German visitors

[ashtondav]

Hi

I have googled my place in google.de and FEWO comes up on page 1.

Does anyone have any experience of them? As they are quite expensive I would only be interested if they achieved many GERMAN only bookings - I am happy with the level of UK visitors.

If no one has used them any other German oriented sites would help.

Thanks

Tudor
www.frigiliana-apartment.com

[mvus]

You might want to consider getting a human translation of your website into German. 80 million of them who I assume search using German but most still speak English.

I've used 123translate a few times. Very quick and efficient and costs 0.07euro cents per word. Just send text on a word document

Noelia Ruiz
123Translate
669575576
123translate 'at' gmail.com

[ashtondav]

No need for that - my wife's fluent! When we did have a translated site we still did not get many German visitors, that's why i dropped the translation when i re-designed.

I would consider asking her to translate some pages if i could get an website that would provide me with some hits.

[paolo]

Do you mean fewo-direkt.com? I think this is the biggest German site, and it uses the same back-end as holiday-rentals.com used to have. It also has an English version which is vacationvillas.net. I used them and got a few enquiries in German. I don't speak German though, which is presumably why I didn't hear back from any of them.

[Bellywobble]

ashtondav, do you target the Spanish market? I've had enquiries from France and have Dutch guests at the moment, but I'm not reaching the Spanish I feel I ought to do something about it.

[mvus]

I known someone who has been renting on the coast for years and rented a few times to Spanish families. Unfortunately, on a few occasions some would book for say 6 but when the (Spanish) caretaker met them they found the property overfilled and had more than the agreed number when all the extended family came along too.

You can't generalize with people but the Spanish are very family orientated and tend to extend this to holiday time. Some don't mind having a house full but would probably cause more wear and tear and cleaning

[Bellywobble]

That could be a very good reason. You can't really take the whole family to a one bedroom appartment!

[debk]

Back to FEWO, I used them for almost a year (Spring 2005-Spring 2006) with a few inquiries but only two bookings which was not worth their price from our perspective.

In fact, I emailed them and asked to cancel early -- that is to pull my listing -- because the few inquiries weren't worth the hassle of updating their proprietary availability calendar with all the bookings that I was getting elsewhere.

We're in Portugal so, as usual, your mileage my vary.

(It's probably worth noting that we get many German and Swiss guests so it's not that we aren't attractive to that market.)

Hope that helps!
debk