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Let’s face it, the typical vacation rental or B&B just isn’t going to have the marketing budget of Renaissance Hotels and therefore you’re likely to have to tone down your proposal to the advertising executive looking after your account. Of course, chances are, you are the advertising executive and it’s your own place that you’re marketing.

Now, you might think that this means you’ll not be able to produce something quite so classy as the Renaissance campaign and, on the whole, that’s probably true. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t produce something similarly effective and memorable for your own place, albeit on a much smaller scale than the Renaissance campaign.

This image is one composed with a great deal of care with each element of it representing some aspect of Renaissance Hotels in general or of a specific Renaissance Hotel. Thus, we have the two hotel staff on the left representing the high level of service on offer in the hotels and carrying appropriately exotic looking dishes for the guest. Then there’s the individual attention from the pool guy offering the towel on the right. The pool is from their hotel at Seaworld and from the Hamburg hotel we have the arched building in the background. Right in the middle, of course, we have the most important aspect of the composition which is the representative hotel guest. The overall message is that you can expect elegant surroundings with personal service when you stay at a Renaissance hotel.

Obviously all that is specific to their hotel chain and clearly a lot of work went into creating the composition (this is only one of a number of images which they used in the campaign). Whilst you’re probably not going to produce something quite so sophisticated you can follow their principle of reflecting your message throughout your own marketing. They’ve emphasized elegance and service, what are you going to emphasize?

For example, say you have a luxurious chateau then make sure that in every image you use there’s a hint of that luxury. Perhaps by something as simple as a Louis XIV chair in the photo of the pool, or the Mercedes parked in front of the entrance. The idea is that you follow through on your core message of “a hint of luxury”. Or perhaps, your message is that yours is the place for outdoor persuits. In that case, each image should contain something hinting at one of those. The racing bike resting against the wall, the hikers heading off down the path, etc.

Doing this isn’t always as difficult as it might first appear. However, the key thing is to be clear on what message you want to get across. Once that’s clear in your mind you’ll be able to make the small changes in the images that you take which are required to get a consistent message across to potential guests.

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Surely not, it can’t be the new year already can it?

Ah, well, whilst many owners don’t begin their marketing for the new year until they’re actually into the new year, in fact it’s now that you should be starting to gear up with your marketing. Sure, you’ll not be able to go full pelt at it just yet as you’re still busy dealing with the summer guests but it’s time to make a start.

The first task is to assemble a list of all those sites that you’re currently advertising on. If you’ve not been keeping track of your listings, check things like your bank or paypal account for payments made for advertising and searching for yourself in google.com, live.com and yahoo.com.

Once the list is complete, go through it and add in the cost per year for each entry and, if you can, the number of bookings provided in the previous year and how long each one was for. When you’ve done that, you can examine it in more detail over a week or so and decide which subscriptions you’ll be renewing. For each listing, look at:

1. Is is free? If it is, you may as well keep it regardless of results.
2. If you’re paying for it, did it provide more bookings than it cost? If it’s a close call and the bookings are good quality, it’s probably best to renew anyway as you may be getting bookings from them which you’re unable to trace back to them.
3. If it’s providing a sensible number of bookings, are they good quality ones? Longer term bookings are better than shorter term ones and by dropping a site providing a stream of overnight bookings you’ll make space for more longer term bookings. For example, we dropped one site that was providing a lot of overnight bookings this year and ended up substantially increasing our occupancy in the form of more longer term bookings.
4. If it didn’t provide you with any bookings then consider not renewing it or downgrading to a cheaper entry if that’s an option. Remember that you may not be able to trace all bookings back to the original listing that people found you on.
5. Consider upgrading listings on sites that have brought you bookings eg we prioritise the search results on premium listings thus those with premium listings get more bookings from us and many sites operate similar prioritisation policies for listings (typically called bronze, silver and gold or something similar).

You might think that if a site hasn’t provided you with a booking and you’re paying for it then you shouldn’t renew the listing. However, remember that it’s quite common for people to look you up on a site and then e-mail or phone directly ie you wouldn’t know for sure where the booking is coming from (and asking them rarely produces the correct answer even if they think they know where they found you); similarly even direct click-throughs to your own site don’t always appear in the stats. What you don’t want to do is to cancel a listing only to find that it was really providing you with substantial numbers of bookings. Finally, remember that it’s the first place that they found you which is important but, usually, it’s the last place that they will quote to you.

Next you need to consider new advertising which is a whole different ballgame so we’ll look at that separately next.

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Who among us hasn’t felt themselves drawn to a very old property that we felt would have been the ideal place for us in its heyday?

Well, those old properties can be restored to their former glory but don’t make the mistake of underestimating the time or cost that this will entail as Becky will attest.

The history of this particular house goes right back to 1136 when it was part of a grange and owned by a monastery. Ownership passed through Henry the eighth when he disolved the monasteries and subsequently sold in 1557 to the Kemeys in 1601 who carried out some building work from then ’til they sold it in 1793. The Howard family then bought it in 1793 and kept it until 1941 when it was split into apartments before being sold to developers in 1970. By 1972 it was scheduled for demolition but subsequently saved from that fate by the McLeod family who kept it safe until it was acquired fairly recently by Becky who has completed the restoration started by the McLeods. Becky has much, much more detail on the history of the estate.

As you’ll appreciate from this lengthy history the first question that arises is simply what to restore. After all the house changed quite significantly over the period from the initial construction. Naturally, there are no plans and few drawings or paintings to guide any restoration for any truly ancient period.

Since this building was scheduled for demolition, clearly the first task is to do whatever work is required to stop it actually falling down. For example, whilst the ivy looks cute on the house, it’s destroying the fabric of the building and left unchecked will demolish it therefore it has to go and the brickwork behind it needs to be repaired. All really old buildings are unique in the problems and challenges that they present. Here it’s ivy but others may have watercourses to deal with or perhaps trees undermining the foundations.

As Becky says, the cost of restoration using period materials and methods can be astronomical. However, it’s necessary to restore the building with those older methods because old and new often don’t mix well. For example, old buildings didn’t have damp courses and therefore needed to be able to get rid of rising damp in different ways. If you use new techniques on an old building you’ll end up with all kinds of problems arising from that particular difference in approach.

That massive cost of restoration has led to a number of owners going down the DIY route and therefore there are a number of courses that are available to owners who wish to carry out the restoration themselves.

It’s important to remember that you’re not alone in taking on restoration projects like this: help is out there. To start you off, I’ll shamelessly pinch the list of links that Becky has:

1. Period Property and Building Conservation have all kinds of resources for this from for sale listings, forums for owners, specialised property insurance, a directory to find the materials and lots more;
2. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and SAVE are there for a little handholding (SAVE lists some beautiful properties in need of someone to restore them).

Even if you’re not quite ready to restore a whole building by yourself you can help those who’ve got one of these properties in their upkeep and stay in a truly historic property.

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