Updating your holiday property guide
One of the most useful things to do to attract people to a holiday property is to write about what’s in the local area in terms of places to go and things to do. In addition to the Internet version of this many people also place a pile of brochures on the local attractions in the property itself.
However, this falls down in three main areas. Firstly, on most websites you’ll get at best something to the effect that “there are many chateaux in the area” when they should be naming each one that’s there and saying a little about it. Why? Well, naming the chateaux means that people can find your site by searching for “accommodation near chateau versailles” if you’ve named it. Name everything that you can from beaches to zoos as you’ve no idea what future guests will be interested in.
Secondly, there’s the problem of updating the information. The majority of sites seem to operate on the basis that the local attractions never change. If it’s an historic chateau that may be largely true but it’s not completely true as there are often pageants associated with chateaux and they do change from year to year. More modern attractions change much more frequently with possibly the extreme case being the Disney parks where they seem to be constantly announcing new rides. Any photos you use should be updated on a regular basis and usually you shouldn’t be using a photo of something that’s more than 3 or 4 years old if you can avoid it.
Thirdly, there’s the business of organising the information which is often largely neglected. Guests do take apart guides left in a property and reshuffling things is a pain but it’s something that needs to be done because the idea behind producing a guide in the first place is both to make your guests’ stay an enjoyable one but also to give them ideas to either stay longer or come back to see things they missed. How you organise it depends to some extent on your place and what’s around in terms of attractions. Some places do themed guides so they’ll group all chateaux together, all beaches together and so on. However, that ignores the time required to travel from your place to the various attractions: clearly someone staying overnight isn’t going to be interested in travelling several hours to some chateau. Therefore, it’s probably more useful to organise the information by distance from your place so, for example, everything within 20 minutes (ie just around you), up to an hour (effectively a morning/afternoon excursion) and finally day-trip things (up to a couple of hours drive). What we do is follow the themed approach for the website and the distance approach for the guide in the property.
What’s important though is that your guide doesn’t gradually become more and more out of date. Whilst you could use Marco Polo’s book to explore China, it wouldn’t be an overlly practical guide.
How do you avoid the archaic guide syndrome? On the Internet site the ideal plan is to re-examine all the sources of information that you used to create the guide in the first place and apply updates as required. If you originally worked from actual guide books then you’ll need to purchase the new editions of these (usually they come out every 2 or 3 years).
The “pile of brochures” is a different matter. For a start, don’t make it a pile, organise it in a folder. Our own guide is organised into a section covering the surrounding area (basically everything within 20 minutes of our place), another covering the local region (within an hours drive) and finally one covering day-trips (up to around two hours drive from us). Thus if they’re only staying a day they will find something to do in the surrounding area, a couple of days lets them explore the region and longer lets them do day-trips. This works quite well and is fairly easy to get back into order after guests have pulled it apart. Although you may need to keep ones up to a year old to enable you to collect the latest version for regular festivals and the like, you should weed out anything more than a year old.
This is very much a winter season task although you’ll generally need to have taken the photos for your update during the summer. Incidently, forget about using camera phones for taking these photos: at the very least you need a good compact camera. See our camera guide for more on this.
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