In last Sunday’s Boston Globe, there was an article talking about staying in a vacation rental for a great honeymoon experience. The article really got me thinking about how vacation rental owners are marketing their vacation rentals properties – specifically, the description of the property and the photos that owners post of the property.
What I found was pretty interesting. While vacation rental owners typically do a great job describing the basic features and amenities of their properties, such as whether or not it has a microwave, or how close it is to a beach, there is little information that owners post about what kind of travel experience one could expect by visiting the destination, and there are very few, if any, pictures of those experiences.
The honeymoon concept got me thinking, so I did a search on FindVacationRentals.com, using our Advanced vacation rental search, for they keyphrase “romantic”. The results I got indicated that about 5.6% of our customers used the word “romantic” in their description text. This listing is a great example of a well written description that really sells the experience and does not just talk about the # of bedrooms and bathrooms the place has.
Next, I tried a search for “honeymoon”, which speaks to the suggestion by the Boston Glove article to the traveling public. This time, I only got results representing 1.8% of our inventory. This listing was a great example of a well written description that sells the romantic and honeymoon experiences very well.
So, a marketing lesson to be learned here. Clearly, travelers are looking for a certain experience. Search engines like Google match travelers to content that matches there search criteria. Travelers are often not looking for just a certain location and number of bedrooms – they are looking for a certain travel experience.
I think, as vacation rental owners, we could do a better job providing descriptions of those types of experiences. If we do, our interest are all better served!
Jon Ludwig, Owner
