Destination Oriented Sites/Portals

[HolidayWebs]

Hi there,

having just come across this great web site & forum, I thought I should do the honorable thing & contribute as both an apartment owner in Puerto Pollensa, Mallorca and owner of a destination portal that includes rental listings.

I've seen that there have been several discussions on which listing sites to use & I agree that those that appear highly in search engines for your key words e.g. "puerto pollensa apartment" are worth trying. I've tried several 'free trials' & the only one that brought me any enquiries apart from our own portal was spain-holiday.com which is not a very pretty site but does well in Search Engines. Unfortuanately they don't do calendars so I get a lot of enquiries but few bookings.

The majority of my bookings do come from our own portal (& my property doesn't get any priority!) & I believe this is because we are destination oriented & include a lot of information about the area itself as quite often people know where they want to go & conversely if they don't know an area, you need to tell them about it. I would suggest this is worth bearing in mind for personal property sites as well.

So based on my own experience of having tried several general rental sites, the ones that have worked for me are focussed on the location where my property is based.

I'd be interested to hear your views & whether that applies to other destinations as well,

[paolo]

Welcome to the forum, HolidayWebs!

Taking your point at a slight angle - even for personal websites, content about location is really important for the same reasons. Either for people who DO know where they are going, or for those that don't know where they are going.

If you have a page or two of your site that is dense with copy and keywords, those pages could be found by people searching with a narrow phrase. Those searching for 'spain villa rentals' will find pages of rental listing sites. But those searching on a phrase that includes your village name may be able to find your site through your page on that village.

For people who do not know the area, a page telling them all about it is more likely to convert them into an enquiry. Holidays are chosen on location first, accommodation second.

The same page or pages can perform both tasks if it is carefully written. This does take a little time but is well worth it. For instance, if you type my village into Google, my two property sites come in at positions 4-7, because I have pages on both the village and the region.

[BungleBob]

From our experience, specialist sites almost always seem to do better. When we ran a poll on the directory to find the best sites, there was an outcry from owners who use smaller sites which weren't included in our lists - clearly these do exceptionally well given the number of owners who are so pleased with them.

We launched a specialist portal for another Spanish island a couple of years ago (not mentioned here for fear of blatant advertising!) and that site met with incredible success. It now has more properties available for than any other site and the name it has built is incredible. When we attempted to replicate the success across broader areas in Spain, it was a much tougher gambit and we still have a long way to go.

Specialist sites most certainly get better results because they target the niche better than bigger sites ever could. Paolo's technique of scouring the search engines for your area is a good way of throwing them up.

It sounds like your own portal is doing well for that very reason.

Keep up the good work!

Rich