Our Inns

Much as many of us think that we’ll be keeping that dream property forever, in reality there’s quite a turnover in holiday properties and this year the trading seems particularly hectic.

One key problem with selling a holiday property is that it’s best not to tell potential guests that your property is up for sale, at least not until they’ve paid for their holiday anyway. The reason behind this is that it creates uncertainty in the minds of those guests and that can drastically reduce your bookings. It’s a big mistake to put a “for sale” sign on your website as a number of people tend to do as this will almost certainly lose all advance bookings which, on the whole, tend to be the more profitable ones. Similarly, don’t put a “for sale” outside the property as that’ll lose the drive-bys.

Another issue is that if you’ve decided to sell the property you might cut back on spending money on the property. That’s a big mistake, particularly in these times when a property can be on the market for a considerable period before it’s sold. In particular, you need to keep the marketing in place because potential buyers may want to see that it’s well advertised as they’ll be hoping to be taking on the guests that you’ve attracted. You also shouldn’t neglect the upkeep of the property both because guests won’t like it but also because buyers will be put off too. Obviously you shouldn’t plan on making major expenditures on the property whilst you’re selling it but by and large it’s the small things that make the difference in that critical first impression that a buyer gets.

Clearly, you’ll be listing it with estate agents but selling a holiday property isn’t like selling a house so there are differences here. Although you can list most holiday properties as houses you should also consider listing them as commercial property which is usually handled by different estate agents than the usual house sales people or at least by specialist agents within the agency. If you are selling it as a commercial property then you’ll probably have to provide accounts for the business although it is possible to list a property as “with potential” which negates the importance of those accounts in the eyes of the buyers and usually makes the sales process a lot simpler.

Given the high commission charges that estate agents make, you should also consider advertising the property yourself both though the likes of adwords and by way of internet listings sites. Our own Great Property Direct offers free listings but there are some others offering free listings and many that charge reasonable amounts. When you’re doing this, it’s best to use a separate series of photos than those that you normally use for the holiday property and don’t link through to your property site; this helps to seperate the sales process from the business of renting out your property.

One basic assumption that you’ll need to make is that the new owners will be continuing the business without interruption in exactly the same manner as you. There’s no way out of making such a sweeping assumption as you’ve no way of knowing in advance what kind of buyer you’ll find. I’ll be looking at the consequences of this assumption and how you can deal with them next week.

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Much as we like to think that we would never be taken in by an Internet scam, it’s much safer to assume that at some point you will be and prepare for that.

There’s two basic approaches to this which are 1) recognising scams in the first place and 2) preventing the loss of money if you do happen to be taken in.

To help you with the first one, here’s the latest one that has arrived at the OurInns site recently:

I\’m Charles Strander,i live in UK,I would like to know if your accomodation will be available for rent from the 1st of July to the 15th of July 2008.

email details or call +447045757027.

daddykoboko2@gmail.com

(2 persons)

N.B:The date above may be flexible,so please feel free to let me know when your place will be free for rent. hope to hear from you soon.

Best Regards

Charles Strander

Let’s analyse why this might be a scam.

1. The e-mail address looks a bit suspect, doesn’t it? Some people reject all booking enquiries that use hotmail, yahoo or gmail addresses. They lose a lot of legitimate bookings that way so that’s not foolproof. Having said that “daddykoboko2″ looks quite odd but then again, whilst that’s an indication of a possible scam, it’s not positive proof.
2. The grammar is poor. Don’t worry about the “I\’m” because the odd characters can be inserted by mail programs. “i live in UK” might perhaps indicate a non-native speaker of English yet the name seems very English and it’s that conflict rather than each individually that is another indication that it might be a scam.
3. “your accommodation”: it’s not specific as to your place ie it doesn’t say “your B&B” or “your villa”. However, normal bookings aren’t always that specific either.
4. “from the 1st of July to the 15th of July 2008.” is quite a long period and long rental periods are another indication of a possible scam although this is dependant on the normal period which people stay with you.

And that’s it. You’ve four separate things that indicate that it might be a scam but even together that’s not really conclusive. In fact, the only way you’d know is if the booking came through a listing site and they told you that there’d been 100 or more booking enquiries from this person.

In fact, of the people that received this about half considered it genuine and replied whilst the other half were convinced that it was obviously a scam and the majority of these people have been in the business for quite some time.

OK, so chances are that you are going to be taken in by one of these scams at some point so what can you do to protect yourself?

At the end of the day the scams operate by taking money off you in some manner so the simplest thing to do is to only refund in a like manner. So, if you’re paid in cash return the same cash in case it’s forged. If you’re paid by credit card, process it as a refund to the same card. If you’re paid by bank transfer, refund by bank transfer to the same bank account.

Where this process breaks down is in two basic areas, notably with cheques. Some scammers try to get you to take payment by a cheque drawn on a foreign bank and then refund them in some manner. The problem is that it can take six months for a foreign cheque to fully clear and, of course, who would expect anyone to wait six months for a refund? To avoid this, you either need to refuse foreign issued cheques or to impose a six month moratorium on refunds from cheque payments.

