Goodbye rentability - another holiday rental website gone

For some years now I have advertised on Rentability, but today received an email telling of its demise.

There are an awful lot of holiday rental sites out on the Internet and I've tried a few of them over the years, but Rentability was one that I hoped would have made it a success as it had a really good look and feel with lots of photos and interactivity and as a property owner the editing tools were really easy to use. Best of all it charged no upfront advertising fees, you only paid to receive the booking enquiries, and with 5 free enquiry credits I had nothing to lose from trying it I felt.

So over the years I've diligently been updating my property availability on Rentability but was beginning to realise that this was a losing cause as I had never received any genuine booking enquiries, let alone any that translated into an actual booking. I've had a few spam booking enquiries but Rentability was quite good at detecting these so I am still sitting on 5 free enquiry credits.

Today I received the less than unexpected news that Rentability was shutting down. I guess it never could drive enough traffic to the site to enable it to be come a commercially viable business.

Here's the closure email I received.

RIP Rentability, I personally am sorry to see its demise.

The end of the road

It’s with great regret that we have to announce that Rentability will shut down at the end of February 2014.

If you have purchased credits with us, and you would like a refund of any remaining credits in your account then please email Josh@Rentability.com with your Paypal account details and we'll refund you as soon as possible.

We’re very sorry that it has to end like this. We tried our best, and we hope that the shutdown doesn’t inconvenience you too much.

Josh, Sim, Tom

A cautionary tale

The story of our gradual decline is a common one I’m afraid. The original idea for Rentability came from talking to my mother, who was fed up with paying large up-front fees to holiday rental websites without any guarantee that the hundreds of pounds she had invested would result in any actual enquiries. The bigger websites also seemed to charge lots of hidden extras - charging more to advertise on “sister” websites that were effectively rebranded versions of the same site, charging fees for each image uploaded etc. This existing model had been inherited from the “classified ad” model of print magazines without realising any of the advantages of the Internet. We thought that a fairer model, where advertisers paid only for actual responses rather than a fixed fee would surely be welcomed by property owners - instead of risking hundreds of pounds on an advertisement that might not bring any responses they’d be risking nothing and pay much less in total.

We set about trying to build a website that fixed these problems. Instead of dull, identical text ads with a few pictures, we built an editor which allowed property owners to create much more attractive and unique pages for their property, with lots of images and interesting layouts. We added free SMS alerts for enquires, calendars and booking management tools. We created a system that allowed you to embed your Rentability booking calendar into your own website, all for free. We developed a unique system which identified and warned property owners of potentially fraudulent enquiries. We even gave everyone five free enquiries when they first signed up.

Frankly, we couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to continue advertising their property on one of those old expensive, ugly looking rip off sites. Everyone would surely realise how much better our system was and abandon those rip-off sites immediately!

It took nearly two years to develop the website. In the interim, the largest existing advertising site received a huge investment of cash, and bought up all of the smaller sites, creating a near monopoly in the market. They were now an almost unassailable monster.

Rentability was three people: Sim, Tom, Josh. We knew we couldn’t simply outgun such a huge corporation, and none of us are natural sales people - we just thought that if we built something clearly better than the competition then word of mouth would do our advertising for us. Turns out we were wrong.

The problem that we faced on launching the site was achieving critical mass - a holiday rental website isn’t any good without properties to rent, and if you’re looking for somewhere to stay then the wider the choice, the better. Some start-up websites tried to solve this problem by trawling holiday rental websites and spamming property owners, or even automatically duplicating their existing advertisements without permission. It would have been extremely easy for us to do the same, but we ruled out this sort of thing out early on - that was exactly the kind of unethical and predatory behaviour we felt Rentability stood against.

So we tried what we could to promote the site with our limited resources - we engaged with people on forums, placed Google ads and tried to spread the word. We’d expected that the start would be difficult - but what we hadn’t anticipated was the hostility and suspicion we would have to face. In retrospect, it’s understandable - with so many rip-off sites around, the awful state of the holiday rental advertising business had made property owners very wary of anyone new coming along - especially if what they seemed to be offering was “too good to be true”. The same unethical practices that we were trying to improve had made people too cynical to even give us a chance.

