Holiday rentals of houses and apartments are in vogue. More and more tourists are opting for an individual vacation with family or friends. As a provider of a vacation property, you can ensure high demand with simple options.
You can continue to use the calendar overview with your holidaymakers' bookings in analog form. But when it comes to marketing your vacation property, you can no longer ignore the digital world. You should take your time to plan and prepare your online presence.
Consciously select booking portals
You don't have to appear on every portal. Above all, think about which target group you want to reach with your accommodation. It is best to place four to five advertisements on large portals. Airbnb, Booking.com or Expedia have a particularly wide reach. Vrbo or Rentalia are more likely to focus on specific vacationers or interests.
Planning the content of advertisements
The content of the advertisements should be well thought out and well prepared. An appealing, not too long and error-free text and - last but not least - impressive photos arouse the interest of your visitors at first glance.
For the images, you should, if possible, hire a professional or at least seek advice from an expert. This will help you to avoid visual missteps and ensure that you take really beautiful and authentic pictures of your property. By the way, a short virtual tour is a great experience for potential customers.
Descriptions with a twist
Be creative when describing your vacation property, but always be honest. Don't get lost in overflowing explanations, but get to the heart of the most important things. This includes information about the accommodation, which is crucial for everyday life, but also information about the surrounding area. A vacation home is not just a place to spend the night - for many vacationers it is a temporary home where they want to feel at home.
Offers aren't everything
Customers are attracted by special offers. However, a reasonable price calculation protects against financial difficulties that may arise from renting. It is therefore worthwhile to have a realistic overnight price that really takes all fixed costs into account. Using special tools such as Market Navigator, you can observe and analyze the competition in order to find the right pricing strategy. Incidentally, this calculation also includes seasonality. Take a look at the vacation and public holiday overviews of some important countries from which your customers come.
Your own homepage as a business card
Direct contact with you as the landlord is extremely important. The Internet and therefore also booking portals are still impersonal applications. Your advertisements should therefore be supplemented by your own website. Make sure you have a simple page structure, short, informative texts and beautiful images.
Your own homepage not only presents your vacation property as a unique object, it also offers a convenient and direct communication channel between you as the landlord and your customers. If you also incorporate booking software, this can quickly multiply the number of bookings.
Convenient booking options
Remember to include the "Instant Booking" option on all booking channels. Surveys have shown that many reservations are only made shortly before the actual travel date. The trend is moving towards last minute - also and especially for vacation properties.
Marc Fischer
