2014 bookings

[hobbo]

Ownersdirect has the option for owners to show their location on a map, ours (tk2346) shows location on the map, perhaps some owners don't know of this option or don't want people to know where their villa/apart is...

[Lizilu20]

Also on owners direct there must be the opportunity for owners to add the location as sometimes on the subheadings it says "old town", "kisiltas" "ortolaan" etc but I'm buggered if I know how to search for it! I have noticed also, that it sometimes declares "old town" but from experience I can recognise the views and just know they are fibbing! 

[MartynE]

Our apartments are filling nicely- about 75% full, and that's par for the course for this time of year, but it's mainly repeats and referrals. In terms of new customers, Holidaylettings has been utter rubbish for us this year but Ownersdirect enquiries are holding up nicely. We now get more from our own website than those two put together, though.... Google adwords has been a big help in that respect.

Our villa bookings have been slower though.... but enquiries have suddenly started coming in this week. It's a new market for us, so we have no comparison with previous years to go on.

[Christina]

At the risk of creating competition for myself, I thought I would pass on a little tip to those who advertise through Owners Direct. As I've mentioned before, I advertise on both the OD and the Holiday Lettings sites. My HL bookings are quite healthy whilst my OD business is zero. The photos and information are identical on both sites, but the HL, being linked to Trip Advisor, automatically shows your guest ratings. In my case these are all five star reviews accompanied by some lovely comments, and I believe that potential customers can find these quite reassuring and persuasive during the booking process.

OD have now started their own 'review' tool, and when I was chatting to their admin people yesterday to find the reason why my business through them has been slow, they said that whilst the Trip Advisor reviews could not automatically be transferred to their site, they would be happy for me to cut and paste them into their own review system, and OD would subsequently email the guests for verification that the comments were attributable to them. Of course I have contacted my guests/reviewers in advance to check that they would be happy with this.

When conducting a trial 'search' for my own apartment on the HL site, I was surprised how many properties featured at the top of the search results had the green 'flash' advertising that you could 'book online with  payment protection'. Clearly, many owners have now signed up to this new arrangement, and the feature is presented in such a way that it adds 'status' to the offer. At first I was dead against signing up to this, but given the escalating costs of web advertising, it is now something that I will be giving some thought to next year, along with alternative means of promotion.

[Cosetta]

My experience with reviews is somewhat different.  Ever since we began renting some years ago, I have kept online a private guest book in which guests could write in their comments, and I show this page to rental prospects.  Most prospects do look at the page, I can't be sure whether they were influenced by what they read or not, but when I had public guest comments on HL and TA, it didn't make a bit of difference.  In fact, while I continued to receive many requests from OD with no guest comments, I got nearly none from HL and TA which both had 5-star comments.  We still have public guest pages on VRBO and Homelidays for our Spanish apt, but I think that price, amenities and location are the determining factors.

I was also advertising on Flipkey.  Quite to my surprise, last week I received in the mail a 1099 form from them.  This is a US tax declaration that they send to the IRS declaring the rental income we earned through FlipKey.  This is most unusual as I've never gotten any kind of similar declaration from OD, HL, VillaRenters, VRBO or Homelidays.  I'm sure it is tied to the fact that our bank is in the US but that holds true for all of the property rental services we have ever used.

Out of curiosity, does anyone (non-American) here advertise with FlipKey, and if so, do you receive a tax statement of income to declare to your tax office?

[Chris S]

Without wishing to get on a real hobby horse of mine (but I can't help it), I am astonished at how many people appear to regard TripAdvisor as the holy grail of unbiased and valuable guidance for holiday accommodation.  If a villa owner advertises their villa/apartment with Holiday Lettings (wholly owned by Trip Advisor) then wonderful reviews may well appear on the Trip Advisor site, but the minute the villa owner decides to stop advertising with Holiday Lettings, then all reviews vanish.  Does this mean that the villa suddenly becomes a hovel, or does it clearly illustrate that reviews on Trip Advisor are far from unbiased and depend solely on payments to the TripAdvisor organisation and their subsidiaries?  I have no reason to believe that this does not apply equally to restaurants and hotels.  Just try to post a review on a villa/apartment which is not advertised with a TripAdvisor subsidiary and see how you get on.
The business model that TripAdvisor appears to follow is to lure Villa/Apartment owners with apparently 'free' advertising (there is no such thing as a free lunch, or is this an exception  ) whilst charging the potential holiday maker with unseen booking fees (does the holiday maker know that the same property is much cheaper through other sites).  If you don't check, I suggest you should.  They then take the rental and stuff it who knows where (not an Escrow account) until after the holiday maker is in situ, often for months, telling the holiday maker that their money is safe.  History shows that companies involved in the tourism business are susceptible to going bust (much bigger companies than Holiday Lettings UK) and I would suggest that they are more likely to 'go down the tube' than I am.  They also employ the tick box routine for cancellation policies giving 3 choices, none of which are particularly attractive, which are the only ones available , at the same time as insisting that they are not a party to any contract!  I wonder what happens if a particularly cute holiday maker arrives at their accommodation and immediately emails Holiday Lettings making a spurious claim that the accommodation is sub standard.  Who pays who when, and in the mean time the punter can play havoc with the villa/apartment.
Have all you accommodation owners had a look at http://www.laymyhat.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=12.  You should.
Holiday Lettings appear to make money by paying whoever gets their site high up on Google and other search engines.  Apart from that, they appear to con both owners and holiday makers to an equal extent.
If accommodation owners wish to reassure their customers that they are not a potential risk, may I suggest that you offer payment through the PayPal system so the guest has the assurance of paying by credit card.  The credit card company is then at risk.
If anyone thinks that there are inaccuracies in this post, I would be pleased to hear about it.

