Who offers pay-per-enquiry for owners?

[new2itall]

Hi - What a fantastic site - I can see that I'll be spending far too much time here. Can anyone please advise me which advertising site offers some kind of pay per enquiry deal? I've looked at all the main sites like holidayrentals and holidaylets - but they all want money up-front. I would rather just pay for each enquiry I get (as long as it turns into a booking ). Please forgive me if this question seems naive - I am a new owner and so I know I'm a very dark green - but I can't beleive that no-one is offering this to owners. Is it any different in the US? (I'm based in the UK - but our house is in Mallorca)

[Hells Bells]

Hi, have a look again, some of them offer a free trial period first. I use homelidays.com for mine, and I got a free trial period first, as I did with holidaylets. I do know of a site which offers free advertising, but takes 10% commission per booking, but as it's a specific website for a ski resort , it would be no good to you.
And, welcome to Lay My Hat

[Garri]

Please forgive me if this question seems naive - I am a new owner and so I know I'm a very dark green - but I can't beleive that no-one is offering this to owners.

There is one site offering this but it's for France I think.

I can't believe owners fall for it because it's open to abuse and therefore a dodgy business model.

[la vache!]

I joined a France one once, holidayswanted.com or something like that.It was a complete waste of time and money. You pay per enquiry, as Garri says, it's open to abuse and you pay for answering enquiries from people who are often not serious about ever booking.

[ashtondav]

You could try villarenters who charge 10% for a booking and also offer the facility to accept credit cards for about 4% (if you secure the booking).

To compensate for their 10% charge i add about 5% to my prices on other sites. (As i reckon to pay 5% on advertising anyway.)

I'm not the best advert for VR having only got three bookings in 2 years - and i know others on this site have had problems with them. I can only say that whether VR got the booking or if I simply used them as a credit card payment mechanism for the 4%, everything went OK.

The economics of the up-front sites really depends on your rental prices. Holiday-Rentals' £180 is a small price to pay for 4 weeks of bookings at £3,000 per week (less than 2%). £180 for 4 weeks at £350 works out at nearly 13%! ie better off paying VR, or an agent, 10%. So if you're nearer the £350 market you would need 5 weeks of bookings to get down to a 10% "commission" with H-R. They're good, but not often THAT good.

If you're new, the best method is as Paulo advises. Search google for phrases that are relevant to you (holiday apartment/villa in xxxxxx etc) and see which sites are on the first page of google.

The reality is you will be going with some up front payment sites - choose 3 or 4 for your first year and drop the one that doesn't perform. And as the others say, don't go near pay per enquiry sites. If you look through the postings on this site there's a guy who has a website which features all the free, and free offer, websites. I've never had a booking from a free site, though.

One other thing - don't underestimate the value of having your own site. 40% of my bookings come that way and, strangely, the majority of low season bookings. Maybe i'm lucky because i appear on the first page of google for my (small) village. With a little bit of elbow grease and a reasonable host it works out cheaper than most advertising sites. Keep working on it!

Good luck

Tudor
www.frigiliana-apartment.com

[new2itall]

thank you for your comments but I don't understand Garri's point:
>>I can't believe owners fall for it because it's open to abuse and therefore a dodgy business model.<<

Do you mean that the advertising site would keep e-mailing your property to bump up the amout you pay - but surely you'd be able to see that it was all coming from the same person?

Some of the sites let you show your booked weeks - so I thought that this would stop the wasted enquiries that I couldn't fulfil. Does this help anyway, in your experience?

What puts me off the annual fee is that I don't know if it will be worth the money and they don' seem to give any sort of guarantees. I looked at Holidaylets - but they don't offer a free trial (not that I could see).

Thankyou Tudor for your advice – that’s really practical! I did think that Holiday-rentals looked the best simply because of the size of the site, even though they were the most expensive – but I hadn’t thought through the economics in that way.

[ashtondav]

New2, people are far more devious than your second paragraph implies. Believe me!

You only have four choices:

1. Free sites or sites with free offers. Try this link for more info: http://www.compareownerholidayrentals.com/

2. Go for the up front payment sites. Again take a look at that link for deals and offers.

3. Some sites allow you to join and pay for a short period(s), effectively testing them. Portsidepromotions and ownersdirect do this, i think (monthly and quarterly contracts respectively).

