2006 booking stats - most effective sites

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
User avatar
vrooje
Posts: 3202
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 2:48 am
Location: Burgundy, France

2006 booking stats - most effective sites

Post by vrooje »

In keeping with the tradition of posting our booking statistics, and since I doubt we'll be making more bookings for this year, here are our booking stats, in order of most to least weeks booked. I also calculated the cost per inquiry and cost per booking, depending on the cost of the advertisement.

Code: Select all

Our Website (directly):        15 inquiries,  6 bookings for 8 weeks (US$8.67/US$21.67 each)
Holiday-Rentals:                  12 inquiries,  2 bookings for 6 weeks (£24.38/£65 each)
VRBO:                                 10 inquiries,  4 bookings for 5 weeks (US$19.60/US$49 each)
French Connections:           25 inquiries,  2 bookings for 4 weeks (£6/£75 each)
Friends or Client Referrals:   1 inquiries,  1 booking for  2 weeks ($0/$0 each)
Perfect Places:                      3 inquiries,  1 booking for  1 week ($0/$0 each) - I was shocked to find this!
A-Gites.com:                         9 inquiries,  0 bookings
Direct bookings from our website continue to lead the pack. French Connections generated more inquiries that last year (including some that inquired from our own web form but found us through the FC site), but not many bookings. A lot of the FC inquiries were for booked weeks. I also had a lot of FC inquiries the week I was sick, so I didn't get to them very quickly, and they didn't convert. But they all did appear to be legitimate inquiries.

What really shocked me was Perfect Places. The client inquired far in advance, and then contacted me again months later, but they did originally find us through Perfect Places. Interesting.

Note that previous statistics have been posted at:

viewtopic.php?t=682
viewtopic.php?t=967
viewtopic.php?t=1902

Did I miss the thread where everyone had already done this for this year's bookings?
Brooke
A-two
Posts: 2091
Joined: Mon Oct 25, 2004 10:05 am
Location: USA

Post by A-two »

Brooke,
I am stunned by your generosity in sharing this information. Thank you, it's more than useful. If only I were so organized, I would return the favor! One query. VRBO provide a link to personal websites, so if you have taken advantage of that, how can you know how many of your direct inquiries have not come via the listing site?
User avatar
vrooje
Posts: 3202
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 2:48 am
Location: Burgundy, France

Post by vrooje »

Joanna,

With all our direct inquiries, we always ask how people found us. Those that found us through VRBO or French Connections (which also allows a web link) are counted as an inquiry for that listing site.

Our webstats package for our personal site can track search engine query strings from many search engines, and the number of inquiries we get is less than the number of searches that led to us (as I would expect). So it may be possible that we've mis-classified an inquiry or two as being direct when it was really from VRBO, but we do everything we can to make sure that doesn't happen. :)
Brooke
Post Reply