Many vacation rental owners send me complaints that, as soon as the trial period on their vacation rental listing is about to expire, they receive enquiries from renters. However, when they follow up on these enquiries, they find that the renters don't respond. Hence, they suspect that the Vacation Rental Sites are sending them these enquiries in order to entice them to pay for a full listing and that these enquiries are, in fact, bogus!
So, could this possibly be the case?
I have spoken with several sites owners and all deny that they would engage in such a practice. (Of course, they would say that, wouldn't they?) Furthermore, they say it just wouldn't be practical for the following reasons:
1. If these enquiries are generated manually, the amount of work would not justify the potential revenue they would receive. Typically, conversion rates from trial to full paying customers are less than 10%. Even if they could increase this to 20%, this means they would have to generate enquiries for 10 trial owners just to get 1 more to sign up. Of course, they would need to generate more than 1 enquiry for each owner, so the reality is that it would take probably up to thirty or more enquiries just to get one more trial owner to convert to a full paying account. Since most sites charge around $100 per year, it would hardly be worth it!
2. What about if enquiries are generated automatically? Well, this would certainly reduce the work in generating the enquiries. I am not a technical expert, but I suspect it is technically feasible to generate false enquiries. However, if this were possible, why wait until the end of the trial period? Surely, it would be more effective to generate enquiries within the first week or so of the trial period, rather than waiting until the owner has effectively written off the listing on the site.
I suspect the reality is that when owners get an enquiry at around the same time as a trial is expiring, they are putting 2 and 2 together and getting 5, and that these enquiries are likely to be as genuine as any other they recieve from the site.
At any rate, I would encourage owners to log the performance of the vacation rental site over the full trial period, counting not just the number of enquiries, but also the number of follow up responses, before deciding to commit to a fully paid vacation rental listing.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Do vacation rental sites send you false rental enquiries?
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8 comments:
Before we started Perfect Florida Villas we heard many of these "conspiracy theories" from owners and it even crossed my mind a few times. However, since running our own business it is really not feasible. As has already been said it would take a lot of time and we just don't have that much free time!! Also and more importantly, it will do no good in the end. You need to build a good client base and for word to spread to other owners that you run an efficient, honest business that generates a good amount of genuine enquiries.
Although I must admit that our conversion rate is much higher somewhere in the region if 85%.
Before we started Perfect Florida Villas we heard many of these "conspiracy theories" from owners and it even crossed my mind a few times.
Good to see a little honesty Steve!
Whether or not it is a good idea or not I don't know but $50 to some Indian software maestro will get plenty of inquiries generated.
I have had a few sites where inquiries at the end of the trial period have increased substantially. Funnily enough, never got a reply to my responses though. Curious.
I hope you get some other replies as this is an important subject.
This is why it is better to use established websites or FREE ones. FREE ones (like ours www.gulivers.com)won't charge you and the established have a track record.
What bothers me more than getting the fake inquiries, is when a free trial expires and instead of the vacation rental site taking your listing off their site (deleting it), they leave it on so that potential guests think they can contact the owner when in fact, they can't. What happens is when a potential guest sends an inquiry, the person sending the inquiry receives a reply email from the vacation rental site saying their inquiry has been forwarded to the owner. BUT............all the owner gets is the potential guests name but NO contact information. Instead, it says that you have an inquiry but in order to get the contact information, you must first log on and pay for the listing. This has happened at least twice to me. Both time I tried to contact both site administrators and they never responded. I was able to log onto one of these sites and delete as much of my info as possible including photos, name of my cabin, description, etc. The other site wouldn't let me edit unless, of course, I paid for the listing. It wasn't until I wrote about one of the sites and mentioned their name in a google group forum and then....wouldn't you know, my listing was finally taken off!
Great blog. We are starting one for Orlando and were looking for some inspiration
http://orlando-vacationhomerental.com
As someone who isn't in the business- the argument that you'd send false enquiries during the first few weeks of a trial doesn't hold. You don't keep customers by showing them how many unanswerable enquires your site generates, but rather you could wile them back with the false hope of enquiries that may pan out...
Also you can't assume that they don't have a list of five or ten fakes that they send to just about everyone. Not many Owners are going to check with other Owners about non-replies.
It is impossible to prove unless several Owners get responses from the same unanswerable addresses.
But I think that the comment above that they don't take your listing off right away says volumes about the honesty/integrity of the websites.
Now please name names!
I'd love to know who these weasels are.
P
trial periods?
i just found a site that must be somewhat new, ravant.com .
i never heard of them before but
they offer totally free listings for life with very nice looking listing pages. i figured its worth a shot, hopefully theyll bring me some inquiries. if anyones heard of them please reply to this post
This is simply brilliant! I didn't know that was possible. Stumbled it for you.
-Ella
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