Late last week, FindVacationRentals.com released a completely revamped website with new features designed to attract and keep renters attention.  It also offers new ways for owners to market and promote their properties.  And the best part – this comes with no price increase to our owner community.  Some of the highlights of the new site include:

• New “Owner’s Specials” section.  This allows owners to promote short duration discounts on  properties to enhance the utilization of their vacation rental.  Discounts seem to work pretty well with renters in this economy – people are still taking vacations, but they want better deals, and this section of the site speaks to that: http://www.findvacationrentals.com/cheap-vacation-rentals.html
• New “Vacation Themes”, which are linked all over the site using recognizable icons.  This includs disney, golf, beach, pet friendly, cabin, and ski focused vacations. We created custom inventory for these “theme” pages that highlights vacation rental owners that have rentals in those areas to give them more exposure.  We are also using these themes to create custom email programs, so we send renters alerts periodically that generate even more traffic for owners.  Some sites do this to some degree, but I think FindVacationRentals.com is pushing the envelope a little further by having special landing pages and promotion of specific owner properties.
• New search functionality.  Every page on the site displays the “quick search” box on the top left.  The quick search now has “autocomplete”, so if a renter types in “D…Å…Y…”, it will display options in a drop down box like “Daytona Beach” directly underneath the search, kind of like Google does.  FindVacationRentals.com also offers a completely revamped advanced search page: http://www.findvacationrentals.com/vacation-rental-search.html
• All of the pages across the FindVacationRentals.com website, including country pages, state pages, region pages, city index pages, etc, have been polished and updated to a new design that was created to attract and keep a renters attention.  The city and country index pages that display summary listing information are also much improved.  There are now visible icons for “pet friendly”, and “smoking/non-smoking” displayed with the summary data for each vacation rental listing, as well an additional icon to draw attention to those listings with owner’s specials posted so renters are attracted to those.

We would love to get some feedback from both owner’s and renter’s on the new design.

Cheers,

Jon Ludwig, Owner, FindVacationRentals.com

I’m not entirely sure what experience everyone out there is having with keeping your rentals booked with the touch economic times, but I am sure about one thing: the two most popular adjectives attached to all search traffic on the Internet are “cheap” and “discount”.  In general, everyone likes to think they are getting a great deal, no matter what they are buying.  So, they put the word “cheap” or “discount” in front of whatever it is they are looking for, and see what Google spits out.

Realizing this, I did a bunch of research on Google search traffic in the vacation rental industry specifically related to the phrases “cheap” and “discount”.  I was not surprised to find that “cheap vacation rentals” and “discount vacation rentals” are two of the more popular search terms in the entire vacation rentals by owner online industry.  On our website, http://www.findvacationrentals.com, we put up a speical website section called “Owner’s Specials“.  Our customers can log in to their Owner’s Corner and post an owner’s special anytime they want.  This immediately places their vacation rental on our special “Owner’s Special” section, giving them extra exposure and helping them to increase their inquiries and bookings.  We also make our Owner’s Specials available through a RSS feed, so anyone that finds our Owner’s Specials mini-site can elect to receive instant updates on their mobile phone, or can even have our owner’s specials on their “My Yahoo” or “iGoogle” page automatically.

Yeah, I know.  “Cheap” doesn’t sound like something you want to associate with your vacation rental.  But these days, I’m not as proud as I used to be.  I really need to keep my place booked, and advertising a special so that someone selects my vacation rental versus the many other choices they are going to have is a competitive advantage.

Another thing that owners can do is put the keyphrases “cheap vacation rentals” or “discount vacation rentals” in their actual online advertisements for their vacation rentals.  “Discount” probably sounds a little better than “cheap”, but either way it should increase the exposure to your individual listing.

If you are a customer of www.findvacationrentals.com, you can log in to Owner’s Corner if you want to make any adjustments to your listing text.

Cheers,

Jon, Owner, www.findvacationrentals.com