31 Days to Build a Better Blog for Vacation Rental Owners

November 16, 2011

Writing this blog has created a lot of opportunities for me. I get contacted by owners looking for advice and consultancy, journalists needing material for a story, and a lot of interest in my membership site, Renting for Profit. Consequently I believe wholeheartedly that blogs are here to stay, they work to create credibility and [...]

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Blogging – How it Works for this Vacation Rental Owner

November 14, 2011

I’ve written several times about how important it is to keep your vacation rental site refreshed and up to date, and to make it ‘sticky’ – as in encouraging people to stick around. One of the best ways of doing that is to install a blog on your site, so I tweeted a few days [...]

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Being a Guest in a Vacation Rental

November 13, 2011

  I’ve stayed in several vacation rental properties this year and am now looking forward to my first visit to Costa Rica in February where we’ve rented Flying Toucans, an idyllic looking villa with a swimming pool and fabulous views of the Pacific Ocean. As I showed the listing to another friend yesterday and we [...]

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Going Green Can Create More Business

November 11, 2011

It was interesting to read this article from ABTA discussing sustainability in travel, and the growing number of tourists seeking socially and environmentally responsible travel experiences. The key points I picked up from the article are that creating and maintaining a ‘green’ policy for holiday accommodation not only benefits the environment but also appeals to [...]

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Capture off season bookings with niche marketing techniques

November 1, 2011

I took up stand-up paddle boarding this past summer. It’s a cross between surfing and kayaking and I am hooked on this sport. When we were in Dallas a few weeks ago, and staying on Grapevine Lake in an RV park, I met up with another enthusiast and as we paddled out for an hour [...]

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Washing bedding in vacation rental homes

October 24, 2011

   How often do you wash the bedding in your vacation rental property? I don’t mean the sheets and pillow covers that are more likely to come into direct contact with guests’ skin – I’m also referring to blankets, comforters, duvet covers, mattress and pillow protectors. Should they be washed after each rental? When we [...]

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Vacation rental lessons learned on an RV road trip

October 20, 2011

  We are still on our road trip travelling through Texas, and stopping at RV parks along the way. While the big difference is that we are hauling our home behind us, there are a lot of similarities between vacationing this way and renting a vacation home and this year, as in previous trips, we’ve [...]

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7 Tasks for October

October 11, 2011

I’m on vacation in Texas for the past few weeks and have been deep in the woods camping for the last two of them, using the welcome ‘down-time’ to get some writing done. We were without any internet connection for most of the time so its been a good opportunity to do some reflection on [...]

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Why I Like Review Sites

September 16, 2011

I realized recently how much I use review sites for anything from checking out movies on IMDB; books on Amazon; RV Sites on RV Park Reviews and of course vacation rentals on Trip Advisor. My son & his wife have just climbed Mt Kilimanjaro and been on safari in the Masai Mara with an Africa [...]

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Vacation Rental Savings in the Stores Now!

September 4, 2011

Craig White is my business partner in CottageLINK Rental Management; good friend and mentor. He wrote the following for our owners group site, but it deserves a wider airing so he agreed to have it published here as a guest post. For me, the Labour Day weekend always brings with it a wealth of mixed [...]

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