I’m beginning a series on the blog this week featuring what I think are the best vacation rental websites. These are individual sites – not agencies, or listings from Home Away – they are what, in my opinion, sets the standard for owners in developing their own sites. This is not to say these sites are perfect overall – some could do with a little more work on design or navigation perhaps – but what they all have is sticking power. That is, there is something there that may capture a visitor for more than a few seconds, and could have the power to get them to explore the site in more detail and even bookmark it.

These are not critical reviews, although I will say what I like and what bugs me, and no-one has submitted their sites for inclusion. Mostly, I have found them on Twitter or Facebook or they are sites I’ve just stumbled across in forums or searches. You may not like what I like, or think there are better ones out there I could have featured and I appreciate that. I’m just sharing what rocks my boat. I think you’ll find there’s an eclectic mix and if something in each one gives you, even a small idea for your own site, it’s been a worthwhile read.

First up is Updown Cottage in Dorset, England. In fact, seeing this site was inspiration for this series as there are aspects of it that I found mildly irritating, but these were overtaken by a powerful pull to keep looking and moving around the site. This is what makes a site ‘sticky’.

The first thing that grabbed me was this:

“They’ve thought of everything” Sally Shalam, Guardian

Now I was never a Guardian reader however my first instinct was to click on that link and see what had been said. It led me to a 2007 newspaper review and I was immediately hooked.

“everything has been carefully chosen, from umbrellas and a shopping bag in the hall to writing paper and envelopes in the sitting room, from rainy day distractions – jigsaws, Nespresso coffee machine, piles of magazines – to travel toothbrushes and White Company bathroom toiletries.”

So back to the web site to settle down and take a leisurely look at the photos. The minor problem was when I tried to find that home page again I came up with another that had a different link to a small review in Times Online so I had to go off and read that too:

“It is cute, beamed and Aga’d up, with eyefuls of lush, rolling countryside through every window, but it’s tucked amid the cobbles of the busy hilltop town of Shaftesbury, in Dorset, and only a stone’s throw away from a deli selling gourmet goodies.”

As a potential renter, I have now been sold on this cottage because it’s been written up in two of the UKs most well known newspapers. I can read any number of reviews written by previous renters, but a piece by a journalist still gives more clout for most people. After all that is what grabbed my attention in the first place.

It might be more helpful to have both those links on one page because I found it mildly confusing that there appears to be two similar home/welcome pages. This then brings me to the irritation of the site itself which I’ll now get out of the way. With a whole page to fill, why is it confined to a little box in the centre? I’m no techie but I’m sure there must be a way of making all those beautiful photos fit the whole page and give us the chance to see bigger pictures and larger text without having to scroll down. For someone viewing on a netbook or smaller devices the text may be impossible to read.

So, onto the photos which are the real selling points. I bang on all the time about making bedroom images stand out and these do it. The text alongside each one captures the imagination and creates a sense of ‘being there’. I could almost feel the pillows, the fluffy duvets, smell the freshness of the rooms and hear birdsong from outside. Romanticising? Yes, of course, but that is what a site with good images does for me.

“Piles of soft, white pillows, fresh aqua fabrics, a window seat heaped with cushions, all set against antique furniture and beams. Aqua overlooks the famous Gold Hill which has cheated the march of time by remaining free of vehicles… except for the odd ‘Hovis’ bicycle!”

(For those not in the know, Gold Hill features in the 1973 "Boy on Bike" television advertisement  for Hovis bread, that has been voted Britain’s favourite advertisement of all time)

Mmmmm….I’m there!

‘Sticky’ features – reviews in known publications; gorgeous bedroom photos – I kept coming back to them; enticing and appealing text, and a whole slew of ‘extras’ not normally found in a holiday rental. I got the impression that the owner really wants guests to feel welcome and at home. Visually it is very attractive and would be even more so if it was enlarged. The photographs are excellent and staged in a way to fire up the imagination and senses.

The downside – the site was confusing to navigate and it was hit or miss in finding all the photos. I would have liked to see either a gallery of photos or the rooms clearly labeled with a set of photos for each one. It wasn’t until I clicked on Tariff that I found all the facilities which are very comprehensive and should be more prominent. Even with the lovely images it would be important to me to quickly find out if there is high speed internet access. I could also have been sold by some of the other features – wood burning stove, grand piano etc but they were not obvious. If I hadn’t clicked first on the media reviews I might even have missed them altogether. The white text on dark background also made it difficult for me to read the text.

