A new report out by PhocusWright highlight the many online travel trends.  No surprise, online travel is strong and growing.  Following are a couple of highlights from the report: 

The PhoCusWright Consumer Travel Trends Survey Tenth Edition

What does this mean to you, the vacation rental manager?  You better be online – in a simple & pleasant way.  Have an online experience that is similar to what travelers will find in booking business travel.  Vacation homes are right in the sweet-spot of the trend that people need a change of scenario to vacation.  Know your target customer, and niche – because you will get outspent in marketing by the big online travel agencies.

Ralf
www.liverez.com

Whether you are SEO’ing or PPC’ing – it all comes down to having the right words in mind, and focusing your efforts on those words.  The word ‘New York’ is very powerful.  So is the word ‘Skiing’.  But think about how many different contexts these words can be used in, and how many cyber-sellers are using these works to position themselves and their products/services on the web.

OK – nothing new so far.  But here is the new statistic – the Average Google search has 4 words!!  One place to check out how different keywords, and keyword phrases compare to each other is in Google Trends:  http://www.google.com/trends

That means your target vacationers are not thinking about which word they should search on, but which phrase to search on.  Shoppers are no longer inputting single words or a couple of related words.  They are searching on meaningful phrases that define very specific target content.

So my advice is, think in terms of meaningful phrases that define what your target prospects are searching for.  Not ‘New York’ or ‘Skiing’, but ‘New York Family Ski Vacation’.

Happy booking!

Ralf
www.liverez.com