Our Inns

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

We’ve talked about registering your domain, getting somewhere to host it, what you need to include on the site and how to get the perfect photos. Next up is getting it written either by yourself or paying someone else to do it but before we get to that, I thought it better to start with what you shouldn’t have on the site.

The first thing you need to bear in mind is that your site is there to sell your property to prospective guests. In particular it’s not there to show off the skills of the website designer. If you’re getting someone to write it for you, remind them of that; if you’re writing it yourself, keep in mind that it’s not a showcase for your webdesign skills.

How will they find your site? To sell your property you first need the people to see your site which usually means that they will find it via a search engine. Search engines can’t read images so it’s vital that your site actually has text on it (as much as possible). There’s something of a trend for some site designers to put everything in an image (even the text) which has the effect of making the page appear completely blank to the search engines.

What’s your place look like? When they reach your site people want to see what your place is like which is where your photographs come in. These photos need to be “Internet size” which means no larger than about 300 pixels wide. If you just upload the image from your camera chances are that it’s more like 3000 pixels wide which means that the page will take around one hundred times as long to load as it should. That 100 fold increase means that instead of taking a second or two to load it will take a couple of minutes even on ADSL and possibly an hour or more on dial-up (which is still used by a lot of people). Many people just don’t have the patience for that and will look elsewhere. Large images should be accessed by clicking on the small ones but even then “large” means no wider than 800 pixels.

What’s going to be on your homepage? This is one of the most important pages of your website yet a number of people use it merely to hold a large photo of their property and “click to enter”. In practical terms, you may as well not have that page there if that’s all that’s going to be on it. Websites aren’t like brochures with a front cover: people want to arrive on real content when they go to your site.

Background image? Think plain if you’re using one. Much as the faded image of your property as background to all the text might sound great and look fantastic on your computer, you can’t depend on it looking good or the text remaining readable on other screens and, of course, a full-screen background image is massive and therefore takes ages to download.

Animations? By and large these just eat up your bandwidth and annoy readers of your site. Avoid them.

Javascript? Many people block this with the security settings so you’re eating bandwidth un-necessarily. It’s best to think “plain vanilla” for the HTML that you use as it will load much faster and work on a much wider range of setups.

Background music? Another eater of bandwidth. Personal spoken greetings fall in the same category.

Finally, remember that each page is important in its own right and people can arrive directly on any page on your site. Therefore make sure that you can reach the rest of your site no matter what page they start with. Make each page unique and you can increase the number of entries that you have on the search engines: many people use the same title and description on every page which just throws away the possibility of extra entries. You’re going to lock down your site so they can’t do that? That would be one of the worst things you can do as the search engines won’t be able to access it either and it’s seriously annoying for users of the site too.

I was going to put an image of one of the worst sites around as my photo for this post but as that would only encourage them, I’ve left it to your imagination how bad they can be: think glaring background, flashing text, menu constantly circling around the page with each menu choice animated and tune playing in the background. Hard as it may be to believe, that was all on a single website that I came across this morning for a holiday property although it was actually worse than that as they didn’t even have any text on the page “describing” their property. The images were so large that the site crashed the browser so I don’t really know what their property looks like. Oh, and the site was done by a “professional” website designer.

Popularity: 69% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Up to now we’ve looked mainly at how you could go about marketing your holiday property, but equally important is getting paid for all your hard work, so how do you do that?

In days gone by you’d have relied on drive-bys and just taken cash. Some people still do that but it’s a decreasing band and these days most people accept a range of payment methods which I’ll go through briefly here to give you an idea of what’s involved.

Cash is easy to accept of course but you need to be clear what cash you accept. Is it only the local currency or will you accept, for example, pounds, dollars and euro? If you are planning on accepting foreign currency, check what it will cost you to change it to your local currency before you start accepting it as it’s often extremely expensive: around 10% for reasonably large amounts and for, say, £50 you could find it costing you £10 ie 20% to change it.

Travellers cheques are just as easy to accept although if you’re accepting cheques in foreign currencies you’ll be hit with charges similar to that for accepting foreign cash. You don’t need to sign up in advance to accept these. Stick to brands that you recognise (American Express, Citibank, Thomas Cook and Visa are the major ones) and write the passport number of the person giving them to you on the cheque. You can usually deposit these as cash in your account but some banks charge (usually around 1%).

Personal cheques are best avoided as the number of bounced cheques is on the rise. In the UK you can accept these when backed by a guarantee card but remember that the amount is only guaranteed up to the amount stated on the card and, no, this does not mean that you can get people to write several guaranteed cheques if the amount is above their limit.

