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If you are taking over an existing holiday property business, you should try to retain the existing name if at all possible.

Why? Well, the existing owner will have been marketing their property, possibly for many years and therefore the name will appear in a great number of places ranging from road signs, old newspapers and magazines through to internet sites. Even if you could track down all those places, in many cases you won’t be able to change the name. For example, we still get calls from people from an advert we placed in French Property News nearly three years ago.

On the contact front, you should also try to retain the existing phone number, website address and e-mail address. All of these will be used both by previous guests and others who look your place up.

If it’s a new place, then it’s an entirely different proposition.

With a view to eventual website promotion of your property, you should avoid using anything other than normal English alphabetic letters ie no accents, no “&”, etc. and avoid choosing anything that is difficult to pronounce. It’s best to avoid provocative names. Ideally it should be something short, memorable and unique which is a difficult combination to achieve but one that’s worth working on at the outset.

In combination with working on your name, you should also check that the names on your shortlist are available as Internet domain names. The domain that you should aim for are the .com and the country specific one for your target market eg .co.uk if you’re aiming at the UK market. Should you find that the names are available, register them immediately to avoid having to go back and go through the name selection process again should someone else choose the same name (you don’t need to worry about the website at this point). Register both the .com and country specific domain: it’s only about £5/year for each and having two domains gives you twice as many chances to promote your place online.

Our little photo is to remind you to be careful with any associations that you might not want made with your place. For example, if you had a houseboat for rent, it might sound 1) cute and 2) sure to get good publicity to call it Titanic. But, what about guests who associated the name with a sinking boat?

I’ll be covering how to go about registering your domain later.

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How many would openly admit that they fell in love with a property first, bought it, then started thinking about how to a) run it and b) market it as vacation accommodation?

Of course, it happens, it’s just that few people would admit to doing it.

So, what do you do once the property is yours? A lot depends on the condition of the property naturally as some people buy property in need of renovation, others buy something that’s ready to run and many buy something in between those extremes.

Clearly if you’ve a lot of renovation to be done before the property is useable as holiday accommodation then you’ll need to concentrate on that first. However, you should always be thinking of how you will market the property as that will affect how the renovations need to be carried out. Not only that, but you should be researching local attractions because you’ll need to know about those for use both in your marketing and when guests ask you where they can go.

You’ll need to know how potential guests are likely to use your property too. For instance, it’s fine to have a vacation rental miles from civilisation as the guests will be staying there for at least a week at a time but a B&B needs to be much closer to the attractions as guests will generally only be there for a few days at most. If you’re close to a motorway exit or an airport you may find that people will start to use you as a one night stop-over.

It’s useful to separate out the different aspects of your “product” in your marketing. By that I mean that there will be aspects of your marketing that relate directly to the property itself (cute cottage, city apartment, etc.), others relating to the type of location (countryside, beach, etc.), the attractions that are in the area, and, of course, whether you are marketing a B&B/hotel or a self-catering property.

Finally, don’t forget that you aren’t simply advertising your property: you are marketing it which is quite a different thing to do. Advertising implies that you cannot change anything whereas with most holiday properties you can change almost everything apart from the physical location of the property.

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