Get Your Guest's Real Email Address

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With the advent of Commission based listings from the likes of Holidaylettings, Homeaway and Flipkey, you will not automatically get the real email address of your guests.

A case in point arose recently. Someone who had stayed at my apartment in Nice, France last year contacted me again: she had been so happy with the apartment, she wanted to book again this year. After some exchange, I generously included a discount on what she had paid last year and thought we had agreed the booking.

However, it turns out the email address she was using to contact me was actually a Holidaylettings.co.uk email address. ( This wasn't apparent to me, because she showed up as "Jane Doe" in my inbox.) Hence, there was a slight dilemma: she wanted to book through Holidaylettings.co.uk , but I had not included the booking fee of 5% ( let alone allowed for the 3% commission) in the rates I had quoted to her.

Of course, what I should have done last year was to make sure that I exchanged real email details with ALL my renters who booked through Holidaylettings.co.uk .

In fact, it's probably good practice to send a follow up email to all guests who rent your apartment to confirm they enjoyed their stay, to exchange email contact details and tell them that, if they contact you directly next time, you will be able to offer them a special price.

That's what I intend to do this year.

Renters visit about 4 vacation rental sites before choosing a Vacation Rental

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Data from Flipkey indicates that the average renter will visit about 4 different vacation rental sites and inquire about 7 different vacation rental properties before choosing a vacation rental.

According to Flipkey, the breakdown is as follows:

12% visit just one vacation rental site
39% visit 2-3 vacation rental sites
28% visit 4-5 vacation rental sites
8% visit 6-9 vacation rental sites
12% visit 10 or more vacation rental sites

Apart from the fact that 12% visit more than 10 vacation rental sites, I was not very surprised with these findings. In my own experience,  I certainly want to check out more the vacation rental listings on more than one site. I am likely to look at a couple of the bigger sites, such as Homeaway or VRBO, plus also a couple of regional/specialist sites (e.g. Rentalia or Spain-Holiday for Spain).

I suspect in practice, many renters just google appropriate search terms such as "vacation rentals spain" and then use that to find vacation rental sites to explore.

I was a little more surprised at the fact that renters enquire about only 7 vacation rental properties on average. Given that many of the vacation rental sites have the facility to create "favorites" and make it easy to send the same enquiry to multiple owners, I expected that the average number of renter enquiries would be more than 7.

So, what are the implications of these findings  for vacation rental owners?

Well, firstly, it re-enforces the need to be listed on multiple vacation rental by owner sites. (You should check out either COHR or All Holiday Rentals to find a list of potential sites.)

Secondly, if you are getting bookings from more than 1 enquiry in 7 , then you are probably doing a good job of converting enquiries into bookings. If not, then maybe you need to examine ways to improve your conversions.