Holiday Home Advertising - Owners Need Control

[charles cawley]

Setting up a holiday letting agency from scratch is a very tough thing to do, even with the owners working in the office.

In the long run, if successful, the agency will have to conform to the pressures of the market that dictates how it needs to behave. Any idea of acting in an idealized way, in spite of the attitudes and other aspects of the market, will be a costly error.

You could end up with a successful regional agency not unlike many other regional agencies. Some economies of scale go in the favour of the giant booking services but regional and quality niches do exist. However, to survive, you will need a full time staff and significant emotional and capital input. Booking agency operation has been the fifth business I have started from scratch and it has been by far the most demanding.

Ironically, the easiest was senior management recruitment when I was quite ignorant way back in the early 1990s. Money, in large wads, seemed to walk through the door and long lunches were the order of the day. Now, I often work Sunday nights. Having said that, it is the most interesting and, in some ways, the most complex business I have ever worked in. You could do it, but do not underestimate the work, capital and dedication required to create sound foundations and brand reputation.

It took us 5 years to start making profits, but ghastly weather in 2012 and 2013/4 held us back perhaps by 2 years, so you should not expect a hope of profit in under 3. The booking agency business is very tough but, potentially, very rewarding.

It is no place for amateurs or people who do not pick up very quickly.

[costa-brava]

Sorry I'm a bit late in on this one.
e-Richard wrote:
"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."

Sounds like Dragon's Den but Richard is spot on and realistic on this topic. We are all looking for another good site that serves US not THEM but it is dead in the water if it's relying on support just from LMH posters. We all have wonderful ideas but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
E-Richard's question is not just valid. It's basic.

[Ben McNevis]

E-Richard's question is not just valid. It's basic.

You're right if you accept the assumption that setting up (or taking over) a site to compete with HA/TA is the only possible solution.

BUT It's not the only possible solution. In fact, I think it's a potty solution!

There are other ways to tackle it. I can think of two possibilities. Other folks probably have more ideas. Whether any of them would work... each idea is probably a longshot and needs some research to see whether it is worth pursuing.

What I would like to see in these threads (I know there have been several of them) is a move towards organising people to get a serious discussion going towards doing that research.

[charles cawley]

Ben McNevis.

There are fundamental economic and operational factors that apply to all booking services. All agents encounter them, whoever owns them. Setting up a co-operative between owners, the new agency would be need to be run in an highly efficient manner and be able to overcome the pressures and demands placed on smaller operations lacking advertising economies of scale. The end result would be not much change from now, assuming commercial success, except that owners would share in profits after a substantial capital investment.

Agents, particularly smaller ones, cannot survive without working hard and long. Many of the smaller ones are lifestyle businesses and can only convert into mainstream 'return on capital operations' when they reach a certain size. Although it may appear attractive, you would need to deal with the lifestyle issue and then face up to the reality that an effective business could create something little different from what is already on offer.

I am sorry if this sounds so no-can-do or risky-if-you-go-ahead. The days of organic growth with minimal capital are gone. We invested over £100,000 cash five years ago and have been told that we defied economic gravity to get where we are today. To be more certain, I reckon capital of £200,000 would be closer to the mark with significant losses expected in the first three years.

It is a tough, almost Darwinian market with wannabe gate keepers like Airbnb throwing hundreds of millions at advertising happily factoring in losses for far longer in an attempt to advertise rivals into bankruptcy. AirBnB will pay for such arrogance in the long run and is, now, subsidizing owners with little focus on service quality and respect for them. Its cancellation policy clearly reveals an attitude.

Google, for some reason, buying into Secret Escapes is an astonishing move and can hardly be seen as positive.

Setting up an agency in a market influenced by monopolist attitudes of the likes of AirBnB and, perhaps, others without significant capital matched by focused determination is something to think about. Even though these commercial wreckers may not feature in your local market, they are influencing the whole sector directly and indirectly.

Aggressive highly capitalized companies want to eliminate competitors, such as small agencies, by advertising them into extinction one way or another. They consider good business to be a war, after Sun Tzu, by killing off competitors and, then, milking customers as a monopoly supplier. This primitive attitude is taught at business schools across the World.

The idea that you can and should win by providing the best value for customers is laughable to them. Any well-meaning plan to set up a decent agency to do this without factoring in what these people are getting up to will be deeply flawed.

[Ben McNevis]

yes... but was anyone talking about setting up an agency?

[charles cawley]

How else do you hope to work?

The market has created entities that work and all others have failed. It would add further to the risk to try to invent something new that has not been tried before. You might, just might, stumble on a new way of doing business but the odds are dangerously against this. The general economic environment outlined exists whatever entity or new form of business you propose.

AirBnB will continue to throw millions at trying to become a monopoly supplier and Google et al will continue to do strange things. Any plan to go it alone, one way or another, will need address these realities.

The ball is at your end of the court. This is not a matter of research.. it is a matter of invention to create a new form of corporate entity or method of business. Rather you than me.

[Cassis]

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.

Unfortunately, at the moment Google takes hotel/B&B accommodation details from OTA sites like bookingbastards.com.

If you do a search for B&Bs Alençon, Normandy we appear in the box but it shows you a price and online reservation via bookingbastards.com (rather than our own site). There's a link to our website but BC advertising features more strongly in the box details.

EDIT: Worse, the Google street view that features isn't even of our house! It shows another house approximate to our address because you can't actually see us from the street.

