Lay My Hat

This may just be something I have not noticed before but I think airbnb have changed their settings. I was under the impression that people could only book a rolling year in advance - hence I would endeavor to keep prices up to date for that period. I have just had an enquiry for a week in aug 2018 ...

I use Freetobook for 7 cottages - find them excellent. I use ical feed for the availability calendar and take credit card bookings using their Fabpay sytem (which also keeps accounting simple). The up take on their review system is huge (I think the system automatically emails guests after the holid...

I list with ABNB, TA and HA - thinking of trying Booking.com as well. I do seem to remember starting to list with them a while back - however I think they were more geared towards a nightly rate system? I tend to stick to ideally weekly breaks but also minimum of 3 nights - can their pricing system ...

I have found TA and Airbnb synchronize automatically and pretty much straight away. For some reason HA needs you to go into the dashboard and manually click "calendar up to date" which is a bit of a nuisance.

Might give them a try with one cottage - getting so difficult these days to know who to advertise with - the markets littered with agencies.

Just had a brochure through my letter box advertising TUI (Thomson in old money) Villas. Looks like a similar commission model to TA etc - ie 15% commission on a booking. Haven't studied the small print in detail but just wondering if anyone has tried them??

Hi Rosie, how much success are you getting with the listing sites you mention? ie actual bookings or atleast referrals to your own website. Sometimes it can be frightening to work out exactly how costly your handful (at best???) bookings per year from an individual listing site can be. I get inundat...

Thanks Kev - I am using Webplus X8 which is their latest offering - however I have read that they are not carrying on producing or improving it so that's it! I am just curious as to why you feel it is old fashioned coding etc- I assume plenty of commercial designers are using it, I do appreciate its...

I made the decision that credit card payments were definitely the way ahead. Freetobook provided great booking software with incorporated card payments at roughly 1.8%. I then just adjusted my prices for the following year to include this increase. Its worked really well - the FTB system is excellen...

I have just re-designed my website and as always would really appreciate your feedback - the good, the bad and the ugly!! I am finally going to attempt to "blog" more - this will be added in a few days time. This is such an excellent forum for a subject that I feel is becoming more and mor...

I advertise my holiday cottages on HLs (now seems to have been moved to TA) and HA amongst other websites. Having tried a few cottages on subscription basis I now think it is more economical to have them all on the commission listing. What do people think is a fair way to split the fees? I recently ...

Thanks for the replies - I think I will just ditch FK and concentrate on HL/TA. I now have all my cottages on a commission basis with HL, up until recently I had one cottage on a subscription which I canceled (or didn't renew) about 6 months ago. Recently I had 2 enquiries via the subscription adver...

Can anyone clarify the situation now with the above online booking sites. I am happy now with the TA portal effectively taking over my HLs listing and that seems to be working ok. However where does FK now fit in - I haven't really been using FK particularly thinking it was part of HLs and in fact g...

I can thoroughly recommend Freetobook to keep your bookings in order. As implied the basic online diary is free, however it really comes into its own when you use their Fabpay system to take online credit card payments. Once set up it really does keep life simple and the cost I reckon for a credit c...

5-10% is pretty impressive! The past number of years I have gone for a nominal 3%- this year I've kept prices the same for the smaller cottages but increased our two large cottages by 3%. The reason being that the large cottages were proving excellent value for a 3 nights break but a lot of work if ...