Lay My Hat

If i take out a HA listing, what can i expect in terms of property views, enquiries, and bookings?

What is your experience?

We've been on Homeaway.co.uk, and therefore all their group of sites including French ones, for years. Used to pay the annual rental and got a booking or two each year and reasonable enquiries; but no more. Not sure if it is because we are only on commission per booking or because it has just got so big that our property is rarely viewed. In the last few years, no bookings (except one who cancelled later) and few enquiries.
I only maintain the ad because it is there, and I have good reviews, and if anyone should be lazy enough to book through it, okay; but they will pay a higher price with commission and I would hope that the sort of people we want would find us through other ads or direct via our website which, even without a link, would be easy enough to find.
There is nothing personal about the site or the company to recommend it for me and our property.

Square root of bugger all. Used them for three years from 2014 on subscription. 3 bookings certainly not more. Their location map wasn't accurate (20 miles out) and they couldn't give a rubber duck. I did get the impression that they had a better reach in S England and mainland Europe. Maybe that's evaporating.

In one word....useless.

I liberally sprinkled my ad with my website and contact details so I assume some of my direct enquiries might have come from them. Last year I didn't book any dates out on the calendar to see what happened; I got a lot of last minute panicked peak weeks enquiries, so I reckon that's their market.

Mousie
x

we used to get most of our bookings from them but after they changed their business model and added more charges the bookings dried up. We still list on a commission basis and get one or two bookings per year, really not worth the effort.

We have a one bed apartment in Nice in a very crowded market. I was on a subscription basis with HA and its previous guises as Holiday Rentals and VRBO from 2007 to 2119. For the majority of that time t brought me 70-80% of my bookings. Even when it changed its system to collecting the payments etc, it still worked for me until 2017. At that time many here on LMH were losing faith and respect for HA but as it worked for me, I held my nose and ploughed on. Since 2018 enquires for me have completely dried up. No bookings or enquires in 2018-19. When renewal time came they offered to change me on to their commission based system. Since then no bookings but one inquiry. A good company ruined in my opinion.
As an aside they recently contacted me to asking to do a 40 minute interview in my experiences with HA which I did. I gave them my honest opinions and got a $100 Amazon voucher in return from them. A little of my last years subs back!

My experiences are exactly as reported above. As HomeAway/HolidayRentals they gave us over 50% of our bookings.

But then Airbnb came along to disrupt the market place and Expedia bought HA for $3.9 BILLION (yes, that is billions) and part of the acquisition conditions was to move from subscription model to commission model. What a brilliant business decision? Not.

Well, at least under the commission model, its their money down the pan - not ours

A very strong dislike for the commission charges.

So who do you list with that is not asking for subscription based listing/advert?

CSE wrote:A very strong dislike for the commission charges.
So who do you list with that is not asking for subscription based listing/advert?

If you don't like commission what is "not subscription"?

confused

You are confused because you miss-read.
I never wrote I did not like commission (charging portals).

CSE wrote:A very strong dislike for the commission charges.

Maybe you mean a very strong dislike for the scale of commission charges?

There does not seem to be a definitive answer but I will say that or own experience of HA is very positive – we get a lot of bookings from them. We "go with the system" rather than try to get round it. We don't try to get people to book direct. The annual fee and 3% fee works out to be relatively ok value when you consider that marketing your property is never going to be "free".

The new system whereby only guests who have booked via the HA system can leave a review means that their review system will be more credible (and on the lines of ABB) - but it does mean far fewer reviews.

I think guests are much more happy about paying a booking fee than we might have thought – we were quite surprised when it was introduced – but it doesn't seem to phase them.

There really is no way of knowing in advance what will work for you. Spain-Holiday used to be brilliant for us but they changed their model and it doesn't work for us any more – but does work for others. HA changed their model and it does work for us. We rarely get bookings via TripAdvisor but use it to collect reviews which guests view as a credible review site rather than a booking site - it seems.

Hope that's helpful.

Thanks for the replies.

I listed for free with cabinbookers last year and got 3 enquiries and 1 booking.

Seems I may as well go with their paid listing. £40 vs £250 for Homeaway, and judging by most of the feedback less or similar enquiries.

Ha used to fill my villa for c 20 to 30 weeks per year. I reckon 2 years ago the algorithm for ranking dumped me down to 600 of 11000, so i have done nothing since with them.

I ll stay with them on commission only as like mousie I have put my contact details on the site so do direct bookings. I reckon the algorithm detects my low percentage of ha bookings v my total and drops my rankings.

Not bothered at all as ha make it very difficult to to do business with, 3% owner fee, deposit dispute resolution, payment on guest arrival, reporting to tax authority....i could go on..,and on

As others have said they used to be very good as Owner's Direct.

I list with HA on a commission basis. Of my 37 bookings from Apr 19 to Apr 20, just 3 came from Home Away..

Nearly 80% of my bookings were direct.