Lay My Hat

Our property is near the seafront in Brighton so I was thinking of getting some postcards or flyers printed to put on the cars in the car parks of the big hotels. This could be considered a bit of a cheeky thing to do but that aside do people think this could be worthwhile to catch these people when they come back to Brighton?

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In France every time you go to market you come back to find at least one leaflet stuffed under your windscreen wiper. They go straight in the bin.

I'm with RuuElisa. Fly posting and illegal.

Find businesses in the area who are happy to let you leave some or pop one in local newsagents.

no, I don't think appropriate, there's something a little desperate about flyers on a car......

Print some postcards and leave them for your guests to take home - or stamped for your guests to send to their friends.

I had some postcards printed last year (double sided ones to make the most of the paper) and leave a couple in the cottages for guests to take, and also put some up in the windows of local shops. I also put a load in the local fish & chip shop where a lot of the tourists go. It's difficult to say whether we get bookings as a direct result, but our bookings have increased this year and I'm always refilling the stock of cards in the fish & chip shop.

I always make a mental note never to purchase goods or services from any firm which slaps a leaflet under my windscreen wiper - it's a practice I loathe. You would be better off finding locations where people don't mind you leaving postcards for patrons to take such as shops and leisure facilities.

Wow, what a consistent "don't do it"!

I parked my car in a gym carpark once and had a flyer from a physio put on my windscreen. I have been visiting him now for 15 years! Guess it doesn't both me. But that's just me.

Thanks for the feedback!

Have you never climbed gratefully and hastily into your car to escape the rain, belted up, started the engine - and then spied a limp piece of paper flopping soggily behind your windscreen wiper requiring you to unbuckle, get back out into the rain and extract it? Worse still the piece of highly coloured, badly printed paper that was placed there the day before, after which it rained and then dried out so you have to get a chisel to actually remove it from your window? If you were to do a straw poll about approval rates for windscreen leafleters I don't think you'd need a supervised recount to determine the outcome

I parked my car in a gym carpark once and had a flyer from a physio put on my windscreen.

I think the explanation is that marketing a physiotherapist is a whole different ball game to a holiday let. The customer's outlay on a physio, or a restaurant meal, is likely to be what? 10%? of the outlay on a holiday rental.

brightmike wrote:I parked my car in a gym carpark once and had a flyer from a physio put on my windscreen.

That was a local business marketing to a local clientele... and a clientele that might already be in need of a physio.

Putting a flyer for a holiday let on the cars of people who are already in that town - and may be local anyway and parked for a meeting, seminar or for work - doesn't seem that focussed to me.

I often get leaflets left on my windscreen when I'm in towns on market days, etc, and if it's not advertising some forthcoming event that might interest me or guests, I don't get further than glancing at them before binning them.

I returned to my car one day to find a flier for a new hairdresser in the town under the windscreen wiper. I promptly binned the flier.
Next time it rained (didn't have to wait too long for that!) I found that my windscreen wiper had been damaged by having been bent to put the flier under it. If I had remembered the name of the hairdresser I would have been prepared to threaten action. I was pretty annoyed at having to pay to put it right.
Please, please don't put fliers on cars.

I think I'm picking up on the fact that people find flyers on their cars annoying.

Since it is a common form of marketing this implies that it can be effective. It therefore must come down to how targeted it is?

Some years ago we were told by a Business Link advisor ( for another business all together) that unsolicitated fliers produce less than a return of 2 for every 1000. And this was a time when more people took newspapers so fliers could be cheaply distributed for you.

I would expect that the number of returns would be even less from a holiday flier as the context is so different to what we were thinking of (we decided not to go with the fliers).

Consider your own response to junk mail delivered by your postman or with newspapers??? Do you immediately rush out to use the service, buy the pizza etc???

I, along with other local holiday owners, still produce a brochure for our property which we leave at the local TI. Many people visit the area, ramblers etc and the coaches park in the car park where the TI is located. The TI also send out the brochures to people enquiring about accommodation and can be picked up off the shelf by anyone visiting the TI.

It is very common for people to return to the area for a holiday as opposed to a day trip when they realise how much there is to offer here.

I always ask people who book how they found out about the cottage and the number who respond saying it is from the brochures alone is very small. However, the brochures do lead to people looking for the cottage via the Internet at a later date and going on to book.

The TI is a useful resource for you, and I believe that if you want to profit from the area you should be prepared to put something back and support advertising your area in a wider sense. A relationship with the local TI is a good start to do this.

At least I can say that I have never found any of my brochures ( or worse, several of them) screwed up in a bin in the car park or on the floor somewhere.

brightmike wrote:Since it is a common form of marketing this implies that it can be effective. It therefore must come down to how targeted it is?

Only my opinion but... I think that nowadays it is an old-fashioned method of advertising a cheap and nasty product. I doubt I'm alone in this. If you've a good quality holiday rental, I don't think flyers on cars in the same town is the way to go.