Every vacation rental property owner gets questions from prospective renters like:
- How far away from the beach is your unit?
- How do I get to your property?
- Where is the nearest grocery store?
- Do you have a map of the area?
Community Walk (www.communitywalk.com) provides a great utility to build custom maps that showcase
Sample Community Walk Custom Map
your property, easily allow guests to generate driving directions, and highlight local point of interest. These custom maps even let you filter the points of interest and let visitors make comments. I’m confident anyone who owns a vacation rental property, would find this tool very as a marketing tool to add to your web sites or listings but also in communicating with booked tenants. It is very easy to set up! You can add points of interest by doing searches, entering street address or using longitude and latitude. For each POI can you can catagorize, add a photo, inster links to web sites and modify many other details of the POI or customize how it is displayed.
There are ads but they are very discrete! You can purchase the maps if you would like to not have ads.
Enjoy,
Andrew M. Seward
Andrew, great post, and I agree that maps are a great way to communicate with your owners. At our own vacation rentals by owner advertising website, FindVacationRentals.com, we are going to release two new pretty important features around this that will allow our vacation rentals owners to not only display a Google map on there listing, but also add their own reviews of local restaraunts, beaches, and other attractions.
Any review content that the vacation rental owner adds will show up on their own personal Google map that will be attached to their listing on FindVacationRentals.com. The map will show how close the owner’s vacation rental is to the local attractions highlighted, and provide driving directions as well.
And, no advertisements will be added in
In order for the map to display properly, the vacation rental owner will need to provide his or her address to the property. Some owners have been hesitant to do this for understandable reasons, but, in this day and age, its just too easy to find an address if you really want it, so I say why not make it as easy as possible for the renters to pick your vacation rental over anyone elses.
Cheers,
Jon Ludwig
Owner, FindVacationRentals.com
I would love to customize my google map for my vrbo listing. I can’t figure out how to do it. Can any one tell me how?