Do you keep the availability calendar for your vacation rental updated ? Is it worth it ?
If you are listed on multiple vacation rental sites, particularly those that have their own online availability calendar, then keeping them updated can be quite a chore. There are tools out there to help, but it is still a pain.
The question is : does it matter ? Do renters use online calendar availability to narrow down their choices, or do they simply ask for price and availability first, ignoring whether this information is already provided in your online availability calendar ?
In my experience, quite often, renters do not check your online availability calendar before sending a query. This can be for several reasons :
1. They simply don't bother ( or don't realise that they can check availability) Although I am sure this is sometimes true, I suspect this is a small minority of cases.
2. The renter's dates are flexible and hence, they don't want to limit their choices. I think this is often the case : the renter may not have yet booked their flights and hence their dates may be quite flexible. Ignoring the information in the online availability calendar allows them more flexibility in finding suitable vacation rentals.
3. The renter may send a lot of queries to see which vacation rental owner comes back with the best option on price and availability. Many vacation rental by owner sites now allow owners to create an enquiry list and then send the same query to all of these vacation rental owners at once. Thus it is easier to send off a "mass" enquiry to 10 or more vacation rental owners, than to individually check which of those vacation rental properties are available for the dates requested. This feature, although great from a renter's point of view, it somewhat of a pain for the vacation rental owner, since it results in a lot more enquiries from renters for every booking that will be generated.
So, it is a waste of time keeping your online availability calendar up to date ? Well, keep in mind that some vacation rental by owners sites prioritise the search results they provide to renters on the basis of which properties have most recently updated their online availability calendar. Hence, updates may actually increase your visibility to renters, resulting in more enquiries.
Comment, as always, welcome.
Kevin
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Online Availability Calendars : to update or not?
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6 comments:
I'm owner of web site for vacation rentals http://arrangeyourvacation.com. I can tell you that only about 10% of the home owners keep their availability calender up to date. 90% believe that it is not important or they are lazy to do that.
Es a result they get meny booking enquiries, which they can not handle, because they are already booked out. I don't understand that - but it is a fackt!
it is an ongoing problem, both for owners as well as customers - we display availability and a significant proportion of our customers will book assuming it is correct without checking first.
We also get customers coming to us who are fed up of checking availability via lots of sites, often not getting a response.
In our experience customers DO want to see availability online - an important reason for customers querying availability first that you have not mentioned is precisely because they are resigned to the fact that frequently availability calendars are not correct.
If customers could rely 100% upon availability, why would they bother querying it first?
Unfortunately, owners are in the situation that the market is very fragmented, with no real dominant sites.
They are generally reliant on several sites to generate suffient bookings, which means a lot of calendars for them to update each time a booking comes in.
It is true that those owners who make the effort to keep their availability up to date tend to generate more bookings through us, making it more worth their while to maintain their calendar; those who do not bother get less interest as a result, making it even less worth their while, a vicious circle!
What we needed (several years ago) as an industry was a cross-platform booking system that everyone could rely upon. Unfortunately everybody has now invested so much in their own technology they're unwilling to bin it in favour of using somebody elses.
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We are increasing our functionality in this area Our booking engine allows you to show your live availability and can also come with a stand alone website for you. This means your own website can take bookings live over the net. The benefit of this is you can link to it from all your other ads and take bookings from it in one place. Easy!
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