Lay My Hat

I have used Holiday Lettings since 2007 and have had good results up until early this year when enquiries hit the floor. I am resisting the payment/book on line option as I prefer to stay in control with an annual listing. However it is now almost impossible to find my property on a general search as they seem to give visibility only to the payment on line properties. It is home id 38738 and if you search with that you find it but searching just with Cephalonia it does not appear. I have tried emailing them but just get the usual standard replies.
Is anyone else having the same problem?

hi herbie,
we get most of our bookings from HL but our enquiries too have fallen off by 100% at the beginning of this year and views of our page fell from 270per month to 160per month. We are however on the % bookings and not an annual listing. We don't know why but we certainly don't seem to come up in searches as easily as we did....

You are not alone. I had advertised for ten years with them and used to get up to 400 hits per month. Recently only 44 hits per month.

In January, I changed to commission as enquiries had dried. Since that time, I have had no bookings from them at all.

Seems their changes have smashed the very business they sought to improve.

Because I have now agreed a sale on my property, I have ceased my HL listing and I am delighted to see the back of such an awful site. It certainly is not what it used to be and, based on my experience, is not a site I would ever use to advertise on again.

We decided to use the pay per enquiry route on HL. We ended up pay about £500 per month before I shut it off. From that we got 1 booking per month with the exception of the final month where we got none.

The quality of enquiries we got were dreadful. People acting surprised when I quoted the rate (and then offering less then half) despite the rates being clearly advertised.

I don't understand why it has such a poor conversion rate compared to OD or Homeaway.

CaliforniaDreaming wrote:I don't understand why it has such a poor conversion rate compared to OD or Homeaway.

Had no idea that HL had introduced pay per enquiry. How much do they charge for that?

It was £7 + VAT per enquiry

CaliforniaDreaming, are you sure that was "HolidayLettings .co.uk" and not another site with a similar name?

Yes 100% sure.

It's under their agency section e-richard. https://www.holidaylettings.co.uk/content/agency

CaliforniaDreaming wrote:It was £7 + VAT per enquiry

Thanks for responding CaliforniaDreaming and thanks for the heads-up about the expense of using that method.

I live and learn. Thanks CaliforniaDreaming and Nemo.

No worries. Incidentally Richard, noticed from your signature that you have a management system - something we badly need. I had a quick look and it looks like exactly what we have been looking for. I will be in touch when things quieten a little as we are in our busiest period.

Don't hesitate to embrace PIMS, e-richards management system. There are lots of advocates here including me. The sooner you take it on, the easier your life will be so don't put it off for longer than you have to!

Apologies herbie for the thread creep. Very rude of us! Welcome both you and Californiadreaming to the forum.

Thank you Nemo. Delighted to be here!

Back to HL... I think some previous posts up above have probably given me the answer to a question I've been considering - Annual Subscription or Pay per booking? (I'll call it PAYG).

I'm now absolutely convinced that PAYG keeps those portals permanently "hungry" so I assume they're reinvesting a sizeable chunk of their PAYG income towards whatever campaigns they subscribe to.

In stark contrast, I'm nearly sure that each time they collect an annual subscription up-front someone in their hierarchy says "ok that mug has paid so lets switch him to drip-feed mode instead"!!!

I originally signed up an annual subscription with HL about 3 years ago. Almost immediately got a booking which covered my costs so I thought "great.. onwards and upwards" but alas I got almost nothing (except a few daft/ambitious enquiries) for the remainder of that year, hence I gave it up as a bad job.

I only discovered the existence of pay per booking in Feb this year so took up again with both HA and HL.

Had 12x juicy bookings in the first few weeks (9x HA, 3x HL) covering 20 weeks with all peak weeks full so was well happy (and still am with more still coming for next year).

Now I keep getting badgered by HA to change to annual subscription which would cost me less than half of the commission I've already paid out in 8 months.

The maths in my head tells me to change but my own logic tells me to resist and stick with the relatively expensive PAYG as I'm happy to keep paying anyone who keeps those bookings coming in.

Can anyone else identify with this?