The hunting season for holiday accommodation guests is open
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:
- Is is free? If it is, you may as well keep it regardless of results.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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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- Selling your property whilst keeping the business running
- Happy New Year from the best accommodation website in the world!
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