[Ben McNevis]

Cassis, when I do that search for B&Bs Alencon, Normandy, I get the Google Places panel just below the Ads on the search results page with your place at the top in the panel. When I click on

La Basse Cour B&B

I get the big panel with map and the first two clickable buttons on that are [Website] [Directions]
of which [website] is your own page.

Below that under the Ads heading is BBC and Priceline.com

So, Google is taking information from various sources and it puts your own web page in prime position but it's down to user behaviour where they go from there.

Google is evolving too. What it does now is just a taste of what it will be doing in 12 months time. Some things, they announce in advance but others just appear. Everything that they do (with the exception of streetview) is based on other people's data. We can't predict what they will do next but the possibility is there to influence it by providing the data in a useable and consistent way.

[charles cawley]

Google is in the business of making money. It is no friend of free advertising and never will be. Its main money stream, by far, is Adwords and allied advertising. Something for little or nothing is not going to happen. Google is not going to undermine its business, you can't run things like that.

Our single largest spend, by far, is with Google. Do you think Agents and others have not tried to save money by getting round the system in some way or other? We are tiny, but the big boys such as Wyndham Worldwide have whole departments working on this.

Just as in the old days, the likes of the Telegraph, Observer or Guardian would never ever dish out cheap or free printed advertising to little people Google et al are no different.

[Cassis]

Yes, what you describe is exactly what I was talking about, Ben. There is a link to our site but most of the space is taken up by the BC and Priceline ads, which are what catch the eye. Not really surprising, as that's what Google make their money from.

[Essar]

You might want to have a look at this.

[Cassis]

Yet more depressing reading, Steve!

[Ben McNevis]

There is a link to our site but most of the space is taken up by the BC and Priceline ads, which are what catch the eye. Not really surprising, as that's what Google make their money from.

Yes, Google shows Ads all over the place but rarely, if ever, only Ads. It is up to the person browsing whether to click on an organic link, a MyBusiness (formerly Places) link or an ad.

If Google didn't show organic results that are relevant, it wouldn't get traffic and it wouldn't have a business. It evolves to stay ahead of other search engines by adding more understanding of the data as well as improving its understanding of what the person searching is searching for. My guess is that it will continue to improve - though I can't know that for sure. The improvement will serve to keep people searching through Google rather than elsewhere. Improvement in Google's ability to show relevant and deeply informative results doesn't help advertisers one bit. It helps the users. Google still does it, simply because it makes Google more powerful (becoming more powerful than all-powerful is a big ask though).

Currently (and this applies to all of us) we don't offer Google the chance to show (say in a MyBusiness entry) a link for availability / rates table because they are not tagged with the relevant microdata. So, naturally, the Ads below your [Website] link look more informative because they are designed by the advertisers to look that way.

How much this disadvantages us compared to Listing Sites and OTAs is difficult to assess but it must do somewhat.

As an individual owner, there's currently not much you can do to help Google to understand your webpage. That is because your webpage is wildly different to mine or anybody else's (a good thing). And use of microdata is a rarity (a bad thing). For microdata to be useful, a critical mass of usage is needed. Then there's a chance that Google will take advantage. So, in this respect, by failing to organise ourselves and behaving as individuals, we allow the major listing sites to gain control of the marketplace.

If I search in Google for "Trains from Bedford to London", it provides a useful table of train times and each one can be expanded to show the operator, platforms etc. Google isn't earning a penny from that. It's just showing the full answer to my query because it can. It can, in the case of public transport, reliably answer my query because there is a single reliable data source. The situation for holiday rentals is much more complex: distributed data sources and different ways of operating. Is it too complex or can the complexity be broken down?

Anyway, here I am doing the opposite of what I had hoped to do: I would prefer not to examine the minutiae of possible solutions because any potential solution has many problems to overcome and a discussion of this kind brings out the it-can't-be-done brigade in considerable force. What is needed is a small band of people, prepared to do a bit of work and constructive discussion to look into the possibilities in a methodical way.

[charles cawley]

"a discussion of this kind brings out the it-can't-be-done brigade in considerable force."

To be described in this way is not altogether fair.

Like it or not Google is no friend of free advertising. It will provide useful information as a draw but it will, never, except by incompetence, make it practical or easy for people who might advertise to get anything for free. In effect it distinguishes between organic content.. being more like editorial and advertising content with a bias to the former... just like in broadsheet times.

Do you think agencies with massive turnovers have not worked full time on trying this out? The implication is that agencies either have an unjustified existence or that we really don't know much.

SEO people hold out the idea that you can get free advertising as long, ironically, as you pay them handsomely. But none of them really know Google's articles of obedience and Google will not reveal them because it does not like free advertising. Instead, it dresses them up with fluffy unthreatening names like 'Panda' when, in reality, they can destroy livelihoods.

It is not in Google's interests to make it easy for owners to avoid using agencies because booking agencies spend $ hundreds of millions with Google to advertise. Before the internet national broadsheets had a similar approach with sky high rates for non agency advertising. In this respect, little has changed.

[French Cricket]

There is a link to our site but most of the space is taken up by the BC and Priceline ads, which are what catch the eye. Not really surprising, as that's what Google make their money from.

Yes, but ... if you use an ad blocker - as I do and as I assume the vast majority of people do - the BC and Priceline ads don't show. When I clicked on your link, Cassis, I get a direct link to your site at first place both in the Google places bit at the top of the page, and also in the search listing results a bit further down. No sign of any BC presence. TA appears in 4th place.