[Cosetta]

Owners need to advertise, TA and HL offer them that possibility.  It is far cheaper than getting the same exposure on Google Adwords.  Owners sign a contract that they agree to the conditions.   VillaRenters, aka RentalSystems, also hold the rental money until the renter has arrived and gone, giving a chance to the renter to refuse the property.  They also offer the seller and buyer an option to pay an insurance policy upfront to waive security deposits / damage charges.

As for advertising on TA, they have fake guest comments just like all of the holiday rental sites.  In principle, they only accept 'verified guests', i.e., those who actually booked through them, to prevent people from simply taking out grudges, revenge postings, people amusing themselves posting fake reviews and the myriad of other reasons people do post comments about places they have never been to.  Were I an owner of a property website, I too would want a way to veryify that the poster really stayed in the property being reviewed.  How else would that be possible than knowing that the poster signed a contract on my website?

I don't think fake postings are the majority.  In my limited experience with my own website, the postings are quite authentic.

[msr]

Well said Chris S. I wholeheartedly agree, I loathe Trip Avisor with a passion and cannot believe how many people take it as  the holy grail. We advertise with OD and have always had a steady stream of enquiries and bookings, over the last 10 years. The first year we had our villa we advertised with HL as well but as they did not produce one booking we gave up with them, I think that was before they were owned by Trip Advisor.

I can understand people looking on Trip Advisor but it's a bit like reviewing a book, some people will love it and others not. There are so many negative comments, mostly posted by people who bear grudges against the restaurant/hotel etc. that there is no way it can be a true representation of whatever they are representing. When booking anywhere you usually get 'a gut feeling' about somewhere which does not often let you down and when travelling usually go with this.

A few years ago we stayed in Istanbul in a very pleasant hotel, very close to the Blue Mosque etc. It was quiet, clean and very friendly. When we returned home we looked at the reviews on Trip Advisor and they were awful. I have no idea why, perhaps someone did not like the colour of the towels! I remember one comment was 'there was not enough to do'!
I arrest my case.

[hobbo]

I was surprised how many properties featured at the top of the search results had the green 'flash' advertising that you could 'book online with  payment protection'. Clearly, many owners have now signed up to this new arrangement, and the feature is presented in such a way that it adds 'status' to the offer. At first I was dead against signing up to this, but given the escalating costs of web advertising, it is now something that I will be giving some thought to next year, along with alternative means of promotion.

Christina, we are with HL paying the annual fee (not commission based), we have selected the option that allows us to generate quotes within the system and accept paypal payments, this adds the green 'flash' advertising that you could 'book online with  payment protection' so it's not just the commission based adverts with this symbol. We have only 1 booking this year via this online system, this was only because of the easy use and low fees for the Canadians who wanted to pay via paypal.

[brian j p]

pros and cons with both HL & OD

Agree  that TA should not be regarded as the holy grail of reviews,  there are always the few brain dead  with nothing to do in there life's other than write fictitious reviews of places they have never been to,  or have been to and complain about everything, reminds  me of some of the comments  B&B owners make about each other  the  telly show 4 in a bed,

had about   4 or 5   X 2 week bookings regular with HL in last few year  so quite pleased with them, and review have always been welcomed and fair

[Christina]

Thanks for that info re the 'green flash' on HL ads Hobbo.

Thanks also to Chris S for the signpost to comments about HL practices (when interacting with enquirers to commission-based ads) on the 'laymyhat' site. It made me cringe to read that HL send a succession of automated emails to people who have made an enquiry, trying to convert it into a booking. That's a sure fire way to put anyone off. When I spoke to HL admin the other day, they say that their bookings are down all across Europe. They cite 'the economy' as the reason, but I think possibly their business model might have something to do with it.

[JKR]

This is our first full season for our rental villa and we're really pleased with HL (haven't tried OD) as we are nearly full for the season.   We currently have our first booking of the year this week and then then the villa is pretty much booked from 23 May through to 2 October.  Even last year when we didn't even get the villa until mid May we had a great season. Very happy.