Anatomy of a Feature Story

At Leonardo we talk a lot about telling your property’s story – one of the ways that you can tell your story is through your Feature Stories, but what exactly is a Feature Story? There are several different components to a Feature Story, and this article is going to teach you everything you need to know about feature stories and how you can use them to tell your property's story.

First thing’s first – what is a Feature Story?

A Feature Story highlights the unique features of your property. You can create Feature Stories about the many different aspects of your property.

For example, you can tell a story about your property’s dining experience. Within the Dining Feature Story you’ll want to share photos of your property’s restaurants, bars, room service options, and anything else food-related (maybe you’re known for your scrambled eggs or freshly baked bread – show these off!). In your Dining Feature Story, you can upload 360 tours, photos and videos. All of this media will work together to tell the story of the dining experience guests can expect when they stay with you. 

Read these instructions to learn how to create a feature story.

What’s a multi-grouped Feature Story?

Once you’ve created stories that highlight the great features of your property, it’s time to group them together to create a multi-grouped Feature Story. So what’s a multi-grouped Feature Story? Let’s say that you have a Feature Story about dining and a Feature Story about your property’s amenities. You could combine these two Feature Stories together, and create a multi-grouped Feature Story called ‘Property Overview.’ Or, you could combine a Feature Story about your recreational activities and a Feature Story about your local area attractions and create a multi-grouped Feature Story called ‘Experience’ – the possibilities really are endless. 

Learn how to create a multi-grouped Feature Story here.

What makes up a Feature Story?

There are a few different components to a Feature Story. The image below breaks down these components.

Once you’ve dragged and dropped the images from your Library into your Feature Story, you can change the order of the images simply by dragging them into the order you want.

Here are some best practice tips:

• Keep your Feature Story name short and sweet (1 to 2 words long) and make sure it explains the content of the story. Keep in mind that this name will be seen by travel shoppers.
• The descriptions should be limited to about 10-15 lines of text to avoid scrolling. The text you add under ‘Description’ will show up on your website or web widgets (unless you uncheck the ‘Publish Story Description’ box).
• Break up the text and highlight important points using bulleted lists, bold text and underlining. Check out this helpful community post for some text description guidelines and tips.
• Make sure the photos you use in your Feature Stories are the highest quality possible. Check out this community article for guidelines on media submissions.

Where can I publish my Feature Stories?

You can use a Feature Story on its own, as an image carousel on your home page, or you can publish your multi-grouped Feature Stories to your website, smartphone, tablet, Facebook apps and digital brochures in syndication.