4. Use agents or commisiion sites. They will usually want a lot more than 10%! My local agent charges 20% so i only let him sell low season weeks when i find it difficult to occupy. One local agent wanted 33%!

As i said in my post, if you are at the lower end of the pricing market go first with the less expensive (but still google page 1) sites. Its worth registering with H-R as after a while they emailed me with a money back guarantee ad for a year (so far not encouraging it has to be said).

Do try your own website and price competitively in your first year (you have something to prove, your established competitors do not!)

Tudor
www.frigiliana-apartment.com

[Garri]

thank you for your comments but I don't understand Garri's point:
>>I can't believe owners fall for it because it's open to abuse and therefore a dodgy business model.<<

Do you mean that the advertising site would keep e-mailing your property to bump up the amout you pay

Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

but surely you'd be able to see that it was all coming from the same person?

All they would have to do is set up a mysql database and some scripts to auto-generate enquiries. Populate the database with some variations of enquiries and make sure there's some conditional logic in the db to ensure that owners don't get the same emails twice. Then, a script that recognises when you've replied to the fake enquiry so that the database can 'follow up' and send you an email saying 'sorry, but we've found somewhere else, thanks'.

Easily done. With a slickly designed website and the mechanism to take the micro-payments it's a license to print money, or they could sell in incremental blocks like phonecards e.g. £10 for x amount of enquiries.

[kevincohr]

"There is one site offering this but it's for France I think."

RentalsFrance offers a pay per enquiry, although I have no direct feedback on from owners who have tried it.

Another alternative is VacationRentals411.com. They offer a free listing, with the opportunity to "bid" for higher placement on thier site. Most of the feedback we have received has been positive. You can find a review of them on our site.

Regards,

Kevin

[Dog House]

"Please forgive me if this question seems naive - I am a new owner and so I know I'm a very dark green - but I can't beleive that no-one is offering this to owners".

If you are located in the Vendee, France. Then have a look at www.vendee-gites.co.uk Commission charge of 10% on confirmed booking only.

[Alan Knighting]

For the life of me I can't imagine why anyone would want to pay “per enquiry�.

As Garri says, it is so obviously open to abuse. I would go further and say that you would be begging to be ripped off. Spurious enquiries are so easy to generate and the property owner finishes up paying for them. I’m not saying that’s what does happen, I am saying that’s what could happen and if it does happen you only have yourself to blame.

Paying “per booking� is another matter entirely. Paying a commission out of money paid and received is a normal business practice.

I know it’s “horses for courses� but I prefer the normal approach with Listing Sites, where one pays an annual fee up front. There are no guarantees of enquiries, there are no guarantees of bookings but there are no further payments either and there is no chance of being scammed by the Rental Site!

Alan

[Sue Dyer]

New2

I think it is just a matter of doing some research and taking the plunge to a site which suits your pocket and others seem to get good results from.

I advertise on 2 (UK) sites which cost me about £70 each annually. That is my sole advertising for a year so I was happy to take the gamble with them, which luckily has paid off so far.

good luck.

[new2itall]

Thanks again for your comments. I did look at rentalsfrance - but it looks a very amateur site and when i clicked on the links and property pages many didn't work. Plus my property is in Spain (mallorca) so I wouldn't use it anyhow. I also looked at vacationrentals411 - but they don't actually say how much you have to pay to get at the top of their advance listings (i've e-mailed them to ask them - but no reply) Anyone use them before I go through the business of signing up? I've now signed up with a couple of sites that you have recommended (thank you) both based in the UK because I think this is where I'll get my customers from. I've also found a site called holidaybank - does anyone use them? I've looked through the postings on LMH and can't find them mentioned - don't know if that's good or bad. They look better than holidayrentals but they don't say how long they've been around for.

[Garri]

Holidaybank is one of the better designed listings sites and I noticed they've improved the layout. Reasonable cost too.

I reckon you have to nominate a budget and experiment with a basket of sites. Also, sign up for free offers but make sure you time the start of the trials well. I think people here have mentioned that before.

Holiday-rentals (awful site as it is), are offering, or were offering a money-back guarantee but check the small print first for any caveats.

[kevincohr]

If you are considering sites that focus specifically on Spain, you might want to consider www.spain-holiday.com .

Regards,

Kevin