People were suspicious that we could charge them for trivial enquiries, or simply make up fictions enquiries. So, after considerable debate we decided to put our trust in our customers and instituted an honour system which meant advertisers only had to pay for those enquiries that they thought worthwhile. This ensured that no-one had to pay us any money if they didn’t feel we’d earned it.

We tried everything to convince people we were legitimate - we thought that if only people would join us they would see we were genuine. It didn’t help that our user interface could be intimidating to first time users, who couldn’t understand why it was so different from the websites they were used to. So we even offered to design the advertisements and set everything up ourselves. This wasn’t an automated process - each advert was designed individually, by hand - it was a lot of work.

It wasn’t enough.

We were out of ideas, energy and money.

We knew at that point that we were never going to win. Our competition had millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of customers, and we were a tiny group of people trying to do things in a new and unfamiliar way. We discovered that contrary to myth, in David and Goliath battles, Goliath wins most of the time.

Without a critical mass of advertisers we could never generate a critical mass of traffic, and without traffic our advertisers weren’t going to get enough enquiries to make it worthwhile for them. It was a Catch 22 we were never going to escape.

Since that time we’ve kept the site running for the sake of our customers, not wanting to let down the people who did believe in us and hoping that we would have a new idea that could change everything. But despite some possibilities, the miracle never happened. It costs hundreds of pounds each month to keep the servers running, and a considerable amount of effort in technical support. The total income ever generated by Rentability would barely pay the server bill for a single month.

Finally, last month, we conceded that we simply can’t afford to continue running the server any longer. It was difficult for us to admit we’d failed, but we have to face reality.

In parting, we’d like to thank those of you who have supported Rentability and especially anyone who recommended us to your friends - we’re deeply sorry if you feel we’ve let you down and wish you the best of luck with your bookings this year.

What's the probability? My Gite advert on 4OD

I have recently taken out an advert on Holiday Lettings.co.uk for our farmhouse rental near Josselin, and much to my surprise today I saw a banner advert for our Gite!

I was viewing the Channel 4 TV 'catchup' service 4OD, to try to watch an episode of Time Team that my father recommended to me as they were digging in York, which is where I went to University (an awful long time ago).

And there, in the banner advert at the top of the 4OD website was an advert for Holiday Lettings, with links to two of their Brittany properties, including on the right, my own holiday Gite.

I was at first incredibly surprised at the probability of being served an advert for holiday lettings, and then for there to be two featured properties that included my own. After a while I figured that it was probably the cleverness of Google Advertising that had worked out that I have sometimes searched on Google for Brittany holiday Gite's, and that this was thus a good advert to serve to me. However having refreshed the 4OD page several times since I've been shown adverts for Aviva Insurance, Audible spoken word books, Thomson Holidays and now Marc Jacobs fragrances, so I am not convinced it was clever Google after all.

Here's my full browser window, showing the advert in context:

Well let's hope the bookings come rolling in !

Panda Power brings a touch of French language

For 8 years now we've been renting out our holiday Gite to anyone that would like a tranquil holiday in our lovely little corner of Brittany. In that time we've had the majority of our guests from the UK, a smaller number from Ireland, and a few from America, Canada, Holland, Sweden and even Australia!

But the one country we've never had any guests from is perhaps the most obvious, i.e. France itself.

Obviously never having had any guests from France I'm not sure of the precise reasons for this, but one thing I have considered in the past that may put potential French guests off is that our holiday rental website is written entirely in English.

So hence on my "wouldn't it be a good idea to do" list for some time is the idea of having a small sub-set of our Gite website pages written in French in order to make the property more accessible to French speakers and residents of France itself.

Unfortunately like many of my well meaning ideas the French site has just never got done. Although I can "get by" in conversational French I don't think the quality of my written French is good enough, and similarly using an automated service like google translate comes up with a passable conversion, but again I don't think it would look professional enough to put on my website.

So the only remaining option is to find someone who can speak good French and good English and ask them to do the translation.

There are plenty of professional companies that will translate anything you like - for a fee - but its the size of the fee that has put me off. Fees vary quite a lot but are typically around the 10 to 15 pence per word mark, so even translating a core subset of our website (which has 20 plus pages) would be a few thousand words to translate ... and a price to match.

And so there the task has sat.