Verdict – This site doesn’t have much information on the area, nor does it really capitalize on the location – the ‘Hovis’ hill – so I think there are some opportunities missed here. However, not even the downsides can detract from the visual aspect and the reviews, which together create that ‘must have it’ factor. The learning points for owners are:

• Reviews from travel journalists featured in newspapers and magazines are a powerful magnet for potential rental clients
• Spend time staging photos for bedrooms using attractive furnishings or have them professionally done
• Use text that triggers the senses – i.e. mix visual, auditory and kinaesthetic words – describe what could be seen, heard and felt

  The UK Times Online  has addressed the issue of second home ownership in its article Strangers in Paradise. This mirrors the difficulties cottage owners are facing here in Ontario as the demand for purchasing vacation properties falls off. This is exactly what I was talking about with Seamus O’Reagan on the Canada AM Show last month, and illustrates the challenges facing owners who are having difficulty selling.

I’m visiting two properties in Bancroft tomorrow; both have been listed for sale for over a year with minimal interest by potential buyers. They both have tremendous rental potential and if the current demand for vacation rentals continues, we will have no difficulty in renting them out for the high season providing the owners are willing to do the work to bring them up to standard.

The advice given in the Times article is spot-on which is much the same as I’ve been recommending here:

• Hot tubs add value so if you have the room, put one in
• Invest in contemporary furnishings – there’s such great bargains in furniture and furnishings at the moment, now’s the time to buy
• Provide the latest in hi-tech items – flat screen TV; Ipod docking stations; hi-speed internet; Playstation
• If you want to rent out this summer, put the property with a rental agency to get it moving quickly, unless you have the technical and marketing skills to set up a web site and create traffic. Make sure the one you choose does active low and shoulder season marketing and advertising.
• Price it competitively and get some advice on comparable properties in your area
• Be businesslike and don’t go this route if you are not customer focused

Just as a matter of interest, the demand for summer vacation rentals here in Ontario is at an all time high. Bookings with my agency are already 20% up on the first two months of last year with another 2 weeks to go to the end of February. A bit more on trends later this month.

If you are thinking of renting out, a great primer is my book, Renting Your Recreational Property For Profit.  It’s packed with tips and ideas; checklists and recommendations for setting up a property for rental.  Pick it up from Chapters, Borders or online at Amazon.

I’m writing a longer article on this topic and would love to hear from anyone who is planning on renting out because they cannot sell.

Just a few days after the CBC reported that Lake Superior State University’s 34th annual list of words or phrases that should be banished due to their overuse, misuse or uselessness included the word ‘staycation’, the  UK Daily Telegraph  reports that the Collins Dictionary is considering adding the word to its next edition.

There’s a number of other words that Collins head of content Cormac McKeown describes as ‘gloomy’ as they all relate to the current economic climate but he’s hoping they may be shortlived as popular expressions:

“With a bit of luck most of these will have slipped off the radar this time next year, but my money’s on bad bank and staycation to stay the course.”

I’m using the word ’staycation’ a lot at the moment to describe the phenomenal increase in enquiries about vacation rentals so far this year. It looks as though more people are planning on staying closer to home and traveling less than a couple of hours door to door. This is good news for the rental industry, and savvy owners are capitalizing on this by advertising on listing sites that cater to the home-grown vacationer such as CottageLINK, Cottage Life Rentals and Cottages In Canada in our area of Southern Ontario.

The big issue that’s created by the staycationing trend is the rising number of people who have never rented before; have no clue about what’s in their back yard, and may have wildly inaccurate expectations. A few examples from my inbox:

‘We’re coming up to a cottage so we can skate’.

The perception that a frozen lake meant a 10 mile skating rink and all that was required was to lace up the boots and go, was established by a quick call to the client. No, they hadn’t considered there may be a foot or two of snow on top of the ice.

“We want a completely private cottage; miles away from anywhere – lots of water, no other people…..must have hi-speed internet”.

Umm….there’s unlikely to be a cell phone signal let alone a connection to the internet.

‘Would like a nice place – quite private but within walking distance to shops, restaurants and casino. We’ll be coming by bus so I hope there’s good taxi service in the area.’

There is a great responsibility here for owners and listing sites to educate the neophyte rental public about the area they are traveling to. Many owners take it for granted that everyone knows about the quirks and peculiarities of cottage country, since it’s only a couple of hours from the city, but this is rarely the case. Nor do I see the popular listing sites taking the opportunity to provide information beyond a couple of links to the tourism offices.

I’m going along with the Collins man…..’staycationing’ maybe here for a while so lets cater to the newbie renters and give them more information.

And by the way, my favourite new expression is “social notworking” – the practice of spending time unproductively on social networking websites especially when one should be working. Given the amount of time I now spend on Twitter, this one rings uncomfortably true!

Photo by Sam Spice on Flickr

Well, yesterday was pretty cool!  For anyone in the world who missed my email, call, or general broadcast, I was a guest on Canada AM on CTV and spent a whole 3 minutes discussing vacation rentals with Seamus O’Reagan.  Of course, I am not passing up the opportunity for you to take a second look, so here’s the link to the segment.

