffee.
• Shoot the walk — the market, the bakery, the coffee place five minutes away.
• Shoot at golden hour where you can, and stay honest in the edit: enhance reality, do not invent it.

That last point is not decoration. It is the same honesty rule I set out in the photography pillar, and it applies harder to food because food is so easy to over-promise. If the barbecue is small, shoot the small barbecue. If the restaurant is a twenty-minute drive, say twenty minutes. The goal is a guest who arrives and thinks this is exactly what I paid for.

05Food in your content, your site and your social

Photography is where food enters the listing. Content is where it earns you traffic.

A "top ten places to eat" post about your town is one of the easiest genuinely useful pages a rental business can publish, and it does three jobs at once. It answers a question every one of your guests is already typing into a search box. It demonstrates local expertise better than any "about us" page. And it gives you something to link to from your confirmation emails, your guest book and your social — content with a life beyond the week it was published. That is the whole argument of content marketing for vacation rentals, applied to the subject travelers care most about.

Social is where food compounds. A plate needs no caption to work, it stops a scroll in a fraction of a second, and — this is the part owners underrate — guests post it for you without being asked. Nobody photographs a well-made bed. Everybody photographs dinner. Which means the restaurant you recommended on Tuesday is doing unpaid marketing for your property on Wednesday. All the mechanics of turning that into a system live in the social media pillar; food is simply the most reliable fuel to put through it.

And put it on your own site, not only on a platform. Food content on a page you own works for you permanently — in search, in AI answers, and in the mind of a traveler who is still three months out from booking anything.

06Side two: food in packages

The second half of the argument is the commercial one, and it is where food quietly beats almost every other add-on you could offer.

Perceived value is what a guest believes they are getting for the price. Attraction tickets buy perceived value expensively — theme park admission for a family is a serious cost against a nightly rate. Dining buys it cheaply. A welcome dinner, a restaurant credit, a partner discount at the place two streets over: modest cost to you, immediately understood by the guest, and used on the first night while they are still forming an opinion of the whole trip.

When I first made this argument, the mechanism I demonstrated was a third-party tool for buying discounted restaurant certificates and bundling them into a stay. The specific tool matters much less than the move, and the modern version is better anyway: go and talk to the restaurants near your property. Agree a guest offer. Put their name in your welcome materials, and let them put yours behind their counter.

• Welcome-night dinner. The most valuable meal to remove friction from — arrival day, everyone is tired, nobody wants to cook or research.
• Partner perks. A standing discount at three or four local places for your guests, arranged directly. Costs you nothing but the conversation.
• Seasonal food packages. A harvest weekend, a seafood season, a festival week — built around what is actually happening locally.
• Grocery or market pre-stock. Local produce waiting in the kitchen instead of an empty fridge and a supermarket run.

Every one of those is a reason to book direct. That is the strategic value: a perk you negotiated belongs to you, not to a platform, so it can only be honoured on your own site. It is a tangible answer to "why should I book here instead of there" that does not involve discounting your rate — which is the position everything in the vacation rental marketing playbook is built to get you into.

07The curated local restaurant guide

I wrote about this back in 2012 and I would not change much, other than the software.

A local restaurant guide is not a list of every place within five miles. It is a handpicked best-of, and the craft is in the spread. Include the hole-in-the-wall that does the best bacon burger in town. Include the best pizza. Include several cuisines. Include the cheap and cheerful alongside the special occasion, because your guests are not all the same person and neither are their budgets.

The mistake owners make is curating to their own palate. You are not building a list of your favourite restaurants; you are building a list that fits the guest's taste. A family of five with two picky kids and a couple celebrating an anniversary need entirely different answers, and a good guide gives both without either having to guess.

Two practical notes. Keep it current — a guide recommending a restaurant that closed last spring reads as neglect. And write it in your own voice, with a line on why each place is on the list and what to order there. "Best pizza in town" is fine. "Get the clam pie, sit at the bar, they stop serving at nine" is the version a guest screenshots.

08The proof: Blue Water Cove and the expert makeover

Two pieces of real work sit behind this page.

The first is Blue Water Cove on Singer Island. We went on location and shot the experience rather than the unit — and food was a substantial part of that, including a dedicated shoot around the waterfront restaurants and the local dining scene. That was a deliberate decision. A traveler evaluating a beach property is not only asking what the bedroom looks like; they are asking what Friday night looks like. Photographing the dining scene answers a question the property photos cannot.

The second is the expert-panel makeover I took part in with Tyann Marcink and Mercedes Brennan. That is where the food-in-photos observation came from — reviewing real listings with other practitioners and noticing the same absence in gallery after gallery. Tyann is known in the industry as the Queen of Guest Experience, and the panel format is exactly why the insight was worth keeping: several sets of experienced eyes on the same listing, all landing on the thing that was missing.

Both of those are on the record and both are part of the pattern in our track record: the properties that market the experience outperform the properties that market the square footage.

09Bring your local cuisine into the presentation

So here is the whole thing in one paragraph. Food tourism is real, it is large, and it has been growing steadily for twenty years while vacation rental marketing has mostly ignored it. It costs you almost nothing to act on: a few photographs with food in them, a genuinely useful guide to eating in your town, a conversation with the restaurant down the street, and the discipline to name the actual dish instead of gesturing at "great local dining."

Do that and you stop being a property with a kitchen. You become the local expert who happens to have somewhere for people to sleep — and that is a much harder business to compete with.