Until last week when I read an article on lovemoney.com about taskpandas, a new way to make money from doing odd jobs. The idea of taskpandas.com is brilliantly simple, it acts as a marketplace to match people who have a bit of free time and skills that others might want, with people that need tasks doing. So if you need someone to assemble some furniture, to do some dog sitting, to deliver leaflets, to paint a shed, or simply give you a hand with something around the home, then taskpandas can help.

Since you generally need most of the requesters and taskpandas (those that offer their services) to be local to each other the service launch has started off in major UK cities (London, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Edinburgh & Glasgow), although is spreading quickly.

Simply post what you want done, when you want it done by, how much you are prepared to pay, and then wait for panda's to offer (bid) their services to you. You can review prior feedback star ratings and comments (ebay style) from the pandas that bid for your task, and then accept and pay for whoever you like. Payment is taken by paypal and once completed the panda is paid into their paypal account (minus a 15% commission that the website takes for acting as intermediary). According to taskpandas.com there are 1,500 registered users and some £50,000 of work has been offered since the site was launched earlier this year, so its growing quickly.

So I thought I would give it a go. Taskpandas offers CRB checks for their more active pandas as a measure of trust, but for what I needed help with this wasn't a deciding factor.

On Monday evening last week I posted my task on taskpandas, asking for a virtual task (i.e. didn't need someone local), with a 'due by' date of mid January as I'm in no immediate hurry:

Translate some web pages from English to French
I would like a fluent French speaker/writer to translate a small number (circa 6) pages from a website from English to French

Tuesday afternoon I received my first bid, the second came in on Wednesday afternoon, and then on Thursday morning I assigned the task to one of my two bidding pandas.

My winning panda has taught French for over 25 years and is a senior A level examiner for two examination boards so I am very very happy with finding the kind of skilled person that I don't think I could have found easily otherwise - and in less than 60 hours from raising the task to agreeing who to do it.

I'll let you know how I get on with the actual translation.

VillaRentals / RentalSystems new website launch

Just in time for the Christmas season and potential customers starting to look for their next year holiday, VillaRentals relaunched their website on the 23rd December with a new cleaner and simpler look and feel, and a number of behind the scenes improvements including an improved ability to upload unlimited holiday property photos.

One of the most significant changes with the relaunched website is to the way that VillaRentals now shows holiday rental prices.  Previously the Gite rental price we charge is displayed against the listing, and then only when a customer progresses towards the end of the booking process are VillaRentals' mandatory credit card and booking fees added.  The end result is not surprisingly that customers are annoyed by seeing the price they pay change.

From now on all this is simplified and VillaRentals now shows from step 1 an all-inclusive weekly rental price.

Previously VillaRentals charged 2.5% for handling the credit card payment and £15 booking fee for rentals generated by themselves, or £8 for rentals that we generate and process through VillaRentals payment engine.
In the new scheme these two fees are replaced by a single combined flat rate 4.5% fee.

The nett-nett is some slight swings and roundabouts. VillaRentals generated bookings work out generally slightly cheaper for the customer (a £500 weekly rental price now costs £522.50 whereas previously the customer would have paid £527.50), and member generated bookings work out slightly more expensive (the same £500 rent would have cost £520.50 and now costs the same £522.50).

All in all though providing all inclusive prices should definitely make things better for our customers. We usually get one or two bookings direct each year from our holiday Gite advert on VillaRentals.

Start of a new year and I'm thinking about Gite advertising

Happy New Year, Happy New Decade, and all that stuff.

In a couple of days (January 5th to be precise) it'll be the 6th anniversary of Liz and I buying our own French holiday home. The first year was spent sorting the place out, decorating, buying furniture, etc, then we started renting the Gite in February 2005.

2010 is thus our 6th year of renting, and although we've seen some 'normal' ups and downs over the years, there has definitely been an abnormal drop off in rentals over the last year, no doubt caused by the downturn in the economy.

And so I am thinking (again) about advertising the Gite.

I've recently found a couple of new free advertising options to pass on ....

First up, is Rent Gite France run by Dave Smith.

Dave writes the interestingly named Gite Guru blog and as well as passing on SEO and Wordpress tips he also creates professional Gite marketing websites. What is a little unusual is that Dave creates all his websites using the free Wordpress Blogging software which whilst creating some restrictions to the website layout has the big advantage of making it really easy to produce and add new website content.