The second area where you can get problems unexpectedly is with bank transfers. Obviously you need to give the person details of your bank account to receive these and the problem is that the same details can be used to withdraw money. All banks will tell you that this is impossible. It isn’t. The way to protect yourself from problems in this area is to quote the number of a savings account as they can’t use the fraud schemes to withdraw money from these. If you’re really paranoid (and it’s safer to be) then use a savings account in a separate bank and keep the balance low.

The upside of all this is that once you start receiving scam e-mails it’s a good indication that your marketing is working.

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Incoming search terms:

• money being taken away
• money flying
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• olivier audouard

We’ve been talking up to now about getting your online advertising going, but what about advertising in print?

Print advertising has a number of quite different characteristics than online advertising which are useful to look at before you get the chequebook out and buy some advertising.

Firstly, it’s almost never free and usually costs a significant amount of cash even for a fairly small advert. Typically you’re looking at a minimum of £60 for the equivalent of a classified advert and it’s typically around £500 to get into one of the holiday brochures with an equally small advert.

Second, it’s limited in size. That £500 may only get you about 100 words and one photo.

Thirdly, it’s time sensitive. This means that if you advertise in a newspaper you’re usually advertising for one day, perhaps for a week in a magazine and a few months in a holiday brochure.

Finally, the lead time can be substantial. To get into the 2009 holiday brochures you need to have your advert with the company by June 2008. That in itself can cause problems if you’re starting up as you may not have that one perfect photo yet.

If you’ve lots of properties to advertise then you can obviously spread the cost between them and perhaps go for a larger advert covering them all. However, even then the photos that you use must be chosen to make your property stand out. As with our example here, your photo should very much be “in your face” as you’ll be competing with page after page of photos of cute holiday cottages in the brochures.

OK, so it’s expensive, the information you can print is limited, it’s time sensitive and there’s a long lead time, but does it work? That’s perhaps the biggest problem: you won’t know ’til you spend the money and try it out. There aren’t any free trial periods for the brochures so you can find yourself out £500 with no return or alternatively out £500 with very substantial numbers of bookings. On the whole, print advertising tends to work fairly well for self-catering properties but poorly for B&B properties. Nobody seems to know why that should be but it’s clear that a typical B&B is going to need up to 40 times the number of bookings as a typical self-catering place so possibly it’s just down to there not being that number of people looking at the brochures these days.

However, if you’ve decided to try it out, what should you do and where should you advertise?

For a quick hit, the best places are magazines focusing on your area as you’re going to reach an audience that’s interested in your general location to begin with so you just need to tell them a little about your place. In general, the tighter the focus on holidays and on your area, the better. For example, say you’re based in France. You could advertise in something like National Geographic’s Traveler if they’re doing a special issue on your area but even then as it’s a general travel magazine you’re not going to have the focus on people interested in your area as you’d get from the much lower circulation of something like French Property News. Not only is it going to be substantially cheaper to advertise in French Property News but you’re going to reach an audience that is already interested in France so part of the job of selling is already done.

Lead time for magazines like this is around one to two months and you generally get offers. Bearing in mind the time sensitivity aspect, you should aim your advertising at issues that will be on the street when you’d expect people to book your place. For self-catering places, this is usually 3 to 6 months in advance of the peak season, for B&B around 1 to 2 months in advance.

For a more sustained burst, something like Chez Nous for around £500 will put your property in the brochures for around 6 to 9 months. This publication doesn’t work well for B&B so only consider it if you do self-catering. One good alternative for this is to get into the travel agents brochures directly which you can do via some wholesale sales places. These look incredibly expensive as they charge you commission of from 25% to 35% but they seem to be one of the few ways you can get your property in front of travel agents. I’ll be covering these later.

For both straight-forward advertising and hitting the brochures, you need to work on the text of your advert. You’ve only got around 100 words to play with so every word needs to count. Whilst it must be easy to read, it also needs to have all those important key words in the text. Likewise, make it easy for people to contact you for more information: quote your website, your e-mail address and a low-cost phone number that they can use. That last one is very important as many bookings are made in working hours and a lot of people can’t phone internationally from work so you need to have a local number that they can use (UK local rate numbers are free from our services page). Check that all the contact details are correct!

If you’re using a photo, it needs to be perfect and one that’ll grab their attention. Ideally the photo shouldn’t have any clouds in the sky and the sun should be in the perfect position to get everything lit to perfection. What’ll grab their attention depends on where you’re advertising. Taking Chez Nous, you’ll find page after page of photos of cute Breton cottages on their Brittany pages and, frankly, few of them seem to have made any effort to make their place stand out from the crowd. If you make that effort, you’ll be rewarded with bookings.

For the online advertising option, why not sign up for our free trial? Unlike many, we’ll not constantly pester you to upgrade to the paid version.

Popularity: 24% [?]