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What does Booking.com actually accept in 360? The exact requirements
Plenty of owners commission a virtual tour assuming it will go onto Booking.com as it is. It will not.
Booking accepts panoramic photographs, not an interactive tour that moves from room to room. The difference is significant, and it costs money when you discover it afterwards.
The requirements are not a secret. They are published. They just sit in technical documentation nobody reads before commissioning anything.
Booking accepts panoramic photographs, not an interactive tour that moves from room to room. The difference is significant, and it costs money when you discover it afterwards.
The requirements are not a secret. They are published. They just sit in technical documentation nobody reads before commissioning anything.


The requirements, as Booking states them
In its partner documentation the platform sets out three things.Ratio 2:1. Width twice the height. An equirectangular panorama is already in that ratio, so if someone hands you a file in a different one, something has been cropped.
Size under 8 MB. That sounds generous until you notice a good panorama often comes out larger. It needs proper compression, not a drop in resolution.
Files in .jpg, .jpeg or .png.
The photos go into a separate gallery on the property page, not mixed in with the standard ones.
What "individual panoramas" means in practice
The guest sees one space and can look around it. They cannot walk from the living room into the bedroom.That changes what is worth commissioning.
If Booking is the only target, you do not need a full tour with connections, hotspots and floor plans. You need a few very good panoramas of the right spaces.
If you also want a full tour, that lives on your own site and your other channels. The panoramas for Booking come out of the same shoot, so the extra cost is small. As long as it was agreed at the start.


Which spaces deserve a panorama
Not every room needs one. Only the ones photography treats unfairly.Yes: open plan living and kitchen, terraces with a view, internal courtyards, oddly shaped rooms, the pool and its surroundings.
No: small bathrooms, storage, corridors. A panorama there mostly demonstrates how small the space is.
This is one of the few cases where less genuinely returns more.
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