Earlier in the year Dave launched Rent Gite France (RGF) as a free Gite advertising directory, and I guess partly also as a showcase for his Gite SEO skills.

It's taken me ages to actually get around to creating our own Gite listing on RGF but with the holiday break I finally had time to do it. You get plenty of space on RGF to describe your Gite, the features of the Gite, add pictures, and of course where it is on the map. And best of all, RGF is completely free!


Secondly, lovetoescape.com which is an altogether bigger holiday home rental site.

Lovetoescape dropped me a note (via the 'Contact us' enquiry form on our own Gite website) to ask if we would like to list on their site. Their website is already well established as a UK holiday accommodation directory with some 7 million page views per year and they've recently expanded into France and the rest of Europe.

You can list on L2E with a free basic listing, or for £150 you can list as a premium entry, which provides all the usual holiday home rental facilities; full details of your property, lots of photos, the ability to manage your holiday booking calendar, and any enquiries you receive, etc.

Until the end of January 2010 all basic listings for French holiday accommodation on L2E will be upgraded free of charge to a Premium listing, all you have to do is to drop them a line to request the free upgrade.

L2E claim that Premium listings receive on average 2,000 page views a year and between 250 and 500 direct referrals, so it's certainly worth a try.


So far booking enquiries have been very quiet but I'm hoping that they'll pick up as people return to work next week. Certainly the more places we advertise with has got to increase our booking opportunities.

See other articles I've written under the GiteAdvertising category for other advertising options we've found.

GuideEuro - online European website directory

We're always looking for good value (aka cheap, or even better, free) places to advertise our Brittany Holiday Cottage, and I've written before about some of the different Holiday home advertisements we've tried.

One that we've recently joined is Guide Euro which is (ambitiously) aiming to create a comprehensive directory of European websites ... sounds like it might be a bit of a Forth Railway bridge painting job to me.

You can be included in the GuideEuro directory as either a Premium advertiser, a Basic advertiser or a Link Partner. The Premium and Basic are paid advertiser entries which give your entry more text, photos and details about your company; whereas the Link Partner requires a reciprocal link back from your own website.

We're on the French Travel resources section as a Link Partner.

French Entree - performance over last year and 2009 renewal request

Yesterday I mentioned that French Entree have kindly been continuing to send me booking enquiries for the last year despite the end of my free French Entree advertising trial which I didn't renew back in February 2008.

Well in my mailbox has arrived another request to renew with French Entree and in light of the predicted forthcoming "tough year for French holiday home owners" I'm being offered a special deal of "just £45 (approx. 50 Euros) to advertise all year on FrenchEntrée and on their sister site TotalFrance.com".

On the face of it this is a good deal as the published 2008 advertising rate for French Entree was £139; which was then discounted down by 30% to £97 if I renewed by the end of February 2008.

Looking back on French Entree's performance, I can see from my mailbox that they have sent me 14 enquiries over the last year - a pretty good result when compared to other Gite advertising sites.
But when I drill into these 14 enquiries a bit more I noticed that 3 of these were scam bookings (all with 00 225 Ivory Coast telephone numbers), 8 booking enquiries were for peak July and August weeks (which we can and do easily sell anyway), and the other 3 enquiries were for other weeks in June and September 2008 that had already been booked.

Thus we didn't get any bookings as a result of our French Entree advert last year.

So all in all despite the good rate of enquiries I don't think I will be renewing again with FE. Unfortunately I'm just not getting enough booking enquiries that wouldn't otherwise be received such as low season or short break bookings from them to justify the expenditure.

"Credit crunch" affecting bookings ?

Gite lounge and dining table

With all the news of doom and gloom on the high street and talk of recession I've been thinking about whether we're seeing any signs of that in the holiday bookings for our Gite this year.

Today I took a booking for a week's holiday in June 2009, and a few hours later whilst sitting on a plane descending into Frankfurt airport (a one-day work trip for a training course), I thought I'd do a quick bit of analysis to see how we're doing compared to the last couple of years.

Right now (23rd November 2008) we have bookings for one week in June, half of July and almost all of August 2009 already booked - a total of 7 weeks reserved.

