Do you rank higher on HA with subs?

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
sazzleevans
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Do you rank higher on HA with subs?

Post by sazzleevans »

I’m buried on HA I’ve been in it for years. Was always high up even when I went to PP booking now I’m buried would paying subs rank me higher?
Giraffe
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Post by Giraffe »

In my opinion, no. I am on subscription but have fallen off the cliff. When I search on my village I don't appear at all. Gave up after the first 400 results, and there are only around 80 residential houses in the village, let alone holiday lets! Only 1 OD booking for this year, don't know how they found me.

Won't be renewing my subscription next month. May stay on there on commission for the online presence. It's such a shame, up until last year I did well on HA/OD.
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COYS
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Post by COYS »

Agree with Giraffe. Last subs renewal has produced tumbleweed, but I don't think it's necessarily a 'listing type' issue. I have friends who follow every HA diktat, are higher up the pages, but who are still only getting a fraction of the enquiries/bookings of years past. The added cost of using them must be having an effect but as far as ranking goes I think that their insistence on area/town/village search returns covering such a wide & often irrelevant area means that we are competing with so many more options than we realistically should be.
Like Giraffe, a search for our well known & established tourism village will return hundreds of homes that are nowhere near it, in some cases on the opposite side of the island which is a 2 hour drive away with a markedly different microclimate & infrastructure. For me, this is one of the biggest factors in HA enquiries dropping off a cliff in our area.
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sazzleevans
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Post by sazzleevans »

Thank you thts what I thought but wasn’t sure. It’s mad!
Jenster
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Post by Jenster »

If anything being on subscription would have the opposite effect. With commission listings ha have more incentive to get you bookings as this earns them commission from you and the guest. With subscription you have already paid, so they will get no more from you. Why would they put you above an equivalent property they will earn commission per booking from?
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Rogthedodge
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Post by Rogthedodge »

Service fee, but they would get that anyway I suppose. Unless they change their tact are they not doomed?
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AndrewH
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Post by AndrewH »

Jenster wrote:If anything being on subscription would have the opposite effect. With commission listings they have more incentive to get you bookings as this earns them commission from you and the guest. With subscription you have already paid, so they will get no more from you. Why would they put you above an equivalent property they will earn commission per booking from?
I can see the logic in that.

I am presently on subscription with HA/OD, but if I were to change to a commission listing, would the guest be charged anything more than the 'service charge'? I doubt it, but you never know.
Peggymac
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Post by Peggymac »

We have gites in France... Before HA got hold of OD we had a subscription with OD for the UK market and one with HA/Abritel for the French.
OD eventually became useless for us when HA started fiddling (possibly just before) and we went with a commission based advert keeping the Abritel as subscription. For the past 12 months we have not had a single request from the Abritel one as the OD advert is always way above the Abritel one on all the HA sites so the French never get to see it and even the French (on Abritel and Homelidays) use the OD advert to make an enquiry through. We have dumped the Abritel one completely and just gone with the OD commission based one.

We don't get a lot of bookings via HA so the number of bookings times commission is much less than the subscription (thankfully) and the OD advert covers all the HA sites (which it didn't used to). If HA contributed a higher number of bookings for us we might have a problem with the subscriptions adverts showing up lower in the list. Also HA are forcing the "Pay through us" model with all their listings, so another reason for subscription adverts gone.
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Peggymac
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Post by Peggymac »

I forgot to say that HA seems to charge the client the same for a commission based advert as for a subscription based advert.
Peggy and Lionel

Always do Cooking, Bed Making and Website design with Love and the rest will follow.
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