For a homestay to become a lodging brand: what needs to be done before beautiful photos

Thousands of Vietnamese homestays are running the same formula: hiring photographers for golden angles, listing on Airbnb and Booking, offering discounts in low season, and running Facebook ads when rooms are vacant. This cycle incurs regular costs but accumulates nothing. What this formula overlooks is not a better photo, but a reason to exist that is different from all the other places.

The real issue is not lack of beautiful photos

If you open Booking.com and filter by any tourist province in Vietnam, the first thing that strikes you is not the differences but the astonishing similarities: the same warm yellow tones, the same white bed linens, the same green plants in the corner, the same caption "a peaceful space in the heart of nature." It is not because homestay owners lack aesthetics. It is because they are all copying the same notion of "a beautiful place" without asking: beautiful for whom, and for what purpose.

Marty Neumeier, author of The Brand Gap, defines a brand as "the gut feeling customers have about a product, service, or organization." Not a logo. Not a photo. Not a primary color. It is what customers remember, recount, and use to distinguish you from all other options when they get into a Grab on their way home. That "gut feeling" does not come from photos, although images can convey it if you know what you are conveying.

What must come first: a clear positioning

Positioning is the answer to three questions placed side by side: Who is this place specifically for? What experience do they come here for that others do not provide? And why will they remember the name of this place instead of just recalling "the homestay in Da Lat last month"?

These three questions sound simple, but most homestay owners skip the step of answering them honestly. "For all nature lovers" is not positioning; it is a general description for the entire industry. "A quiet space to relax" is not positioning; it is the minimum standard that guests assume every place must have.

Positioning looks like this: a homestay in Hoi An chooses to serve only families with children under ten, designing everything from safe bunk beds to indoor play areas to a non-spicy breakfast menu, and creating a "busy parents' guide to the ancient town" sent before check-in. They do not need to compete with boutique hotels for honeymoon couples because they are not speaking to that customer. And when a mother asks in a travel group, "where can I stay in Hoi An with kids," their name is mentioned immediately.

The OTA trap and the customer ownership puzzle

Most individual homestays in Vietnam rely on OTAs (online booking platforms like Booking, Airbnb, Agoda). This is not wrong, especially in the early stages. The problem arises when OTAs become the only channel; then customer data belongs to the platform, not to you. Guests remember "the homestay on Booking" but do not recall the specific name. The next time they search, they type into Booking, not your name into Google.

This is the point where the brand intervenes: when customers remember the name and actively seek it out, you no longer pay 15 to 25% commission for each booking. But for customers to remember the name, it needs to be memorable and tied to a specific reason. You cannot solve the dependency on OTAs by simply making prettier images on those very OTAs.

Positioning is not what you do to a product. It is what you do to the mind of the prospect.

Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Local storytelling: an asset that is wasted

The paradox of the Vietnamese hospitality industry: a country rich in storytelling resources, from craft villages to dialects to regional culinary memories, yet most homestays choose neutral international visual and textual language without origin.

Those places that do this well are not "traditionalizing" in the folk sense. They are choosing a truly local, specific detail, not fabricated, and consistently integrating it into every touchpoint: the naming of rooms, the items placed on the first night’s pillow, the scent in the space, how staff introduce the property. Kapferer calls this "physique staging" in the lens of brand identity. When the physique has a genuine origin, the other five facets of the brand have room to stand.

Consistency from before check-in to after check-out

Wally Olins describes a brand operating through four vectors: product, environment, communication, and behavior. For homestays, those four translate into reality as follows: physical space and amenities (product), design from signage to towels to candle scents (environment), how room descriptions are written and inbox messages are answered (communication), and how the owner or staff interacts with guests from the first confirmation message to the thank you after check-out (behavior).

The most common weakness is not poor design. It is that those four vectors do not speak the same language. Photos on OTAs convey a sense of calm luxury, but the owner messages with emojis and refers to guests as "fen." The room is designed minimalist, but the guide is printed in Comic Sans on plastic. Breakfast is home-cooked, but the menu is a default Word file. Each small deviation is not a design issue; it is a matter of accumulated perception: guests are unclear about what type of place they are in, so their memory of it is less vivid.

So where do we start?

Before calling a photographer, before hiring a designer to create a logo, before upgrading the interior, you need to sit down and answer three honest questions: Who is my ideal guest specifically, and at what stage in life are they coming here? What experience does only my place offer, stemming from my location, people, or origins? After they leave, what will guests say about this place, and to whom will they tell it?

The answers to those three questions form the initial positioning. From there, every subsequent decision, from images to room names to how you write your OTA profile to the type of background music, can be checked: is this consistent with what you are building? If you don’t know what you are building, there is no way to check.

Byron Sharp mentions in How Brands Grow that brand recognition can only accumulate when it is consistently repeated over time. For homestays, this means not running a new photo campaign every season but deciding once who you are, then executing that in every touchpoint long enough for guests to remember.