At the same point in 2007 we had exactly the same pattern of 7 weeks booked, one week of June, half of July and almost all of August 2008; and looking further back to 2006 it was slightly higher with 8 weeks reserved, a week at Easter, a week in June, half of July and almost all of August.

There are slight variations year on year as to when we receive the holiday bookings; last year was slightly earlier with bookings coming through in August and September whereas in previous years (and this year) they've not really started until October, but given that we've just taken two bookings in the last week I'm hopeful that the Gite will remain as popular as it's always been.

And as a family we have (for once) got ourselves organised and booked our own Easter and Summer holidays in the Gite for next year - usually we leave it too late and find there's no free dates.

I'm absolutely looking forward to 3 weeks of doing nothing next August ... although knowing me I won't be able to keep still and will be drawn by the lure of plasterboard and wiring in the second house!

PS: It's snowing in Frankfurt and I forgot to bring a coat (Brrr). I was amused to see that the airport code for Frankfurt printed on my luggage label is "FRA", a brief reminder of France perhaps?

PPS: The photo is of the lounge, dining room table and lovely beech open stairway in our Brittany Gite

Choose France have chosen not to advertise French properties any more

Choose France

Way way way back in time (well OK, on 24th September 2005 which is as an awful long time ago in Internet time) I advertised our French holiday home on Choose France.

Well unfortunately since I've had the advert live on their site I've only received three booking enquiries via them, each of which was rapidly followed up by an email from the Choose France administrators warning that the enquirer was probably fraudulent - requesting a holiday for their daughter visiting from the States, asking for a month-long booking, or requesting to book because of company business (but then saying that they wanted to book for 1 adult + 1 child!).

So top marks from Choose France for being on the ball in terms of spotting rogue enquiries, but unfortunately little generated in terms of actual customer leads.

Today I received an email from them saying that from 1st August 2008 the ChooseFrance.com website will become an information only website and will no longer be advertising owner/agent rental properties.

Over the last few years I guess I'd kind of written off their site, and I saw today when I looked at my advert that I'd not even been adding 2008 bookings so it appears as though we're completely vacant in the peak period (which of course we're not, we're full for almost all of this summer holidays).

Choose France did also have a "late availability" section which we used to advertise on occasionally, not sure from their email whether this will be maintained or not.

In the over-competitive rental directory market there'll be a few more casualties like Choose France.

Nice to get a cheque *from* Google

Google Adwords

Last month I wrote about Google Adwords offering me a VAT refund and today in the post I received a nice cheque for £67.90 for VAT overcharged between 1st January 2004 and 22nd May 2008.

I didn't think I really used Adwords all that much (perhaps a tenner or so a month in advertising fees) but it clearly adds up as shown by the size of the refund cheque.

Unfortunately there was no multi-coloured Google logo on the cheque or a curvy 'g' like Google's new favicon just a plain "Google Ireland Ltd" typed out on the top.

Oh well off to the bank tomorrow to pay it in along with a couple of Gite rental cheques that have come in. We ask for a 25% deposit up front to secure the booking, then the balance payment 8 weeks before the booking. So now there's a nice little deluge of cheques arriving with all our guests paying for their July and August holidays.

All helps the "Gite renovation" fund!

Due a VAT refund from Google Adwords

Google Adwords

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from Google Adwords telling me that they'd reviewed by Google Adwords account and decided that my VAT setting was incorrect as my account was being used for business purposes (i.e. I was using Adwords to "gain an economic advantage by promoting goods or services on Google AdWords") rather than non-business purposes.

According to Google I had either declared that my adwords account was being used for non-business purposes (unlikely) or that I had not entered a VAT number (definitely the case as I'm not VAT registered). As a result of this VAT was being charged on my Google Adwords Adverts at the Irish rate (21%) as all EU customers are managed from Google Ireland Ltd (EU).

The email then went on to explain that under article 194 of European Council Directive 2006/112/EC as a non-Irish resident business I should be responsible for accounting for VAT in my home country, and thus Adwords have ceased charging me Irish VAT on my Adwords adverts.

Finally the email concluded with telling me that I may be eligible for a refund of Irish VAT charged by Google Ireland Ltd that I had errantly paid.

