It’s very important to have reviews on your vacation rental site.  It helps build credibility for your business and encourages visitors to trust your brand and business.  Just like when you are shopping on Amazon.com and Ebay and you check out your sellers “score” and reviews, individual reviews on your vacation rental homes and condos help your visitors know what you show is true and what sort of experience they can expect if they book your rental.

There’s a number of ways you can integrate reviews and a number of sites out there than can help.  The most popular for Vacation Rentals is FlipKey, a community driven travel site that helps consumers find trusted vacation rental homes throughout the world, by providing real reviews of verified vacation rental properties.

FlipKey organizes the reputation of vacation rental properties by verifying that homes are represented by legitimate managers/owners and then collecting detailed reviews from real guests.  FlipKey’s Reputation Management tools then allow for vacation rental managers to post public responses to both positive and negative reviews to facilitate a constructive dialog concerning the quality of individual properties and services provided. This is a great tool to utilize to turn upside down past guests into a positive experience.  By posting to the public that their concerns have been taken care of, you are proving to your potential guest that you are a real company, you care about your vacation rentals, and you care about customer service and satisfaction.

Vacationers can use FlipKey.com to evaluate over 50,000 verified vacation rental properties and then book their accommodations directly online or call/email the manager for more information.  

If you don’t have a lot of self-generated reviews already on your site, you can use FlipKey reviews via their API to pull into your site.  This helps keep guests on your site while evaluating your vacation rentals and provides them the information they need to feel comfortable to book online.  Here's an example of one of our sites that features Flip Key Reviews.



You can deny some posts from showing on your site, but all reviews will be show on the Flip Key site.  We recommend you keep some bad review that have been taken care of or run of the mill (“I saw a Palmetto bug on the patio when it was raining!”), so that visitors know this is true information and they don’t need to seek the bad reviews else where.

With the answers exposed on the internet in numerous fashions, it’s important to keep the information available on your site in true, honest form so that you keep that visitor on your site. 

Here’s and example of a site ICND developed with the “self-generated” reviews. 



You'll see it's a great tool, but if you don't broadcast it, you won't get a lot of reviews right off the bat.  The best way to ensure you are generating reviews is to send a post-departure “Thank You” email with a form to submit the review and have it posted to your site upon approval.  Contest and giveaways also help generate your own reviews.  Self-generated reviews are great content for SEO purposes.  It allows for good, unique, relevant content about your individual rental that’s not posted on any other site.  Though Flip Key content is considered duplicate content, it won’t have as much value as unique, it is still good content to keep your bounce scores low, time on site high, and conversions (what REALLY matter) up.

Having a mobile version of your website is an ICND suggestion for the Best Web Changes for Vacation Rental Websites to Gear up for 2012.  It’s incredible to look at the analytics across many vacation rental companies’ websites and look at how the mobile traffic has increased in as little as this past year against last year.


According to Human Factors International, 68% of consumers said, “if they knew a business had a made-for-mobile version they would prefer to use it over the standard website on a mobile phone. Mobile websites are fairly easy to build and you don’t have to completely redesign your site for it or recreate your functionality.


It just needs to be taken to a simpler platform. If you are going to redesign your website, ask your web developer (or ICND) about responsive CSS. It’s a new CSS technology through HTML and CSS where your website is responsive according to the size of the monitor (or mobile device). We’ll be featuring a new site soon with it! Stay tuned.

Highlight the most desired amenities – Recently, Trip Advisor announced the top ten most sought after amenities that proved to be the best selling points to book a vacation rental.  Do you know what was the most desired?
 
32% thought access to a full kitchen was the most important
22% wanted wireless internet access
10% thought it was important to have an outdoor deck or patio
 
41% of travelers thought that vacation rentals typically have better amenities than hotels.
 
What’s this all mean?  Make sure you have a lot of great pictures of your rentals and their amenities.  These days, it’s all about the value added and what’s included.  Professional pictures, virtual tours, and virtual floor plans will all help sell this for you on the web.

Vacation Rental Peak Season Coming to an End.  Where do we go from here?
 
As vacation rental managers start to feel the lessening of the weight of the world off their shoulders, we urge them to take some time to evaluate their marketing and websites.  The off-season is the perfect time to explore, make changes, and gear up for a prosperous 2012 rental year.  Here is our list of the top things we recommend you do, if you haven’t already:
 
1.    Install Google E-commerce Tracking to your website.  You can't effectively evaluate your SEO company, email campaigns, and PPC campaigns by the traffic alone that’s driven to  your website.  You have to be able to track your rate of conversion and your revenue generated from every campaign.  It’s so easy with Google E-commerce tracking.  If you don’t have it, that is NUMBER ONE!  Get Google E-comm set up within your booking engine pages.

2.    Look at your PPC vs SEO keyword phrases.  You’re paying big money for PPC ads and you’re paying big money to be on the top pages of the search engines for popular keyword phrases.  For PPC, you’ll want to check your quality score for your keyword phrases and see if you can improve them by adding quality content to your landing pages thus, making them more relevant to your keyword phrases.  You’ll also want to see which keyword phrases you are converting best on (in which you have the best conversion) for PPC and make sure that those are also keyword phrases that you are ranking well for.  If you aren’t, you know where to focus in the off season (your off-season focus should include) working on content, backlinks, and blogging.  You may also want to explore with PPC other (with other PPC) keyword phrases that you haven’t been targeting through SEO and set up a few campaigns to see if they are a niche you can optimize organically.

