Spain-holiday, waste of money?

[Alvaro]

I got a bit nervous back in january so I decided I needed another listing site and went for Spain-Holiday. It seemed such an obvious choice as it is specialized in Spain and it performed well in google searches.

So far it has delivered nothing.

I sent an email to their customer saying

Hi. My advert with you is not working at all. 1 enquiry in two monts. I know market is low and all that but could you take a few minutes to look at the advert and maybe spot things that are wrong or could be improved? Thanks

And this is what they answered

Dear Alvaro,

Thank you for your email. I am sorry to read it is not working for you.
Your ad is perfectly updated, so has high positions, which is therefore very difficult for me to know why it is not working.
It has been looked at more than 500 times since you started advertising, yet very few enquiries have been sent.
There are other apartments in Puerto Duquesa that were taken offline because the manager had them fully booked and he was of course happy about it, so I am not aware why yours isn’t giving the results.
I suppose we need to give a bit more time as you area recent advertiser.
All the best!

Kind regards

That answer is not good enough I´m afraid as Holidaylettings has much less hits and 8 bookings and HA has less hits and 2 bookings and then I even got a booking through a spanish almost free site.

Could they be faking their statistics?

Do they have any money back policy?

Next year I´m pretty sure I´ll be dropping them and choosing OD.

[Unibond3]

Hi Alvaro

Have you done a price comparison with other 2-bed Spanish apartments listed on the site? If there are lots of others less expensive than yours it might explain things.

Something I always do before advertising on a site is to check out the competition. If there are lots of properties in more desirable location or against whom we'd never compete on price, then, even if the site is popular, it's much less likely to work for you.

[Cas & Irene]

Hi Avaro

We had until recently very good results with Spain Holiday.

In our best period (January and begin February 2013) Spain Holiday and Holiday Lettings were our 2 very best listing sites, every week regularly enquiries and about 7 bookings in that period.

Since the end of February it looks like they (and also many others) are offline! Just a single enquiry and not more than 1 redirection a week to our own website!!
(see also our new topic "What’s going wrong with the bookings?" by Index > Bookings)

First we mentioned our advert under ”Yacht” and after an opinion from SH under “Apartments”, but it didn’t make any different.
We tried to get some discount when we place the ad in both categories but they refuse despite the bad results.

I don’t think that they have a “money back policy”.

Good luck!

Cas & Irene

[brenda]

Due to the decision to close our B+B, we cancelled our S-H membership today.

They are the only advertising site that offered to retain the outstanding fee we have paid in case we ever decide to register with them again; we had just paid 12 months renewal - actually wasn´t due until next week - with Homelidays and no acknowledgement at all from them.

Thank you S-H - you may not have bought in many enquiries this year but your customer service is excellent.

[brendan]

Last year S-H was really productive for me and this year it has taken a nosedive but so has every other site!

If they stood out as non-performers I´d dump them but it seems they´re just part of the general malaise in the market.