Digging into the Adwords help files I found a definition of whether Adwords is being used for business purposes or not, whether VAT applies to Adwords or not which also said that "Advertisers with a business address in the EU, but outside Ireland, may self-assess VAT at their Member State's local rate if they are using Google AdWords for business purposes", and finally instructions on how to declare for self assessment of VAT within Google Adwords.

I did find this all somewhat confusing as there's no easy way of making a VAT self-declaration in the UK as my rental income turnover is considerably below the annual VAT threshold.

Potential eligibility for a VAT refund was triggered by me checking my VAT details on my Adwords account and basically confirming that the account's 'company name' matched the name held on my bank account as this is who any refund cheque would be made payable to.

Well not really expecting much from it I duly verified my company name details and today was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Google Adwords telling me that I am eligible for a refund of past VAT charged by Google Ireland to the tune of £67.90.

Very nice!

French Magazine relaunches Holidays2France and we get a free advert

A couple of months ago I wrote about our print advertisement in French Magazine, which unfortunately to date hasn't produced any enquiries or bookings results 8-(

On Wednesday this week I received an email from the publishers of French Magazine, Merrick Media, to tell me that they've relaunched their Holidays2France website and as an existing advertiser I would automatically appear on the website - just as long as I provided them the Gite details in the format they required by Saturday lunchtime!

Getting the details together was a bit of a challenge as I was in South Africa for most of the week and so had to subscribe to wireless Internet access from my hotel. I did manage to get the entry written just before the deadline and before the day was out my new Gite advert was live.

I continue to hope that the advertising purchase cost was justified and we get some enquires as a result.

Clickstay.com - first with instant vacation rental bookings and confirmation

Clickstay.com from rentalsystems

This week RentalSystems announced that they've launched a new website ClickStay.com which claims to be the internet's first and only site that allows customers to book vacation holiday rentals direct with the owner and receive an instant booking confirmation.

Based on the existing RentalSystems booking engine, Clickstay.com presents to the customer the subset of RentalSystems properties that have guaranteed availability by showing only those properties which offer instant confirmation so it becomes as easy to book a Gite holiday as it is to book a hotel bedroom.

In RentalSystems there's an option that you can set to allow customers who request a set of booking dates to receive instant confirmation of their booking and proceed straight through to paying the rental deposit. Obviously this is only going to be of use to you if you're sure your RentalSystems availability calendar is 100% up to date as otherwise you risk confirming bookings for dates that you've already rented out via another source.

For me I'd previously not marked my property as being available for instant bookings as I wanted to give customers the option to check details etc before I confirmed the booking to them. Having said that though, I do always update the availability calender for our holiday home on Rental Systems as I don't want the embarassment of having to turn down bookings, and anyway I've always ended up accepting all the RentalSystems bookings that we've had, so turning the option on wasn't such a big deal for us.

When you turn on Instant Booking Confirmation you do get a few options that you can select and enable you as to which bookings will get processed via the normal request dates/confirm availability/accept booking cycle; you can select to filter on booking requests:
- over the christmas period
- more than a certain number of single sex occupants (e.g. if you want to prevent "lads away" type bookings)
- less than X days ahead (e.g. to allow you time to inform whoever does your changeover)
- with party members greater than a set age (e.g. if there's limited access upstairs)
- with party members less than a set age (e.g. if you don't want kids just turned 18)
- with more than a certain number of children (e.g. if you've only a certain number of cots or single beds)

If you choose to set these filters (and you don't have to) then you're not actually saying you won't allow bookings from customers that meet any of these criteria, what happens instead is that the booking's not automatically confirmed, instead you're sent the booking request and asked if you want to accept or decline it.

ClickStay.com's available for no extra charge over and above the normal RentalSystems booking commission (of 10% + VAT) so for me I decided to go for it as it's another possible booking source which is no bad thing.

Obviously if it doesn't work out and I start getting bookings that for whatever reason I can't proceed with I may change my mind.

If you use RentalSystems what do you think, are you available for Instant Confirmation? If not, what's your thoughts?
Please do leave a comment

We're in print - French Magazine Advert

French Magazine

In early January I was telephoned by a representative of French Magazine to try to encourage us to take out an advert for our French holiday home in their magazine.

