Lay My Hat

Hi,

Our holiday rental is in Charente-Maritime, France. We've been renting for nearly four years and in that time, have only ever had British guests.

We advertise on Homeaway and Owners Direct, and my understanding is that this automatically puts us on their sister sites in Europe.

So, what listing sites have you used to attract other European renters? Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians etc? Germany in particular is such a big market surely, and it's one I'd like to get into.

Thanks!

We are on OD on subscription, but are no longer on any of the other countries' sites. We used to be on Fewo-Direkt automatically, which was good for us, but we have now dropped off that. Actually, as far as OD is concerned we have definitely 'dropped off' - the end of the world, I think. No enquiries for a long, long time.

We are listed on Ferienhausmiete.de and get a few bookings, but there is definitely a gap in the market for a listing site for the European guests you, I, and a lot of other home owners would like to attract.

I haven't found any appropriate Facebook groups that include Croatia. Don't know if any exist.

Thanks Little Villa.

I'll give that site a try, I think. Unfortunately, I speak no German whatsoever. I'm muddling my way through the site as Google automatically translates it into some form of English. But it's confusing me about whether it is free to list or whether it's 7 euros a month.

Can you shed any light?

Hi Toulouselechat

Try this https://www.tourist-paradise. com/vermieten.php In fact there are 8 languages that you can use, although not all the languages seem to work properly.

Chrome automatically translates Ferienhausmiete.de (badly) when I'm on it, so when I need to really understand it or enter stuff onto it, I use Firefox or go to Tourist Paradise. It's free to register - but not to list your property and it's an annual fee. It has been improved a lot recently and I should really make more of our listing/s but some of the instructions, especially for putting on Special Offers, aren't shown in English, and the Google translation from German is just hopeless.

One of our guests put a fabulous review on there that I wasn't expecting, in German. We were very pleased with that. Good luck if you go ahead with it.

Thanks Little Villa. Sorry for my delay in getting back to you!

toulouse

you need to search using

ferienwohnungen - holiday apartments ( usually with multiple rooms as a flat)
or ferienapartments ( which i have like a studio apartment )

Ferienhaus - holiday house " whole house "

Ferienvermietung holiday let

miete is to rent and ferien is holiday there is also urlaub which is also holiday

then maybe search adding your location

however Germans still like to telephone and speak to the owner to book or use your own website
there is a lot of small OTA's in the market who charge a annual fee usually under 100€ basically we do not get much business from them & if you have to log on to 3-4 separate sites personally it is a waste of time & money
i would spend time on your own website boosting the meta tags to include german words or better still if you want to attract the germans get a german translation remember the german will also attract the swiss as for the dutch most of them can speak german or english

if you re on homeaway add Fewo-direkt or Wimdu ( mainly short lets ) & the younger germans still like sites such as booking com ,Expedia

or you could ask for a few statistics from your local or national tourist office

i hope this helps

Maria

Maria mentioned the idea of version of your own website in German. Any language is worth including, based on your potential guests' nationality.

I think that’s an avenue worth pursuing. However, because automated translation is fairly unconvincing, including a single-page summary properly translated, rather than a replication of the whole site, would be more practical for most people. Using <meta> keywords in a page which is in a different language will not cut it. (The keywords tag has been ignored for years and I would recommend omitting it). Using multiple languages in the <meta> description tag would similarly fail to impress. Bear in mind that this tag has limited length - about 200 characters. It’s of no relevance in SEO terms (as it's ignored for the purposes of ranking) so the only mileage it has is if it’s displayed - and that’s not too likely, because search engines more often than not display the closest matching content string to the search phrase, taken from the body of the page, as the content excerpt below the title and URL line.

If you include page(s) in languages other than the site’s primary language, the most important ranking factor, after the content, is the <title> tag. It’s worth spending time analysing the <title> tags in competing pages. Of course, the page itself should be informative and useful, with plenty of images, and a substantial word-count - 1000 or more - will make a difference.