Best Rental Listing Sites for Ski Bookings

[Margaret]

Our village is Bayerisch Eisenstein, which is a ski resort. The actual skiing etc is done on the Arber mountain. Is that what you wanted to know?

[Mountain Goat]

OK, so here's a list of the Metcheck ski forecasts for Germany, and your village is there.

Click on your village.

Besides an accurate weather forecast, you will see, down the bottom of the reports, space for ads. That's what we are talking about. No-one else is advertising, so maybe worth a go. A bit of a long shot at this time of year, but the traffic is there.

Alternatively, go to Leysin, Switzerland, and see our live ad. Plus 9 other resorts.

We use it the whole time, and so do our guests, and so do many visitors to the resorts, right through the year. That's why we think it's worth a go.

They also list the traditional summer holiday destinations, so worth experimenting with as I don't think it's expensive. They're also receptive to new ideas. I'm trying to get them to accept a click-through image as well.

MG

[paolo]

The last umpteen posts in this thread have been incomprehensible to me

This is sometimes the way here, we discuss everything from thread counts to obscure technical stuff.

[Margaret]

Never heard of it before. I guess it is likely to work best for resorts that people have heard of Our problem is getting Brits to consider Germany as a skiing country, let along actually coming to our village. So people will only see our ad if they actually click on our village?
How do you know the traffic is there?
We use the J2ski weather on our website and are just setting up a dedicated skiing site. We have theoretically been listed on J2Ski for a more than a year I think but I can never find us on there and they don't really reply to emails.

[Margaret]

£9.95 per month when you have no idea whether it will bring results or ever be seen is a bit steep really - I can do quite a lot of other advertising with £120. Can anybody advise me on this?

[Hells Bells]

Margaret, you have no idea whether any of your advertising is going to be successful or not. Just have a search through the threads on here and you'll see. What is successful for one is a total flop for another. There is no requirement to sign up for a long period of time either, so I may just spend 10 or 20 pounds. As Mountain Goat said, I use it all the time, and so do a lot of skiers.

[Margaret]

I do realise that!
But people seemed to be talking about % things and I had the impression (probably shows how little I understood) that there was some measurement gadget on the site.
With magazines I know what their circulation is. With listings websites there is usually some way of gauging visits to the sites.
I was just asking if anyone had a view on whether this was likely to work for an extremely obscure resort. Obviously people going to the famous resorts are going to be looking for this information. Most of the people skiing here are German, Dutch and Czech. Hence my question.

[Hells Bells]

There are some measurements,as we said above, but they are statistics available only to advertisers. I wouldn't look at your particular resort unless I knew about it, and wanted to stay there, but you can also advertise on other resort pages to attract other resorts potential visitors

[Margaret]

what a brilliant idea - like all the best ideas, simple and obvious I know just the place

[Hells Bells]

Precisely why I thought it was at least worth a try.

[Mountain Goat]

It may be too early in the (ski) season to test it properly, but you can play around with different ads on different resorts, change the content to see if anything is more effective etc - it's very flexible.

We're trying their 10+ resort rate at around £4/month/resort, which brings the rate down to between 5p - 10p / click with this month's traffic, and could be less than 5p as the booking season hots up - they claim 50,000 visitors/day in season.

Our interest was not so much our own village, but trying to attract guests who are looking at neighbouring villages (Alpes Vaudoises in our case).

The visitors to this part of the Metcheck site are 'mountain interest' customers, whether summer or winter, and they're the ones we're looking for. Skiers are curious about the weather in their favourite resorts right through the year, and always like to compare their favourite place with others they may have heard about and that's the market we want to tap into.

And being in at the beginning, Metcheck are keen to help and react to ideas from advertisers, which is a refreshing attitude.

Will it work? Not a clue.

MG

[Giddy Goat]

Margaret, all the posts are about advertisements for our properties, and so are relevant to the thread. One property is in Switzerland, and the other two in the thread are in France, All are alpine ,but the thread is about where to advertise our properties so is in the listing site section.

A minor point and forgive me for posting this after the discussion has moved on, but it struck me that Rosbif's question would have been better placed in the Alpine section really, particularly as it was created only fairly recently in response to requests from those with alpine properties. They are special places with special needs, IMHO.

Just to fill you in Margaret, I am taking a bit of a personal interest, having learned to (sort of) ski only this year when an honoured guest (with my OH who last skied 30-odd years ago) of Mountain Goat! Had heaps of advice and help from LMH's Alpine owners.

[Margaret]

Have only just noticed the existence of that one Thanks for pointing it out. Definitely a better place for this sort of discussion, I think.

[Hells Bells]

GG you're right as usual of course, but it was a question about listing sites.

[Giddy Goat]

I had appreciated that, but because of the special nature of alpine properties felt on balance that "Alpine" was the better heading under which to carry the thread.

A minor point in the grand scheme of things though, as I said.