How To Enhance Your Vacation House Rentals Exposure And Improve Your Total Reservations
If you own a house and rent it for the season you may face bad seasons or intense competition from others being in the same business in the area.
Nowadays, there are various kinds of vacation rental owners.
Many still rely on the usual bookings through local travel agencies; some so their own basic promotion by advertising on local or National newspapers with classifieds.
The other kind of vacation home rental owner uses both traditional means of bringing bookings as well as using the new channels like the Internet and mobile phones. It is possible that both kinds still stay unhappy about their booking success rates.
Regardless the type of owner you are you have to make a decision on how to go about more bookings. For the first kind there is no doubt, yes they will need Web presence. For the second kind if you have no results, then you simply have to work more in order to get those vacancies filled.
So supposing that we bring both types of vacation house rentals owners to the same level; here are some thoughts on how to go about maximizing reservations:
Decide if you will expose your property on Travel portals only, or on other forms of advertising online. If you only rely on the first, it means that you will just have to do some form filling, price uploading and you are set. The best portals for the job are usually Expedia and Travelocity. You can upload your property details there and be active in as little as one week. They charge a commission of 20-25% for every booking sent to you and you need to do the credit card charging as well so add an extra 2-3%. The good thing with those portals is that they act as a supplement to your existing line of bookings. So getting an extra 10% in bookings is about right; but don’t expect to be fully booked because of them. It is just a supplement.
If you wish to increase your Internet bookings, your Web site will play an important role. You don't have a site, you say? maybe this is better, because owing a site and bringing visitors in is one thing, but converting them to actual customers is another and it is an Art and you have to talk to someone who knows how to convert them. It will be a costly business.
The good news is that it could be better if you don’t setup a Web site and simply setup a listing on a vacation rentals portal like VillaRenters using their platform, RentalSystems. Then you just drive traffic there using VRBO, HomeAway and Pay per click ads, and all the rental process after booking is set on Auto Pilot too, so you don’t need to worry too much about the usual phone calls, driving instructions etc. You just set all the information and forget it, it will be sent to the renter at the right time. And they send you some bookings too, with only a 10% commission.
If your decide to bring more than 50% of your bookings from the Internet you will need more work. First decide the budget to be spent ($1000/year is enough for a single property). Then talk to a Web marketing agent to work on your exposure. As an alternative solution you can agree to pay them a commission for every booking they bring you.
Kostas Papahatzis is a Full-Time Vacation Rentals property manager with many yars experience on Product Marketing and Project Management. One of his latest projects was the authoring of a new book on the subject titled on the subject of vacation house rentals.
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