From an empty calendar to $500 a night

Cunuco Amor is a historic Aruban property known as the Sanctuary of Peace: five bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, a pool, and room for a family or a group to spread out. The owners had just finished renovating it and kitted it out properly: a full kitchen with modern appliances, beach essentials, loungers by the pool.

What they had was a finished house and an empty calendar, with high season coming.

Aruba is not short of holiday rentals. A new listing with no reviews and no booking history starts at the bottom of every search, and the usual advice, which is to wait it out, drop the rate and build up reviews, is the opposite of what a premium property needs.

The owners asked specifically for Airbnb and VRBO rather than a booking site of their own, so the job was to make the listings themselves do the work: to read as calm, private and worth the rate, in a market where everything is shouting.

We rewrote the listings on both platforms around what actually makes the house different, the history, the quiet, the cultural and natural surroundings it sits in, and reworked the photography and layout to match, so the first impression is the one the renovation paid for.

Alongside that we ran social content and worked the Facebook groups where people plan their Aruba trips, introducing the house to an audience already looking for one. Then we watched the numbers week by week and adjusted whatever wasn't landing.

• Rewritten and optimised Airbnb and VRBO listings
• Photography and page layout reworked around the property's strongest story
• Social content and targeted posting in Aruba travel groups
• Weekly monitoring, with the approach adjusted as results came in

Within a month the property went from no bookings at all to two high-season stays at $500 a day.

Listing views and traffic climbed with them, and the feedback and enquiries that followed kept the interest going into the season.