How to Advertise your Vacation Rentals by Owner

Ok, so you have a vacation rental and you need to advertise it in order to increase your rental income? You have tried a more traditional approach to advertising it, such as local newspapers, magazines, shop windows, billboards, WOM(word of mouth) and other such methods. But you just aren't getting the inquiries and the bookings that you require to give you a decent return on your property investment?

By utilizing the power and speed of the internet you can now advertise your vacation or holiday home rental using one of a number of vacation rental listing sites. Using such sites will not only save you time, but will also save you a lot of money compared to the more traditional methods mentioned previously.

When you need to rent your vacation rental you need to give it maximum exposure in the right places. This means that your advertising needs to be targeted.

Here are my 4 primary reasons for using vacation rental listing sites.

Exposure

You don’t get much more exposure for your holiday rental than with the internet. With a worldwide audience of billions in hundreds of languages its clear that there is no better way to put your property out there in front of possibly hundreds of thousands of home computer users just looking for their next holiday home to spend their vacations in. Most rental listing sites receive thousands of visitors per month meaning that your holiday rental is getting plenty of exposure.

The internet has become so popular in recent years that it’s the first place people will look to purchase an item or service. Why take a walk down to your local travel agent when you can sit in front of your pc with a cup of tea and search through dozens of rental listing web sites listing thousands of properties in the country that you are looking to spend your holiday in?

Speed

Advertising your holiday home rentals on rental listing sites is a very quick and easy process. In just a few minutes you can add your property descriptions, rates and prices, availability and images to your advert and preview it before paying your yearly listing fee. The advantages in speed over other older style advertising methods is quite apparent and can save you much time, money and effort.

But the speed advantages arent only experienced by the advertisers. Holiday makers also have the ability to search thousands of holiday homes online using certain search criteria such as location, type of property, amount of people the property sleeps and other relevant criteria. Their short list of holiday homes can be found in a matter of minutes rather than spending hours trawling through magazines and newspapers which are limited in detail to say the least.

Cost Effective

Ok now we move on to cost, which is always important. And here's a question for you . How much do you think it would cost to put your advert in front of say 10,000 viewers per month, with a full page advert(in colour) using traditional advertising techniques such as magazines, newspapers, flyers and shop window classified ads?

Ok time up. Thousands is the answer you are looking for!!

To put a full page advert in a half decent magazine with average distribution would probably cost you £2000 or more for one edition. Then you would have to consider how many people would read the magazine? 20,000, 40,000, 60,000? And what if it wasn’t a holiday orientated publication? How many people would even be interested in your holiday home rental advert? Very few I can tell you.

So you see, when you are advertising your vacation rental it needs to be targeted. When people hit Direct Holiday Lets I know that 99% of those who interact with our web site are there for a specific reason which is to find a vacation rental or to advertise their vacation rentals. This is not to mention those who hit your advert directly by googling(searching) for explicit terms in their search engines such as “holiday apartment in crete” or “holiday villa in israel red sea”. Just a couple of examples of the kind of “natural” search terms used.

Placing your holiday home advert in newspapers and magazines is NOT cost effective compared to placing it with vacation rental listing sites.

Who´s in Control?

You are! When registering with vacation rental listing sites you will receive a username and password so that you may log in to your owner area and add or edit your holiday rentals. The advantage of this is that you can modify your advert 24hrs a day, 365 days a year. This flexibility just does not exist with other forms of advertising. If your rates or availability changes in some way, you can log in and change this in minutes for all to see. If you need to upload new photo´s, no problem, just log in and away you go.

You should be in control at all times and with vacation rental listing sites you are.

Conclusion

There can be no doubt that advertising your vacation rental via listing sites is the best course of action in regards to getting maximum exposure of your vacation rental. There is also no doubt that it’s the most cost effective method, saving your possibly thousands every year in letting and estate agent commissions not to mention time and effort.

So what are you waiting for?