Making Sense of the Online Market places Where Potential Renters Can Find You

Transcription

1 Making Sense of the Online Market places Where Potential Renters Can Find You Making Sense of the Online Marketplaces Where Potential Renters Can Find You Copyright Beth Carson. All rights reserved. No part of this report may be reproduced by any means without the express written consent of the publisher. The information contained herein is obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but its accuracy cannot be guaranteed.

2 Making Sense of the Online Marketplaces Where Potential Renters Can Find You In the last few years, the landscape for marketing your vacation rental has changed drastically. If you re new to vacation rentals, you can jump right in without navigating all of the changes. If you ve been in the market a while, the changes can be daunting but my view on the changes is that as long as you are a professional, and follow basic, easy policies, you ll do just fine. Listings sites Booking sites. The Big 3- HomeAway, Airbnb and FlipKey have become bookings sites. You may have heard of OTA s Online Travel Agencies like Expedia, Hotels.com, and Travelocity? Well, that s what listing sites are now. Instead of simply being a resource where potential guests contact you, they now handle everything, the payment, updating the calendar, sending out vital information. Contact information is often withheld until the payment has been made, which leaves owners feeling one of two ways- relieved or cast to the side. Some mornings, I wake up, and a booking has come in that I have had no involvement with- I have not answered questions, not processed payments, not gotten excited over why they are traveling- I simply have a booking with guests and money on their way. I urge you to be hopeful about the changes. Basic business practices will go far, while those who don t keep up will be left in the dust, with very few bookings. With each listing, you ll get at least a full page to talk about your property, space for photos and some offer a place for video. We ll talk about how to craft a stellar listing in the Marketing section. In addition to the Big 3, there are smaller more focused websites- Bring Fido has homes that welcome travelers with dogs, or Clanventure for

3 family friendly vacation rentals- ones that have features and amenities that make a home not only fun but safe for families with young children. There are also ones that focus on a specific area. Do your homework if you want to list on other sites. I recommend that you really focus on the Big 3 when you start out Knock those listings out of the park- I ll show you how in the program. It could be that there is a local company that dominates the market for your area, so do your homework! Simple searches can turn up riches. To Your Wildly Successful Vacation Rental, Beth Carson A little history VRBO Stands for Vacation Rental By Owner. Back in the day, the industry was a hands-on, receive a check in the mail and send a contract to the future guests. Calendars were updated on paper. VRBO was the first, true worldwide online listing portal. It began as a family run site in the 1990 s.

4 HomeAway.com HomeAway started in 2005 with its purchase of industry leader VRBO, and soon began gobbling up vacation rental sites to become the largest global listing site for vacation rentals. In late 2015, it made world news as Expedia purchased it. HomeAway owns more than 30 sites in a variety of languages including Note that Stayz- popular Australian site, is part of the HomeAway family. In 2017 HomeAway surpassed 2,000,000 unique spaces to stay and started offering private rooms in homes- which is where Airbnb started.

5 Airbnb- Wow- has this company taken the industry by storm! Here s an excerpt from the Telegraph in the UK Airbnb started in 2007 when Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, then both 27, who had met five years earlier at Rhode Island School of Design, were struggling to pay their rent. There was a design conference coming to San Francisco and the city s hotels were fully booked, so they came up with the idea of renting out three airbeds on their living-room floor and cooking their guests breakfast. The next day they created a website, airbedandbreakfast.com; six days later they had a 30-year-old Indian man, a 35-year-old woman from Boston and a 45-year-old father of four from Utah sleeping on their floor. They charged $80 each a night. As we were waving these people goodbye Joe and I looked at each other and thought, there s got to be a bigger idea here. Chesky told me, sitting on the edge of the sofa, still excited by their idea. Gebbia had already dabbled in entrepreneurship designing a cushion for back sufferers and building a website for product designers to find eco-friendly resources sort of Amazon for sustainable materials. Chesky had recently left his job as a designer on the Simon Cowell show American Inventor in LA the last straw came when I designed a new kind of toilet seat and moved to San Francisco. Both wanted to be entrepreneurs, but neither wanted to create more stuff that ends up in landfill. The idea of creating a website based on renting something that was already in existence was perfect. They decided to target conferences and festivals across America, getting local people to list their rooms and travellers to book them. Today, Airbnb is the most well-known vacation rental site- renting everything from a couch to a Fijian Island. While its roots are in the home sharing economy, it is now focusing on whole house rentals.

6 Number of rooms in the thousands in November 2016 (source, Statista) Only Marriott has more rooms than Airbnb, and it s safe to say they have been surpassed. Comparison between Airbnb Guests and HomeAway Guests

7 FlipKey.com A relatively newer entrant into the vacation rental listing sites, FlipKey is majority-owned by TripAdvisor, a popular, free site where travelers report on their vacation experiences and help other travelers with questions. FlipKey focuses on reviews and photos. The biggest benefit to FlipKey is the relationship with TripAdvisor. All listings on FlipKey are automatically populated onto TripAdvisor, which

8 has the largest online community of travelers, currently averaging 455 million unique visitors each month. TripAdvisor attracts people at all stage of the buy cycle. People who don t even know where they want to go- mountains, beach, city? They hop on the forums and start asking questions. The forums are well organized and peppered with questions like, What s the weather like in Salinas in March? or Any family friendly places to eat in Buenos Aires? On every page, there is a link to Vacation Rentals which takes you to a drop-down menu where you put in your destination and your dates. FlipKey does the rest. This one-stop shop for research to reservation inquiries is the best utilization capturing potential customers in the full range of the buying cycle. Having VR s available in the largest online travel community, TripAdvisor, is a huge benefit to our industry. FlipKey s layout is easy to navigate and visually appealing. To sum it up: Each site is individual and caters to a different blend of travelers. HomeAway caters to larger groups, higher end properties and completely private accommodations- guests expect empty closets and thoroughly cleaned spaces. Airbnb started the Sharing Economy which lead the way for Uber and other companies. People, Millennials in particular, were willing to give up some of the traditional hotel or vacation rental experiences such as privacy and in some cases cleanliness, in exchange for the ability to travel on the cheap. Experiences mean more than room service and a pretty lobby.

9 FlipKey is still trying to find its path to success. They have lost market share recently, but there are some guests who are extremely loyal- for them- it s the only trusted place to do business. What it means for you - OTA s- Online Travel Agencies- which are what all of the Big 3 are, have 72% of bookings for vacation rentals. They are the best, easiest way to get started and booking guests right away. Currently, HomeAway and FlipKey offer a paid service or commission based- where they take money out of each booking- but if you don t make any bookings through them you don t pay. I recommend start with all 3 for free- either on a commission basis or with Airbnb, which has never been an upfront charge to owners. I have 2 homes that are 200 yards apart. One is a 5 bedroom, one is a 2 bedroom one bath. The larger home books almost exclusively on HomeAway, the 2 bedroom books almost exclusively through Airbnb. So, with that information, I know I will come out ahead by spending the money on a subscription with HomeAway for the 5 bedroom house so I don t pay commissions on each booking. However, with the 2 bedroom house, I m not booking enough on HomeAway to justify the yearly fee, so I ll just keep it on the free commission program. So, use this program to create stellar listings on all 3, go live, and give it time to see which listing sites work with your property.