French Magazine is published monthly with a circulation of 20,000 copies, targeted at everyone with a love of French culture and holidays.

Each issue has a cover price of £3.99 and is distributed though:

• Top 544 WH Smiths
• Top 130 Tesco’s (and is apparently the only French/France magazine sold in Tesco's)
• 150 Waitrose stores
• Borders book stores, Eason's in Northern Ireland & East Coast of the USA
• 2000+ copies are distributed Worldwide (including USA, Canada, Australia, Switzerland)
• An exclusive deal with P&0 Ferries to supply 5,000 copies into the Club Class Lounges every month – From Dover to Calais 750 crossing per month
• 150 Waitrose Branches Nationwide
• 20 Alpha retail Airport sites with frequent flights to France (including Birmingham, Gatwick, Heathrow, Belfast International, Nottingham East Midlands)
• Smile Convenience Stores in Gloucester/Southwest including Plymouth
• Tates Convenience Stores in North/North Wales and Midlands

... etc

So in summary, the magazine's got a good circulation and reach to many potential rental customers for our holiday gite.

I do have to admit though to being fairly sceptical about paying serious money for advertising as I want to see a good return on investment from my money.

Generally our Gite advertising has been fairly low cost, currently consisting of Google Adwords, some Fridge Magnets and a couple of targeted website adverts such as RentalSystems. And with this low cost advertising plus some good search engine rankings we're already doing fairly well each year and are reasonably easily able to fill the peak holiday season weeks.

So for instance right now (February 08) we've already taken bookings for all of July and August 08, most of Easter, half of May is filled, and also June is already half-booked. We've therefore only got holiday vacancies in April, May, June and September 2008 and obviously onwards through autumn and into 2009.

If a Gite advert costs (say) £250 and I get back a similar £250 nett amount for a one week rental (nett after deducting the changeover and cleaning fee our agents charge us of course, plus electricity and water usage charges) then the advert is going to have to generate at least two new bookings for weeks that would otherwise have remained vacant before it's proved to be a worthwhile investment.

Renting out the Gite for the school summer holiday's isn't a challenge, what would be ideal is if we can get bookings for the slightly less popular periods in May, September and October when the weather's still good and we've got otherwise vacant weeks.

So having said all that, you can tell that we agonised for several days over whether to take out the French Magazine advert or not. The regular advertising rate for a one-sixth page advert is £400+VAT for 6 months £700+VAT for 12 months; so it was always going to be a challenge to get me to part with that kind of money !

I don't think it's appropriate to reveal precisely how much we did end up paying for the advert, but suffice to say we negotiated long and hard and in fact only agreed that we would take out an advert on the day before the publishing deadline for the March issue (which no doubt helped in the negotiation as they were looking to fill space in that issue).

The magazine's been out for a couple of weeks now and so far we've only had one emailed contact as a result from someone offering expatriate financial services. Still early days and all that so we'll see what happens.

The advert does look absolutely lovely though, we're really proud of it, and if you've got the magazine our advert is on page 115:

Free French holiday Gite advertising on French Entree (until end Feb 08)

French Entree - Holiday Rentals

I don't know if you've seen French Entrée or not, but it's a pretty good online guide to owning and buying property in France. There's quite a lot of useful articles about different regions of France, the process of buying a house, planning permission, new septic tanks (one of my recent favourite subjects!), and more.

I noticed last night that French Entrée have recently launched 'FrenchEntrée Holidays', an online magazine aimed at people holidaying in France, and so are offering free holiday home listings up to the end of February 2008. As standard each advert includes:

• Description & Property features
• Map link
• Rental price calendar
• Email enquiry system
• Account to record all your enquiries
• Keyword search engine optimisation
• 9 photos
• SMS message option for enquiries

After the free trial period the price rises (I think) to €120 per year.

We're in the top 400 Gites in France

We've recently had our Brittany Holiday Gite selected to become a member of GiteDeFrance.Info's top 400 Gites in France for 2008 which is nice recognition of the quality of our Gite, and a potential additional source of customers for us.

Having been selected to be in the top 400, the actual position we appear at within the directory is determined by how many visitors we in turn send to the GdF.I website and how many visitors from GdF.I visit our Gite website. So in essence it's a popularity based ranking. Those Gites that pass more visitors to the directory appear higher which in turn boosts their visitors, etc, etc.