3.    Call tracking.  If you haven’t evaluated a call tracking company you should really get in the game.  It’s one thing to be able to track your online reservations, but it’s even better to be comprehensive.  Sure, Google may offer this for free in the future (Yes! Please!) but in the mean time you really need a well-rounded approach to tracking your marketing.

4.    Evaluate your marketing mix – Social Search and Social Media are getting bigger and bigger.  Sorry.  You’re not going to be able to avoid it.  You can’t hide from it.  If you haven’t found a way to make money off of the 4 hours a day your reservationist is spending on Facebook, then it’s time to talk to a specialist.  Social Media can be very time consuming, but there are ways to generate fans and followers fairly quickly and there are ways to convert them to reservations. 

Remember, it takes a certain number of touch points before you can convert a new customer and you need to cultivate relationships with your existing customers.  Email marketing is still producing, but let’s be honest, I haven’t checked my personal email in well over 4 weeks!  In addition, the search giant, Google, has recently released Google + to invitation only.  It’s only a matter of time until it’s publically released and another avenue you will have to manage and maintain.  In addition it’s the first SURE sign of social and search being integrated and that’s even a whole new world for you to keep up with.  Check these articles for more information about Social media and Google +.

5.    Review your website and make changes and upgrades as you need.  Important things you have to do are highlight your amenities, feature reviews and lots of them, interact with social media sites with share functions, have good content, make your website easy to use and easy to find what people are looking for—Vacation Rentals! 

Analytics is another great tool for this.  Check your bounce rates, your top landing pages and their bounce rates, your top exit pages, your pages with the highest bounce rates and look at how you are driving traffic to those pages and how to improve.

6.    Do you have a mobile site?  If you look back at your analytics, you’ll see how many visitors are viewing you on mobile browsers (and iPads etc too).  Do you have a mobile version of your site?  Sure the phones are getting faster and faster, but it’s so much easier to navigate if you get rid of a lot of that fluff and just let the visitor find and book a vacation rental as easily as possible.  Mobile apps are handy too.  If you have a smart phone, you know the web can be rather slow and jumping on an app that allows you to do exactly what you are setting forward to do will really help out your mobile conversion rates.
 
And you thought the off-season was going to be easy!  Give us a call for more information about any of the topics above.  We’d love to help you out and do the analysis for you, for free.

What to expect and what to see in 2011...

Hotels

In the first quarter of 2010, RevPAR increased around the world with the America's being up 5.3% according to Smith Travel Research (STR).  In 2011, the growth is on trend to continue across the globe. It's obvious that, although today’s bookings aren't quite where they were at during the pre-recession days, the industry is slowly managing to crawl out of its slump.  Which is good news for all of us!

Travel Industry:

With so much inventory on the market for rentals, competition remains strong and customers are becoming increasingly selective as they can.  In order to take advantage of the upward trend, travel operators will need to be increasingly flexible in not only marketing their rooms, but determining what price their customers are willing to pay.  Vacationers have a wealth of comparative pricing information at their fingertips with portal sites, ensuring that they won’t book if a hotel or vacation rental's pricing is too high. More and more, even a few dollars can make the difference between a customer booking and not booking with a property or company.

This year it will be more important to stay on top of your game in the online marketing arena and companies who do so and put their budgets into online marketing will reap the rewards in 2011 more so than any other year we've seen thus far.  Gone are the days we'll be able to rely on direct mailings and a few postcards and we'll need to take every avenue to stay on top of the trends in online marketing.

Think about how Google's $700 million takeover of ITA Software, which will not only make the internet powerhouse a serious operator in the travel business, it will also rewrite the rules for bookings. As Google keeps its hooks in every inch of the internet, it will seed its travel offerings throughout the online space. It's very possible that starting as early as this year, web surfers logged into Gmail will be able to plan and book their entire vacation with a few mouse clicks inside the Google web ecosystem, making it much easier to do from anywhere, while on the go.

Mobile will also take a bigger role in 2011 than in 2010.  Check your Google Analytics and pull last years data with mobile users compared to 2010.  2011 will be even stronger.  Customers, particularly, business travelers, will make even more booking while on the road or in the air and as close as while sitting on the boardwalk outside of the hotel while sipping on a tropical cocktail.  They have the chance to wait until the very last opportunity to grab the last minute deals in an arena where there's tons of inventory left and we're fighting for every dollar.

To top it all off, vacationers will be using more and better smartphone apps to sniff out available rooms and, crucially, the best prices on those rooms and rentals. According to Priceline, 58% of customers with mobile devices made their booking within 20 miles of their hotel where they ended up staying. More impressively, 35% of those polled were within one mile when they clicked on the “reserve this room” button.


Consumers have the power

We've been preaching it for years, but the recent boom in rooms and houses available to rent, along with the advanced OTA's and their ability to dominate the search engines, topped with the technology of smart phones and on-the-go research sets up an interesting arena for 2011.  Driving your customer loyalty with programs and customer relationship marketing strategies will play a crucial role in this years marketing.  A huge development just taking place has been American Airlines pulling form Orbitz and subsequently being dropped by Travelocity.  American Airlines now relies on their own website to deliver the marketing message that they will find the best deals with AA.  Even though they are driving down prices, they avoid the costs of placement and fees with the OTA's.  Travel leaders will need to find their own solution to optimizing their bookings OTA's as well as their own websites.   Increase customer loyalty through programs and interacting with social media.


Social Media

With Facebook taking the lead over Google and other powerhouse websites at the end of 2010, we'll see a huge shift in the involvement of Social Media in your overall marketing mix.  Sooner rather than later,  the travel industry will find a way to book within Facebook and need to plan accordingly, before they lose out on valuable social media bookings.