Last year on FindVacationRentals.com, we rolled out what we called “vacation themes”, which are special sections of our website focused on vacation rental inventory that was well suited for specific vacation activities or travel themes.  This included special sections for beach rentals, pet friendly rentals, vacation rental deals, cabin rentals, golf vacation rentals, ski rentals, and disney vacation rentals.

Initially, we were targeting search traffic that occurs around those specific vacation themes, but, what we found what that travelers were randomly combining an activity type search phrase, like “beach”, with a destination, like “Destin Florida”, and then adding “vacation rentals” or something like that onto the end.

From our perspective, this type of searching called for a new approach to better match those searches to our owners vacation rentals.  Stay tuned to FindVacationRentals.com, as that release will be published the short term.

As we are making an effort to target these highly desirable traveler activities, vacation rental owners can help themselves a bit as well by making sure that their vacation rental descriptions are specifically mentioning vacation themes like the ones we have targeted.  There are many more that travelers are interested in – scuba diving, surfing, and many more – and owners can sell those travel experiences in their vacation rental descriptions.

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

http://www.findvacationrentals.com