Does aerial footage actually help sell an STR, or does it just look good in the listing

Your instinct about Gatlinburg is well-grounded, and your skepticism about Scottsdale is also well-grounded. Those are actually two different questions, so let me take them separately.

For the Gatlinburg cabin: aerial footage earns its cost most clearly when it shows something a guest cannot see from street level or from inside the property. A ridge view with surrounding forest or mountain scenery is exactly that situation. The guest is paying partly for the setting, and if your listing photos cannot show the setting, you are asking them to imagine it. A $275 add-on on a property that probably books at $150 to $300 a night needs to recover maybe two nights of margin over its lifetime to break even, which is a low bar.

For the Scottsdale subdivision: a drone shot of a roof and some identical neighboring rooftops does not tell a guest anything useful. You are right to hesitate. Ground-level and interior photography will do more work for that listing than aerial will.

On your broader question, whether guests book differently because of aerial footage, I am not aware of any controlled study that answers that cleanly for STRs specifically. What I can say is that aerial footage functions as a signal: it tells a guest that a property has something worth showing from above. When that signal is true, it attracts the right guests. When it is not, it looks like filler.

One thing worth checking before the Gatlinburg shoot: confirm the photographer holds an FAA Part 107 certificate, which is the commercial drone license required by federal law. An uncertified shoot can create liability for you as the property owner.

What platform are you listing on, and do you know roughly what your Gatlinburg booking rate looks like right now?

Skip Scottsdale, but that $275 in Gatlinburg earns back in the first night's rate bump alone.

Gatlinburg I'd do without hesitating, but the reason isn't the view itself. It's that cabin guests are picking between yours and three others in the same price band, and a ridge shot makes yours immediately not interchangeable. Scottsdale subdivision is a different story. I shot aerial on a similar Phoenix-area property in 2022 and genuinely cannot point to a single booking it drove, just $300 gone.

The scroll behavior thing is real. On properties where I've had analytics access I see outdoor and exterior shots get less dwell time than master bath and kitchen almost every time. For a cabin with a real landscape feature though I think aerial earns its place earlier in the decision, before they even start comparing amenities.

The Gatlinburg one is basically a no-brainer but not for the reason most people give. What I've seen with ridge and mountain properties specifically is that the aerial is doing a different job than the interior shots. It's not competing with the bathroom photo, it's answering the question guests can't answer from the ground, which is "how exposed is this view, is it actually private, am I looking at another cabin's deck or am I looking at mountains." I had a cabin in Blount County with a similar situation and adding the aerial shot of the ridgeline dropped my inquiry-to-booking gap noticeably because people stopped asking "can you see the neighbors" in messages. The $275 is priced right for that market and it's a one-time cost that lives in your listing for however long you run the property.

The Scottsdale subdivision one I'd skip entirely, but the question I'd actually want answered first is what your current click-through rate looks like on that listing versus comparable 3-beds in the same zip. Because if people are already clicking through at a normal rate, the aerial isn't fixing anything. It's just adding a shot of a flat roof and a shared fence line that tells guests nothing useful. The money in Scottsdale is better spent on a dusk shoot if you haven't done one, because pool lighting at golden hour moves the needle on that type of property more than any drone pass over a subdivision grid will.

For the Scottsdale subdivision place, drone footage probably just shows neighbors' rooftops and identical lots, so I'd skip it. Gatlinburg is different because that ridge view IS the product, guests are paying for the feeling, and if they can't see it before they book they might choose the cabin two listings over that shows it better.

The thing I'd want to know is your current conversion rate on listing views to bookings, because that tells you whether the problem is even in the photography stage or somewhere else.

Gatlinburg yes, but I'd pull the drone clip into the first three seconds of your listing video or guests skip it.