I wish I’d had more time – it’s amazing how quickly it went – but it has given me the push to present a series for new owners who want a quick start on setting their place up for rental. This will be emailed out to my newsletter subscribers so if you haven’t signed up, it’s probably a good idea to do it now. You’ll also get a copy of my free ebook, 21 Insider Secrets to Successful Low Season Rentals.

And…..I’ll be doing a random draw from all my newsletter subscribers to send out two copies of my book, Renting Your Recreational Property for Profit.

It doesn’t cost anything to subscribe; you’ll get regular tips and advice on every aspect of rental; and be the first to know the date, time and venue of my Toronto seminar which will be held next month.

I’ve had a few glitches with setting up the ebook to download so if you have a problem, just email me and I will make sure you get your copy.  Hopefully, this will be fixed this weekend and all will run smoothly. I knew I should have asked Kris Abel, the CTV tech expert, when we were sat chatting yesterday!

Of course, I welcome your comments….bring ‘em on!

I was interested to read the media reports about Barrack Obama and family being without power in their Hawaii vacation rental over the festive period. Apparently the power went off for 11 hours, and despite a generator (or two) being swiftly delivered, the president elect chose to remain in the dark and enjoy being powerless for a short time, something he won’t be experiencing in the future.

This got me thinking about a couple of things. Since we had just had a ‘celebrity’ staying in our cottage too, I wondered about the impact all this media coverage might have on the vacation rental industry as a whole.  Will an Obama endorsement have the same impact that fires up millions to buy a product that is mentioned on Oprah?  Could this be the catapult we have needed to open the eyes of the vacationing public to the joys of renting a holiday home?  I hope so.

It would be interesting to see some statistics of hits on the rental listing sites during the week Obama was on vacation since most media reports were using the keywords ‘vacation rental’ or ‘rental home’ in their headlines. Celebrity endorsements can boost sales of products enormously, and can also direct attention to new trends which may be the impact of all this hype. 

Spookily enough, our rental cottage was also hit by a power outage this week. Our guests were probably affected more than the Obama family, as I bet they didn’t have to trudge down to the lake in 2 feet of snow to collect water to flush the toilets.  Our rental clients stuck it out for 6 hours and then decided to bail out a day early. Probably for the best because the rainfall on top of the snow at the weekend created 3 kilometres of ice rink on the cottage road which made it impassable the following day. Oh the joys of vacation rental!

Yesterday we dealt with a half dozen situations where the power was out in properties and guests had to be relocated to alternative accommodation. Those owners lost on average $1000 for the 3-day New Year booking although  the cottage owner who invested $3000 last year in an automatic generator, didn’t lose his guests to another property. He kept his rental money and probably a lot of goodwill from that particular rental group who may only rent properties with generators in the future.  That’s a powerful thought (pun intended!) and I’ll be covering the subject of generators early next week.

I’ve been a little behind in posting this week so will probably work overtime and get in another post or two today to wrap up the year. Stay tuned folks, for my year in review, coming along a little later today.

It’s tough out there and you need to discount your rental prices.

Vacation rentals will thrive in a recession.

People are staying close to home

Discounted package holidays will keep the industry afloat in 2009

It’s hard to know what to believe. There’s reports; patterns; trends, positively focused articles telling us how we’ll experience an upsurge in bookings, and gloom’n'doom reporting about the downturn in the industry. 

Here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

Australia: Reporting falls in rates of 20% – 50% in some luxury properties with a trend for people to stay closer to home.

Property managers have reported full occupancy and waiting lists of at least two years for beachfront rentals… The tourism industry has urged Australians to take advantage of some of the lowest domestic air fares on record and holiday at home.

United Kingdom

In the UK, travel giants Thomson and self catering specialists Hoseasons have signed up with Direct Holidays listing site to add another 50,000 properties to their database.

"Last week the site reported a 15% increase in bookings. It claimed this was in response to holidaymakers looking to book rental properties direct with owners to save money on holiday costs."

South Africa

"A shift in the holiday rental market has been relaxing the policies on the minimum number of days for a booking…local holiday market demand is at its slowest in years."

USA

Tough times open doors for bargain hunters -"Even if a site or rental agency doesn’t feature deals and discounts, don’t be too timid to negotiate. Almost everyone is feeling the pinch these days, and a property owner or rental agent might be really happy to get $1,000 for a nominal $2,000 rental rather than see it go empty."

"Widely considered to be the new hotels in 2009, vacation rental properties offer prices that are more competitive or lower than hotel rates, making them a highly attractive option for cash-strapped travelers and vacationers during these tough times."

