Airbnb's Photo Tour: How We Turn It Off and Choose the Cover Photo on Every Listing

Airbnb decides more of your listing every year. It sorts your photos into rooms, pulls highlights out of your reviews, and chooses which amenities each guest sees first. Some of that helps. The part that costs owners money is the photo order, because the first thing a guest ever sees of your property is a thumbnail in a grid.

With the photo tour switched on, you control the order of your first five photos and nothing after that. Everything below follows Airbnb's room by room layout, the same layout every competing listing in your market uses. Our team manages 300+ properties across 50+ cities and 7 countries, so this was not one listing to fix, it was a pass across the whole portfolio. Here is what changed, the exact sequence we run to turn the tour off, and how we check what a guest actually sees.

What Airbnb Changed This Year

In the 2026 Summer Release on May 20, Airbnb added AI review highlights. The system reads a listing's reviews and lifts the highlights to the top of the page, so part of your sales pitch is now written by an algorithm reading your guests.

Airbnb's help center also confirms that personalization decides which amenities each guest sees first. Someone searching for a work trip can see your workspace at the top. A family can see the pool.

The photo tour runs on the same idea. Airbnb sorts your photos into rooms and presents them as a guided tour. It looks tidy. It also means your listing is structured exactly like everyone else's.

There is one AI setting Airbnb documents for hosts, "Help improve AI-powered features", under Account settings, Privacy. Turning it off stops Airbnb training on your data. It does not change what guests see on your listing, so do not expect it to solve the photo problem.

Why the Photo Tour Makes Every Listing Look the Same

Guests scroll. Your cover photo and the first few images decide whether they tap, and nothing else on the listing gets a vote until they do.

When the tour is on, the order below your first five photos is set by room: living room, kitchen, bedroom. Every host in your market gets the same sequence. In a search result the goal is to look different, not to match.

Your property management system cannot switch the tour off either. The setting lives inside Airbnb, and Hostaway confirms this in its own support docs. Our team hit this directly: the photo order set in Hostaway did not match what showed on Airbnb, because the tour was on. If you run a portfolio and assume your PMS owns photo order, check one listing against the live page before you assume the rest are fine.

The Sequence We Run on Every Listing

1. Open the listing in Airbnb directly, not your PMS. Go to Listings, pick the listing, then Photo tour.
2. Move every photo to "Additional photos", except bedrooms and bathrooms.
3. Keep bed and bath photos in their rooms, so the bedroom count and "Where you'll sleep" still show.
4. Leave one room with no photos, then delete the other empty rooms.
5. Tap "All photos" and drag them into your order, or use "Make cover photo".
6. Add captions to your photos, since the room labels are gone.
7. Check the listing in a logged out browser to confirm guests see a plain grid.

This works because the tour only runs when every room has photos. One empty room keeps it off.

There is a trade-off worth naming before you do this across a portfolio. You lose the room by room amenity tags. After a while, Airbnb may show a "create a photo tour" banner instead of your photos. And every time you add new photos down the road, expect to repeat these steps. At one property that is a ten minute job. At thirty it is a recurring task that belongs on somebody's checklist, which is exactly the kind of thing that quietly stops happening when nobody owns it.

How We Pick the First Five Photos

Airbnb's help center says the first five photos matter most, because those are the ones shown up front. Treat every one of them like it could lead.

Our rule is to search the market first. Pull up your dates and your filters, look at the hero photos on the listings around you, then pick a cover that does not look like the rest of the page.

A few things we apply consistently:

• Keep bathrooms and big TVs out of the top five. They do not read as warm or inviting.
• A local shot, a nearby beach or a brewery, can beat a mediocre kitchen photo.
• Show the amenity people actually book you for. A workspace, a pool, or a view belongs in the first five.
• Clean up the amenities list, because personalization pulls from it.

Everything else stays further down the listing. Interested guests click through.

What about the data? Rankbreeze studied 478 listings and found those with photo tours averaged 57.9% occupancy against 51.2% without. That is a fair point and worth sitting with. It is also an average across hosts who never chose their own order, which is most hosts. If you turn the tour off, choose photos that stand out, then watch your own numbers rather than the average.

Check What Guests See, Not What Your Dashboard Says

The dashboard and the guest view are not the same thing. This is the check our team runs:

• Search your own market in a logged out or incognito browser.
• Search again from a friend's account and compare the cover, since personalization can change it.
• Screenshot the results with the date showing, in case you need to contact support.
• Read your AI review highlights. If one is wrong, contact Airbnb support with the screenshot.

One more confirmed rule worth knowing while we are on the subject of AI: Airbnb does not accept AI-generated content as evidence in damage claims. Documentation still has to be real, which is the standard we wrote up in our piece on turnover documentation.

What We Would Check Across a Portfolio This Week

Which listings still have the photo tour on. Whether the photo order in your PMS matches the live Airbnb page. What your cover photo looks like next to the listings directly above and below you in search. Whether your first five photos lead with the amenity that drives your bookings. Whether your amenities list is current, since personalization reads it. And whether anyone owns the job of redoing this when new photos get added.

None of it is complicated. It is a few minutes per listing, multiplied by however many listings you have, and the cost of skipping it gets paid in clicks you never see. If you want the wider view of where a listing leaks performance, download the STR Growth Blueprint here.

The broader point is the same one that comes up every time a platform ships a new feature. You do not control what Airbnb automates next. You control how fast you notice, and whether somebody is checking the guest facing page rather than the dashboard. We made that case about dated hosting habits in our piece on strategies that used to earn great reviews.

Want help setting up your STR for long-term performance? The team at Corzly manages properties across multiple markets and helps operators build the systems that drive results. Reach out here.

This article was inspired by Episode 359 of the Short-Term Rental Riches podcast.