Right now we're appearing at position 55-ish but this seems to be recalculated fairly frequently so with luck we'll get a bit higher soon.

I've added the snazzy GdF.i logo to the homepage of our Gite website so hopefully that'll help to boost our ranking a bit:

No success with advertising on RentPropertyDirect

Our Brittany Gite on RentPropertyDirect

Back in December 2006 I wrote about a year's free holiday home advertising on Rent Property Direct, and just a couple of weeks ago I received the 4-weeks-to-go, 2-weeks-to-go, 1-week-to-go, renew-today automatic reminder emails telling me that my first year's advert (which was free) was coming to an end.

Well when I put the advert up I commented that as it hadn't cost me anything to list then if I didn't get any bookings as a result I wasn't losing anything, and perhaps as I half expected, that's exactly what I gained from the year's advert - nothing at all.

According to the RPD statistics for my Gite advert we've been viewed 320 times over the last year (and doubtless one or two of those were from me checking the advert looked right), but I've had zero enquiries, not one, absolutely nothing, zip, zilch, nada, nowt.

So I won't be passing £99 of my children's inheritance onto RPD for a second year's listing and I'll try somewhere else instead. They're still doing the free listing for the first year offer so good luck to any prospective other clients, and sorry it didn't work out for me.

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Vacapedia Vacation Rental directory

Vacapedia rental site

I'm always on the lookout for alternative places to advertise our holiday cottage, partly on the basis of the more places I list, the more places I'm likely to get a booking from, and also partly because more links from other sites will boost our search engine rankings.

If I can find places at low (or no) cost, so much the better!

Recently I came across Vacapedia which aims to be "the leading 'one-stop-shop' site for travelers / families seeking vacation rentals on the Internet", is based in Silicon Valley, and is "building the largest database of vacation rentals and associated information to serve the vacation rental ecosystem".

I'm not sure what a 'vacation ecosystem' is, but nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that.

We've listed our French holiday home on Vacapedia and will wait and see if it bears any fruit.

Vacapedia are currently offering three promotion codes:

• Advertise your properties FREE for 1 whole year, use code "FREE0012" in the final step of the "Add Property" process.
• List your property by March 31st for $60 (60% discount), use code "MAR60"
• List for 2 years for $70 (70% discount), use code "MAR70"

Summer's pretty much gone

I've not written about holiday bookings and current holiday rental availability for our Holiday Gite for some time, so thought it worth penning a quick update.

In brief we're doing fantastically well this year with many more dates already booked than we had at this time last year.

Last week we took a booking for the last free week in May so right now our current summer 2007 availability is:

• Only 1 week free in April (21st to 28th)
• All of May booked
• All of June booked
• All of July booked
• Most of August booked with only 28th onwards being free
• Half of September booked, only 1st to the 10th is free, and 21st onwards
  
  
• Most of March and October are free, as is Christmas 2007 and 2008!

We're obviously really pleased to be doing so well which appears to be mainly brought about by our improved Google ranking (we're about position 8-10 for "Brittany Gite" and position 15-18 for "Brittany Holiday").

Taken a booking for Christmas & New Year guests

Last year The Gite was booked by a couple for Christmas and I was rather hoping we'd get a similar booking this year - we'd even got a Christmas tree and lights ready for the guests!

Dutch flag courtesy of ITA's
Flags of All Countries
and used with permission

Three weeks ago and no bookings in sight (despite putting up some 'late availability' adverts) so I offered the Gite on ebay to no avail. Tried again a week later and this time got a couple of enquiries, one of which looked like they were going to book ... and then we received a booking via our holiday home listing on VillaRenters (so I had to cancel the ebay listing).

Our Christmas guests will be with us for 12 days and it turns out that they're from Holland. So far all bar one other couple (from Ireland) have been from the UK. I'm slightly surprised that we have not had more overseas guests (even though we do advertise via Google in Germany, France, Holland and Belgium) - a few website visitors but no booking enquiries at all.

We did have an enquiry in November from a French group that wanted the Gite over New Year but they wanted to book in a party of 12 which is rather too many for our 3 bedrooms. Even pressing the two children's cots into use wouldn't really suffice ...