Vacation Rental Owner Blog » vacation rental advertising by owner

Marketing Local Attractions with your Vacation Rental

Vacation Rental Expert — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:11:27 +0000

Recently, I came cross this article excerpt written by industry expert think PhoCusWright. The jist of the article is that the traveler community does not select vacation rentals only on obvious factors, like cost and location. Many travelers are looking for a specific kind of travel experience, and they actually don’t care where they go, just that they have a specific type of travel experience.

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.

Custom Gooogle Maps with Points of Interest

Grundig — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:27:53 +0000

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

Photosynth provides easy and fun new way to show off your unit.

Grundig — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 04:16:20 +0000

I’m always looking for ways to show off my unit, recently I learned of a great FREE new 3D photo-stitching service offered by Microsoft. What is 3D photo-stitching? Its sewing together a number of images to form a larger composite image. The technology has been around for a while and is used to create many of the panoramic images you may have seen. I have played with a number of utilities to try to do this on my own over the years and the exercise has usually left me very frustrated. Well, thank you Microsoft (at least for now while the service is still free)! No longer do you have to be very careful when taking the original pictures or manually align images! No longer are you limited to 2D stitching. No longer do you need a special camera or expensive SW. With photosynth it is very fast and easy to create 3D interactive walkthroughs of your unit and let folks zoom in details such as your new 42″ High Def TV, or even read the titles of your DVD collection. The only down side is that the synths are hosted on microsoft’s site, realistically requires broadband internet connection and prospective tenants would have to install a plugin on thier PC to be able to view them.

Interested? Check out photosynth now. I also recommend you watch this great video tutorial on how to create your own in a matter of minutes.

Enjoy!

Andy

List your rental on Google and other search engines.

Grundig — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:57:32 +0000

Most search engines provide a way for business to manually enter their own information on their maps and search results. While just posting won’t ensure you come up at the top, or even the first page. If you list your rental properties address it pick your keywords right, you may come up in a geographic search if they person searching specifies a location or uses the map search function.

If you go the Google Maps home page http://maps.google.com/ you will notice a link to “put your business on google maps”

Go ahead. You never know!

Easy and FREE way to share documents with tenants.

Grundig — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:51:19 +0000

The amount of information you can post on most vacation rental hosting site is limited to a few photo’s and limited text. Do you have documents, links, photos, videos, virtual tours, or other media and information relating to your rental that you frequently share with your tenants? I do! I recently found a great service that will let you host information about your rental and share them with with prospective tenants. Its called DROPIO.

As the web site puts it: “Use drop.io to simply take anything [photos, videos, voice notes, web links, emails, etc.] and add them to a completely private, online space called a ‘drop’ to share real-time by web, email, phone, fax, and more. Check out our ‘How To’ video.”

I have to agree with them. Its very simple and its FREE and there is even no registration required.

Each drop can have 100MB of information and you can have as many drops as you want. Once created, you can add to it in many ways including uploading files, emails, post links, fax, call and leave voice messages. Drops can be password protected, fax from them, and even host conference calls from a private conferencing number. You can view a short tutorial here http://drop.io/howto

What can you share? Here is just sampling of some of the things you can share to support your vacation rental:

As many pictures as you want
Video walkthrough, panoramic stiches
Links to local activities
Newspaper articles about your resort area
Copies of Welcome Packages and other information
Restaurant reviews
Maps
Driving Directions

One final word of caution, be sure to bookmark or write down your newly created drops. Since they don’t require any registration if you forget your drop name you may not be able to find it again.