Holiday Lettings and Flipkey Move to Commission Based Listings

Both Holiday Lettings and Flipkey have recently announced options to list your vacation rental property for free and pay only a commission on bookings.

Holiday Lettings and Flipkey are both owned by Tripadvisor, so presumably there is a connection between the campaigns. It may be that they see this as being the best option to compete with Homeaway, allowing them to differentiate themselves from the vacation rentals industry giant.

From the point of view of the vacation rental owner, commission only listings offer the advantage of having no up front costs, unlike most sites, which have an annual listing fee of $100 - 300 ( or more, in some cases!)

Owners typically have a limited budget to spend on vacation rental listings and want to make sure they get good value for the money that they spend on annual listings. If they sign up and don't receive any bookings, that money is wasted.

The commission only option allows vacation rentals owners to publish their listing and they only pay in the event that they actually receive a booking. Both Holiday Lettings and Flipkey charge 3% commission, which on the face of it, seems fairly reasonable. (However, some other fees, such as Booking Fees can apply).

For many owners, adding a listing with Holiday Lettings or Flipkey is a low risk way to potentially generate more bookings, or fill gaps they currently have. There is nothing to stop Owners from charging slightly higher prices on Holiday Lettings and Flipkey than they do on other sites, such as Homeaway, in order to cover the commissions. In the event that they generate bookings, great! If not, then all that was lost was the time to create the listing.

When COHR published the offers from Holiday Lettings and Flipkey to our subscribers, there was a huge response, so it clearly got the attention of vacation rental owners. Both are well established sites, so they have a much higher chance of generating bookings than the many free vacation rental sites out there.

I have tried out the Holiday Lettings option and have been very pleased with the results so far. There are some things to watch out for (e.g. you don't get paid until after your guests arrive), but overall I would recommend you give it serious consideration. You can check out my experience below:

My experience with the Holiday Lettings Commission Only Listing

I  would be interested in comments from others.

Is this likely to become a broader trend in the industry? I think a lot will depend on how successful Holiday Lettings and Flipkey are with this approach. I suspect the Free Listings sites will give it some serious consideration, as it offers them a way to earn revenues as they try to convince highly sceptical Owners to try them out.

On the otherhand, I suspect Homeaway will be slow to offer commission only listings, at least for the time being, as they may be concerned it will cannabalise revenues from existing clients. It's possible they will try it out on some of their smaller brands first ....

Holiday Lettings Commission Only Listing

Holiday Lettings recently announced an option to list your vacation rental for free and pay only a commission on bookings actually received through the Holiday Lettings website.

I decided to try out the option and listed my 2 Bed Apartment in Nice France . Overall, I have been quite impressed with the results. Over the last 3 weeks, I have received 7 enquiries, 2 of which converted into confirmed bookings.

The sign up process is quite easy: you simply add your property details in the normal way. You can choose how you will be paid (I opted for paypal). You can also adjust your policy on when/how much of a deposit the renter pays and what happens on cancellations etc.

It is Holiday Lettings who actually collect the money from the renter in accordance with your payment terms. However, you don't actually get paid until 48 hours after the guests arrive at your apartment. For some Owners, this might be a concern, although I have found that letting Holiday Lettings look after collecting the payments actually removes an element of hassle to the booking process. Holiday Lettings email you when the renter has paid the deposit and also when they have paid the full balance, so you are kept informed without having to do the chasing yourself.

Holiday Lettings charge a commission of 3% on bookings received, which seems fairly reasonable. However, you should be aware that they also add a Booking Fee of 5% , so you need to either make your renter aware that they should pay this fee or absorb the cost yourself. (I made the mistake with my first booking of quoting a price without the booking fee and had to absorb it myself.) Also, VAT is payable on the commission and booking fee, which adds about 1% more.

To cover these costs, you may want to consider pricing your vacation rental slightly higher than on other listing sites. I'm still considering how to handle that.

Once other thing to watch out for: Holiday Lettings anonymise the email addresses of those who send you an enquiry. (They give them a Holiday Letting.co.uk address). This is presumably to prevent you from contacting the renter directly and avoiding paying the commission.

However, for the first couple of enquiries I received, the emails went straight into my Yahoo email SPAM folder!

Luckily, you can also elect to have Holiday Lettings send you a free Text Message to notify you that you have an enquiry. I had availed of this option and so knew from the text messages that there was an enquiry waiting.

I notified COHR subscribers of the Holiday Lettings offering and received a lot of positive response. Having said that, there were also a couple of people who had some technical issues, plus some who said they would simply prefer to stay with an annual fee.

That said, although it is early days, I must say that I think this is a good, low risk option for getting additional bookings.

If you have used Holiday Lettings commission based listings, I would appreciate your comments.

Getaway Earth Holiday Rentals

To celebrate Getaway Earth's new website features, vacation rental owners are currently being offered a free, full featured listing until 31 May 2013. Features include:

    Unlimited bulk photo uploads to a large format rental gallery
    Quick import of an availability calendar
    Detailed property description
    Local weather
    Link to owner website
    Link to owner facebook or twitter accounts
    Full owner contact details
    Addition of local places of interest
    Property map
    An optional additional blog post on the owner and his/her  property
    Vacation rental reviews
    No payment or credit card details required at signup

For full details simply visit Getaway Earth Holiday Rentals