Holiday Home Advertising - Owners Need Control

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MKC
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Holiday Home Advertising - Owners Need Control

Post by MKC »

Talking to a lot of my fellow Holiday Home Owners in South West France, there is a common feeling that the major advertisers are no longer working on behalf of Owners, but rather purely to increase their own profits. With currently very little alternative but to use their services, there is a desire to do something about this situation. Initially, I wonder if there are many out there on the Lay My Hat forum who are of similar mind and would be interested in looking into the possibility of something more friendly towards us? I have some ideas, but lets see if there is any appetite before that part of the discussion. Regards to all. Martin.
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kevsboredagain
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Post by kevsboredagain »

The topic is often discussed actually but without any direction or real hope of changing anything.

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MKC
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Post by MKC »

As I suggested, I have a few ideas, but need to get a sizeable group together to have any chance of making progress.
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Post by salmoncottage »

Are we not a sizeable group? If so fire away.
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Post by Bunny »

MKC, I don't think there is any doubt that we are all in agreement and we would all support you, BUT is it realistic? Is there any real possibility of you succeeding where others have failed? Tell us your ideas and we'll give you very honest feedback as to whether you are on to something or flogging a dead horse. I await further details with interest. :D
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Ben McNevis
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Post by Ben McNevis »

I think that many of us have our own ideas about what can be done. I certainly have but I haven't yet found any appetite among the peeps of LMH or elsewhere to start serious discussion and spending time/money on finding a solution.

There are substantial problems to overcome and there is a trail of disappointment in the recent history of those who have tried to compete. Should that put anyone off thinking about it and discussing it? I don't think so. I'm game.
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Post by e-richard »

MKC, just one simple question:

Are you planning on doing this full time without any other distractions ?

If you're serious and have the necessary technical, marketing, entrepreneurial, and PR expertise either yourself or on full time payroll, you have already remortgaged your house to start the business, you are working over 80 hours per week solely on this new business and website and you have a formal business plan for the next 3 years, I may be prepared to back you and help.
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Ben McNevis
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Post by Ben McNevis »

I think that Richard's comment/question is jumping the gun.

Nobody needs a business plan or a commitment to working 300 hours per week at the moment.

What is needed is direction, and to arrive at an agreed direction, ideas are needed. The ideas need to be discussed, researched and tested. That can be a collaborative effort.

Once a direction has been agreed upon (and agreement between many different people with differing points of view is never going to be easy), then it is time to think about manpower, skill sets, finance, etc. The fact that serious work would be involved in developing a solution should put nobody off discussing it.

I've said all this before, of course, but as I said, there has been no appetite to pursue it. It seems that many owners are resigned to be fodder to HA.
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kevsboredagain
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Post by kevsboredagain »

Ben McNevis wrote: there has been no appetite to pursue it. It seems that many owners are resigned to be fodder to HA.
There is plenty of appetite but no budget for the menu. The HA is a multi million £ business with an agenda of monopolising and controlling the rental industry. Any business which competes and succeeds gets taken over by HA. OD was doing fairly well for a well and was swallowed up. HD went the same way.

All that remains are some independent sites which have relatively small budgets but survive on a limited subscription base. I've tried a few of these sites with low annual fees but never had much success.

What do you hope to achieve? Without a budget of millions, you will not even make a dent on the HA bulldozer. That leaves the option of a small independent sites, struggling on limited finances but powerless to make headway. The Holiday Let would be a good example. Plenty of enthusiasm there but clearly little budget or even business acumen.

I think it's unfair to suggest we have resigned to become fodder to HA. I personally try to put my efforts into my own website or look for alternative places to advertise, rather than simply rely on one source.

I will of course listen to any ideas on here and offer help where possible.
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Post by Sam V »

kevsboredagain wrote:
Ben McNevis wrote: there has been no appetite to pursue it. It seems that many owners are resigned to be fodder to HA.
There is plenty of appetite but no budget for the menu. The HA is a multi million £ business with an agenda of monopolising and controlling the rental industry. Any business which competes and succeeds gets taken over by HA. OD was doing fairly well for a well and was swallowed up. HD went the same way.

All that remains are some independent sites which have relatively small budgets but survive on a limited subscription base. I've tried a few of these sites with low annual fees but never had much success.

What do you hope to achieve? Without a budget of millions, you will not even make a dent on the HA bulldozer. That leaves the option of a small independent sites, struggling on limited finances but powerless to make headway. The Holiday Let would be a good example. Plenty of enthusiasm there but clearly little budget or even business acumen.

I think it's unfair to suggest we have resigned to become fodder to HA. I personally try to put my efforts into my own website or look for alternative places to advertise, rather than simply rely on one source.

