Having your own website
personal websites
Seeing that the sites we all use to advertise our properties give you limited space and photos, I created a personal site for added photos and information. When a potential client makes an enquiery, I give them all of the info they require, plus I refer them to my site, www.dewberryvilla.cjb.net . I have had a good season, so I think it must be working!
Malta – always in the sunshine!
We dipped our toes into the holiday rental around 3 years ago and made enquiries with agencies. We were horrified at both how little they were going to charge guests per week and how much cut they would take and dictate when we could use our own property!
As I'm not too bad at putting websites together myself (with Microsoft FrontPage doing most of the work) so I created a web for the cottage. However, this gets very few direct hits for this I rely on a couple of internet cottage listings sites which only charge around £75 per year. I get 100% of my bookings through this method. I picked an agency which comes up top on google when I put in "cottage, northumberland". or your own location)
The listing sites puts up basic info but I find most people will click through onto my site which has lots more info re the cottage, village, nearby and full details of price and availbility.
We've been booked from Easter right through now and just have a week left in Oct and a couple in Nov - It also means we can keep our prices down a bit as we don't have the agencies mark up. It works for us anyway!
As I'm not too bad at putting websites together myself (with Microsoft FrontPage doing most of the work) so I created a web for the cottage. However, this gets very few direct hits for this I rely on a couple of internet cottage listings sites which only charge around £75 per year. I get 100% of my bookings through this method. I picked an agency which comes up top on google when I put in "cottage, northumberland". or your own location)
The listing sites puts up basic info but I find most people will click through onto my site which has lots more info re the cottage, village, nearby and full details of price and availbility.
We've been booked from Easter right through now and just have a week left in Oct and a couple in Nov - It also means we can keep our prices down a bit as we don't have the agencies mark up. It works for us anyway!