Archive for October, 2008

VRMA 2008 – News from the Annual Vacation Rental Manager Conference

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

I’m baaaack!  My apologies for the lack of blogging in the past couple of weeks.  We have been busy here at LiveRez with new product solutions, including an integration for the vacation property management system to QuickBooks accounting.  I actually have a whole big list of excuses……………………..but, I will spare you the details.  As my high-school football coach always said, “Excuses are like ______, everyone has one and they all stink.”

Well, moving on.  Over the next couple of blog posts I will convey some of the interesting tib-bits I picked up at the VRMA 2008 Conference.

The Vacation Rental Market is HUGE – it is currently $24 Billion annually.  That is a lot of money.  Based on an average occupancy rate of 35% and a Supply of vacation home ‘unit nights’ of 333 Billion.  That is 21 Million bookers of vacation rentals.

BUT……that is not even the exciting part.  The exciting part is that all this only represents a fraction of the total US Travel Market – and a fraction of the Leisure Travel market. 

Why only a fraction?  Because for most of their leisure travel, 57% of vacationers did not even consider a vacation rental, 23% considered it but did not book, and 20% booked a vacation rental.

57% did not even consider a vacation rental.  Did not even consider it!  We have an amazing opportunity to educate the public and brand the vacation home experience.

More to come……

Ralf
LiveRez

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Pitfalls of Private Rentals…….Ouch, that just does not help our industry

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

A recent article in the NY Time again tells a story of travel misery.  A dream vacation spoiled by an inaccurate, incomplete, and ’skewed’ description of a rental property.  At least the property was there this time.

Here is the full story:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/travel/05pracrentals.html

This is soooo painful to read:
“We ended up leaving midweek the conditions were so bad,” said Ms. Gismervik, a marketing director from Albany. “We couldn’t take it anymore.” The owner, she said, later apologized for the condition of the home, but did not provide any compensation. Moreover, Ms. Gismervik ended up paying an additional $2,000 to stay at a Marriott for the rest of the trip, and the experience soured her on vacation rentals. “I would not choose ever to do that again,” she said. “I’d stay in a hotel where I knew how things are. I’d never rent from a private person again.”

We have to continue to build trust, visibility, and a common standard of quality into our vacation home rental industry.   Finding ways to diferentate quality professionally managed properties from vrbo properties.

Ralf
www.LiveRez.com

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More Free Online Marketing Tools for your Vacation Home Rental

Friday, October 3rd, 2008

Here are 3 great tools from Google to help you in your research and online marketing strategy for your vacation home rental business.  AND…..they are FREEEEE.

Cool Tool #1: Google Insights for Search
This tool gives you all kinds of information about any keyword/phrase in which you are interested. You’ll find out how searches for that keyword/phrase peak and ebb over time, where geographically your search is most popular, and what other keyword/phrases are used to conduct similar searches.

For example, at the time of this writing, we tested the tool using the phrases: “Web analytics” and “Web metrics”. The use of the phrase “Web analytics” has increased dramatically over the past four years while the use of the phrase “Web metrics” has decreased.

How can you harness all this data? Suppose you’re trying to figure out which product attribute to emphasize in an ad or on your website? As an example, this tool could help you figure out what’s more important to your audience: reliability, safety or price. Type in your terms, and see which ones resonate more with Google’s searchers.

Cool Tool #2: Google Trends
This tool shows you what the most popular searches on Google are in any given hour, plus a list of related news articles and blog posts that support the rise and fall of the traffic surges.

You can click on any of the keywords to learn more, including the hourly volume of searches, whether popularity is going up or down and (in some cases) where geographically the majority of the searches are coming from.

You can also put in your own keywords to see where your topic of choice stands over a selected period of time. We used the phrase, “email marketing”, over the past 30 days and saw that search interest surged weekly on Wednesdays and had severe dips on Saturdays and Sundays. The single highest peaks per week were tied into the publishing of press releases and articles on the topic, and the links to those resources were available for your perusal.

Cool Tool #3: Google Trends for Websites
This tool shows you the number of daily unique visitors to a specific site over your chosen period of time. The analysis details what regions visitors came from, what related sites they visited and the search terms those visitors have in common.

This tool does not work for sites with low traffic volume. However, it is a useful tool anytime you want to check out your overall business category, assess a potential online ad buy with a particular property or keep tabs on your largest competitors.

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