Most hosts who commission a property video get one file back. It is usually landscape, because that is what video has looked like for a century, and it is usually the wrong shape for the place it will do the most work.
Where vertical belongs
Anywhere the viewer is holding a phone and scrolling: Instagram Reels and Stories, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels, Pinterest. These are discovery surfaces. Nobody arrived looking for your villa; the video has to earn the stop.
A landscape video posted here loses roughly two-thirds of the screen. Worse, the platforms actively suppress content that does not fill the frame, so the format choice costs you reach before anyone has judged the content.
- Keep the first second doing something — a reveal, motion into a space, water catching light.
- Compose for a tall frame rather than cropping a wide one. A cropped 16:9 shot loses the sides of the room that made it look generous.
- Assume it plays without sound. The visuals carry it; the score is a bonus for whoever unmutes.
Where landscape belongs
Anywhere the viewer already chose to look: your direct booking site, a property page, an email to a returning guest, a proposal to an owner, a YouTube listing tour, paid ads that run in feed rather than in Stories.
Landscape suits these because the viewer has committed. They will watch longer, so the edit can breathe: slower shots, a fuller walkthrough, a proper sequence from arrival to view.
Vertical wins the attention. Landscape closes the decision. They are different jobs and they need different shapes.
Why cropping afterwards does not work
It is tempting to shoot once and crop for the other format. In practice a crop from 16:9 to 9:16 throws away 56% of the image, and the part it throws away is usually the part that showed scale — the width of the terrace, the run of the pool, how far the view extends.
The fix is to build both cuts from the source photos rather than deriving one from the other. Each shot gets framed for the ratio it will be seen in, so the vertical cut is a vertical composition rather than a squeezed landscape one.
A simple rule
If you are trying to be found, post vertical. If you are trying to be chosen, show landscape. Most properties need both, which is why we deliver both as standard rather than as an upsell.
If you would like to see how your own listing looks in each format, send us a few photos and we will build a sample.