I am often asked my opinion of which is better: the large vacation rentals sites, such as Homeaway , or the smaller ones such as Villa4Vacation .
Larger vacation rental sites will argue that they have the higher volumes of traffic from prospective renters, while smaller sites will argue that your vacation rental property will get lost amongst the thousands of other properties in the larger sites. Hence, you are better on a small site where you can stand out.
It reminds me of an article I wrote a couple of years ago about assessing the traffic to vacation rentals sites. The gist of the article is that you should try to calculate the expected number of visitors to your listing, using the tools available to measure website traffic.
Rather than just looking at the number of vacation rental listings, you should use an estimate of the traffic to the vacation rental site, together knowledge of the number of listings on the site, to calculate, on average, how many visitors a listing will get. Although the tools available (such as Alexa or Trafficestimate.com) to measure website traffic only provide approximations, at least it gives you some measure for comparison. You can find the full article here:
vacation rentals traffic
Of course, not all listings will attract the same number of viewings, and this is particularly true for sites that allow you to pay a premium for a more visible listing. Before paying for a basic listing on these sites, you may want to consider whether it is better to pay the extra for a premium listing.
In response to concerns about generating enquiries, some vacation rentals sites have started to offer guarantees. (In some cases, this if offered instead of the "free trial", which many of the more established sites have moved away from.)
For example, vrbo VRBO will guarantee that your listing will generate at least ten times your listing cost in the first year. If not, you get an extra 6 months free.
Other sites will offer a money back guarantee, although usually only when you specifically ask for it. A discussion on the Lay My Hat forum recently indicated that Holiday Rentals have offered such a guarantee on certain occasions in the past.
My advice is that you should at least ask about a guarantee before signing up with any vacation rental site.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Vacation Rental Site Performance and Guarantees
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
I recently found out another holiday vacation rental site
http://www.myholidaysplanet.com
it offers free listings for the holiday house rentals.
its worth a look
Before I register my own holiday property on any website I check to see the source code of any full descriptive advert. If the meta description tag only states the name of the website and not the name of the property being advertised, then the chances of my advert being seen at the end of a long list of properties is zero because even the search engine robots cannot find it!
Some holiday advertising sites offer for your own website link to be placed in the advert, but then in their page coding tell the search engine robots "Index No Follow" -again such a waste of advertising money.
The smaller websites are much better then the bigger ones as they offer good personal
reviews on the subject of vacation rental.
The smaller sites have an edge as I found with vrdiscounts.com
which lists rentals specifically offering discounts and one can find discounted rentals situated all over the world.
Great article and many interesting points. We have a listing on Homeaway.com. We feel as if we are just one 1 of 5000 listings. It is very hard to differentiate yourself. We have more luck with our own personal "blog" listing at www.hillnvale.com
I think that having your own site is really the best way to advertise your vacation property. Unfortunately it can be difficult and time consuming to set up your own site. I think that social networks represent the future of the online vacation rental home marketplace. In a social network members often get their own "myPage" which is easy to set up and edit. Social networks also offer a community of interested and like-minded owners and renters. Community engagement is much more viral than traditional listings and I think the quality of potential inquires is higher. I have started a free social network for the vacation home rental marketplace. Please visit Trusted Getaways Give it a try and let me know what you think
To help me make a decision as to which vacation rental/cabin rental websites to advertise on, I use Google & Yahoo and type in a bunch of different keywords having to do with my cabin rentals. i.e., blue ridge cabin rentals, north georgia cabin rentals. I see where they come up on the SERP's. You want the Vacation Rental website to come up at least on pages 1-3. If they come up later than those, I hold off on paying a lot of money to list. If they come up on page 4 or more, and have a very low listing fee, I may reconsider if they allow me to put my URL on, without having a "no follow" attribute. http://www.CabinsPlusMore.com
If I may put my site on your radar, it is new and I just launched a month ago. It is free. Good luck to me. www.rentication.com
I think they are all great ideas.
Keep up the great work everyone.
Tim Crowe
www.VacationRentalHomes.com
Admin@VacationRentalHomes.com
Post a Comment