I will of course listen to any ideas on here and offer help where possible.
Maybe one possibility is to promote a site like The Holiday Let, if we all jumped on board a site like that, I'm not with them yet, it would be interesting if the site would increase in popularity
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Ben McNevis
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Post by Ben McNevis »

Without a budget of millions, you will not even make a dent on the HA bulldozer
Very true. But that's a blinkered view. Who says you have to compete by setting up a rival listing site (or even cooperating with an existing rival)?

The landscape is constantly changing.

One example of a new avenue opening up is Google's increasing understanding of data (see schema.org) and https://developers.google.com/schemas/search/answers

If you do a google search for "hotel glasgow" right now, you'll see a panel where Google lays out the hotel name, brief description, star rating, nightly price and a small picture.

Now imagine if this was applied to holiday lets and if the microtagging was somehow able to show availability. Then a search for "Cotswold cottage for rent 2 July 2016" would be able to do everything that a HA / TA search could do, but it would be Google, rather than some underfunded upstart, competing with HA / TA.

I'm not saying that this is the answer. It is one example of a direction that we could look in. There are others.

Unless we are happy to be fodder to HA (and ultimately AirBnB), we should be investigating together.
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Post by bessie »

Maybe not a great deal of help but the main problem we have to stand out in the world.After my meeting this week its all about ticking the boxs with what the large agency ,sites think we should tick.
A little fish in a big pond, well for me I always have to different and that's my marketing edge love it or hate it.considering agency nil, me busy year I rest my case.
The idea of a new way has to be totally different from guests just bombarded with cottage etc after cottage ,its got to be great I'm dealing with a group of owners who operate differently not in the way they run their holiday lets but how they get my attention.
Many owners on here do that already by marketing their property in their way and understand their market,we don't all offer the same.
I think there is a new market out there ,and a new way to find guests .
As for cost don't know ,but I know with my farm shop I got plenty of free advertising by coming up with a story etc that caught the attention of the editor.From Country living one Christmas that had me sold out in hours to TV.It just needs a bit of thinking out the box. :roll:
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Post by kevsboredagain »

Ben McNevis wrote:
Without a budget of millions, you will not even make a dent on the HA bulldozer
Very true. But that's a blinkered view.
Others would call it realistic.

The Google topics you mention should be considered by everyone with a website. The greater understanding you mention comes from Google's ability to search your own Google content such as Emails, which is of no real help for advertising.

However, it's possible to increase SEO by the use of microdata. This extends the standard HTML tags to give search engines more understanding and detail of the content being indexed. When coding manually, it's a lot of work but hopefully web tools will develop and make this task become more widespread.

The hotels being shown when you perform that search are simply listed on Google maps. Again, everyone should have their property listed on Google maps and have a Google+ page. It's free but very powerful advertising.

One of the most important things any of us can do to become less reliant on the big companies is invest in our own websites. When I search for "self catering apartment Glasgow" I want to see some private sites appearing on page 1. I only saw one private site listed and even that was a bit cheesy and not at all mobile friendly. It proves it's possible.
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Post by kevsboredagain »

Sam V wrote:
Maybe one possibility is to promote a site like The Holiday Let, if we all jumped on board a site like that, I'm not with them yet, it would be interesting if the site would increase in popularity
I've been with them for 7 year with zero results. Now they ask you to pay so they can "improve" the site. To me that's the wrong way for a business to operate. I will pay when I have something to pay for and not for a promise of developing something better after 7 years of stagnating.

If they need cash then they should find investors or try adopting a low rate commission model to compete with the more greedy companies charging 10-20% or more.
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Ben McNevis
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Post by Ben McNevis »

kevsboredagain wrote:The greater understanding you mention comes from Google's ability to search your own Google content such as Emails, which is of no real help for advertising.
Kev, you're being rather negative this morning. And you weren't the one being kept awake by next-door's AirBnB guests singing in the garden until 2am!

Yes, I realised after I posted it that the Google Developers page I linked was relating to microdata tagging in emails, not in web pages. However, Google is moving towards trying to provide direct answers to searchers' questions in all sorts of fields. Almost any question that you ask Google in plain English now gives an answer direct on the results page so you don't need to go any further: e.g. "What is a Munro?"

It doesn't matter if the source of the data is Google Places rather than web pages, as the two are linked. What does matter is that it is Google's apparent intention to provide a feature-rich search facility that, in the field of holiday accommodation, will stand in direct competition with the likes of HA.

If we all go our own way with microdata tagging, we will probably all do it differently (Schema.org doesn't have a "self catering" category as yet and Google doesn't currently offer any search by availability) and that won't be a help to give Google a grip on the data.

If we do get together to discuss and eventually agree on the best way to tackle the market domination, then there is a small chance that we can make progress. Please be positive!

As I said, this is just one idea and other people have other ideas (some good, some so-so) so lets pool the thinking and see what looks promising.
Cheers, Ben
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