Credit cards, debit cards and charge cards are something that you simply have to accept these days. Costs vary considerably but as a small business you should expect to pay between 1% and 4% of the amount to your bank. If you don’t want to go to the bother and expense of signing up for a machine with your bank you can still accept credit/debit card payments by signing up with PayPal which lets you accept online payments for around 4% with no monthly charges (you can also upgrade to a “virtual terminal” and accept payments directly from people for around £20/month). Banks will require you to have a business bank account before you can accept cards through their machine. Be wary of saying you accept “all major cards” because 1) that’s quite expensive and 2) what people call a “major card” may not correspond with your thoughts: it’s much better to say “we accept American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB, Mastercard and Visa” (if you really accept all “major cards”).

Holiday vouchers come in untold numbers of different varieties but some are limited to particular types of establishment eg you couldn’t accept restaurant vouchers if you don’t have a restaurant. You usually need to sign up for each scheme in advance and will pay around 1% commission on the amount. These are very popular in some countries and, for example, in France the Cheque Vacance scheme includes you on a brochure distributed throughout France which is pretty good publicity for 1% commission. You may need a business bank account to be able to accept these.

You should think about which of the above you’re going to accept before you start marketing as it’s handy to be able to say “we accept payment by….” and some people will book you in preference to somewhere else that doesn’t accept their preferred method of payment.

Popularity: 64% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

When you’ve been marketing your property for a while you’ll find that you begin to get what eventually becomes a flood of fraudulent bookings.

In some ways, that’s a good thing in that it’s an indication that your marketing is working. However, it can quickly become a major pain.

Replying to these people has the disadvantages that they now know that they have a valid e-mail address and secondly that it wastes time that you could be spending on getting real guests. Therefore it’s worthwhile considering how you can weed them out.

The first action of most people is to activate a spam filter. This does thin out the numbers considerably but it has the major downside that it also blocks e-mails from genuine guests. Now, granted it lets the vast majority of genuine e-mails through but you obviously don’t want to block any genuine enquiries ie in activating a spam filter you need to accept that you will lose genuine bookings.

What’s considerably more effective is a two stage process for most people. First, change your booking e-mail address and then replace any references to your e-mail address by a link to an encoded form. For example, to e-mail me you can click here and anyone listed on the OurInns sites can do the same thing. This has the advantages that 1) your e-mail address is never displayed on the site and therefore can’t be captured by automatic scanning programs and 2) e-mailing via the form is difficult to automate ie it’s less likely that you’ll get spam that way. The OurInns system provides adds automatic blocking of bulk e-mails and a check for the location of the sender.

However, regardless of what you do, you’re still going to get some of these fraud bookings coming through.

Once you’ve seen a number of them you’ll get a feel for what’s real and what’s not. For example, many will be from some (usually) religious organisation, there will be major grammar errors in them and they’ll use free e-mail addresses such as hotmail or yahoo. That said, organisations obviously do make bookings, real people have dreadful grammar and they use hotmail and yahoo addresses but, on the whole, it’s an overall view of the enquiry that’ll ring bells for you.

The other type of fraudulent booking that you’ll get is from people who require a visa to enter the country. Generally speaking you’ll get these if you offer an instant booking facility on your site because they require proof that they’ve booked accommodation to get the visa. The characteristics of these are that they are 1) from nationals of countries that require a visa and 2) they are usually for unusually long periods for your cheapest room. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to separate these out from the real bookings: clearly you can’t just reject bookings from, say, non-Europeans as that would include a great deal of real bookings. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to reject unusually long bookings as some people from distant countries do stay longer than average.

What you need to do in these cases is to add an extra paragraph to your booking conditions requiring all visa nationals to 1) provide you with a copy of their passport and their visa and 2) charge them the full balance upfront on a non-refundable basis. Most European countries require you to record the passport details of non-Europeans that stay with you so legally you’re fine on the first point and it simplifies any required visa application if they can prove that they’ve paid a non-refundable deposit so genuine guests are OK with the second point.

Finally, you’ll usually find that the number of fraud bookings increases dramatically in the peak season. Clearly that’s the most lucrative time for most of us and we don’t want to be holding rooms for duff bookings so over the peak periods, it’s usually best to ignore any bookings that you’ve any doubts about as the rooms that you’d have to hold for them will be taken by real people making enquiries that you’re happy with.

Popularity: 57% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!