I couldn’t find any media comment giving predictions for the Ontario market in 2009. My feelings are, there will be a rise in available properties, meaning owners must find ways of being more competitive.  Late booking may become the norm; there’ll be more discount hungry renters looking for deals, and we should all become media savvy in our attempt to capture the market.

Whatever 2009 brings, it’ll be an interesting year!

After spending the morning ducking the bombardment of conflicting information, advice and suggestions about what we should expect in 2009 in our vacation rental market, this article caught my eye.

"Tough Times Open Doors for Bargain Hunters" comments on the movement by some of the large listing sites to create discount  pages to highlight special deals.

It’s interesting because, on the one hand we’re being told how popular vacation rental will be amongst the ’staycationing’ public, while the doom and gloom merchants are agonising over the potential for gaping availability calendars.

I know it’s going to be tougher in certain areas than others and there will be some that will have a hard time to attract rental clients in a packed market. I’d be interested in hearing from those in other parts of the world with their views on this.

A post on the Vacation Rentals Community was pertinent to this topic too:

"……in the last couple of months it seems like half of our callers are demanding discounts, usually in the 40% to 50% range.  Had one this week that wanted 60% off."

Should we be prepared for this as a norm for next year? 

There was an interesting concept raised on Travolution today.  Will companies like Expedia jump on the growth in the vacation rental market and start targeting owners, given the increasing popularity of this type of vacation? 

It’s difficult to see how this could work since there are quality issues on both sides to start with. The travel company would have to inspect every property in their inventory which would be a massive undertaking in itself, but how could owners feel confident that the guests who have booked are the right ones for their property?  Perhaps those owners who already entrust their rentals to an agency would give this a try, but those who advertise privately – the bulk of the vacation rental suppliers – do so because of the autonomy it gives them to pick and choose their rental guests.  Would they be prepared to pass this over to a third party?

There’s changes coming, for sure, and it’s going to be an interesting couple of years as the online travel industry jockeys for position in this growing market.  I’ll be keeping a close eye on the industry and reporting on developments. And I hope my readers will let me know when they get the call from Sell off Vacations or Expedia. I’d love to know what they are offering!

Home Away, the Texas based vacation rental mogul, has raised another major chunk of venture capital this week.  I was amazed to find that the company employs over 300 people in its Austin headquarters; lists over 325,000 properties and has gobbled up most of the big names in vacation rental over the past few years.  I thought it would be interesting to see what the media are saying about this awesome money raising operation.

The UK Financial Times blog suggest that venture capitalists are seeing it in "the same league as another TCV investment, Expedia, which currently has a market capitalisation of $2.4bn and forecast revenues this year of $3bn."

bits.blogs in the New York Times comments that although visits to travel web sites are down 3% from a year ago, more people will be driving to destinations rather than flying in the next year which accounts for the growth in the vacation rental industry as vacationers stay closer to home.

Tech Crunch calls the pre-money valuation of $1.15 billion "absurd" and has doubts about future growth of the company given its takeover of most of the competition already. There’s some interesting comments on this blog too:

"this is a HUGE and growing opportunity. Many second home owners are feeling the squeeze on that vacation home mortgage and there are something like 19 million vacation home owners who do not rent out their second homes….yet. It is a huge growth market and the economic slow down helps the situation."

"While this company may have a valid business, in looking at the site and the amount of money put in it really does smell like a late 90’s dot com scenario all over."

"Their 11 site acquisition isn’t even a snowflake on the tip of an iceberg. Next to porn, vacation rentals has to be the most saturated industry online. I often joke that there’s more vacation rental websites than vacation rentals."

This was a particularly interesting comment:

"If HomeAway can compile a common set of (high standard) services for its portfolio of holiday homes it can lift itself well beyond the localized (country) based competition and use scale to effect the margin.

The owners of these holiday homes do not want to think about the servicing side of the operation, they want to see high occupancy rates and maximum rental returns. "

So, what does this all mean for us?  Well, I don’t think Ontario cottage listing sites are going to be much affected. Most domestic rental clients find their way to one of the localised sites like CottageLINK or Cottages in Canada, and international travellers are more likely to use Google to find ontario cottage rentals or something similar, which will point them in the domestic direction.

I did advertise one of our properties on Home Away this summer and had an very poor response for the $350 price tag. There have been some enquiries but not one of them converted to a booking, so from my minimal experience I would suggest leaving this one well alone. Of course, I would love to hear from anyone with better experiences.

I had to share this one with you. A report in the UK Times Online has some wonderful examples of complaints made by British vacationers. I’m not quite sure any of them can beat the ones we had recently:

"We were not told we had to walk to the dock" – a 50 yd stroll

"There were lots of boats going up and down during the day – it made it very difficult to relax on the dock"

I see that the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) is suggesting people should complain more. While I have no objection to hearing feedback when a vacation rental is not up to standard, there are limits. But it does give us a good laugh in the office!