5 Ways to Increase Bookings without Drastically Reducing Prices

Posted on Categories Vacation Rental Marketing

It’s getting down to the wire and your numbers aren’t matching up year over date and your boss is starting to put you into a panick.  Can you drastically reduce prices and blast it through email, social media, and promotion and catch up?  Sure you can, but here’s 5 different ways to improve your bookings all year round!

1. A picture speaks a thousand words. Are you telling them you have a great place to stay or showing them? Do you have professional photography?  Are your balcony shots all blown out and you can’t even see the amazing views your condo has? If your selling oceanfront, but you aren’t even going to give them a taste or what it looks like, you can be really missing the boat.  Is it good lighting or are you taking pictures in a cave?  With the wrong lighting, you can make it look like your selling a room in trailer park and not giving the full effect of your prestigious oceanfront room.  It will also keep your visitors on your site to offer plenty of pictures, virtual tours, and videos.  Give them as much information as they need to feel like they’ve got a great vacation.  And don’t hide your links to these different views.

2. Put your money where you make money.  Are you watching your marketing campaigns and tracking onthly  in peak seasons. 3. Boost your CPC performance. leads and revenue?  Avoid overspending on keyword phrases and campaign that aren’t bringing you in revenue.  A lot of times it’s not the amount of traffic you drive to your site, but the quality of traffic you drive to your site.  Make sure you are reviewing your traffic and campaigns at least quarterly, if not mWhere are you distributing your product and do you have the option to do a pay per click rather than a flat fee or by impression.  It’s really old school these days to still pay a flat fee or by impression.  It’s all about the click because, let’s face it, that’s all you care where can i buy generic levitra about anyways and good performance factor to use across all your campaigns.  Which OTA’s or portal sites are converting best for you and which ones aren’t?  Where are those portal site getting the traffic from?  These are all valuable places for you to look to invest.  But you should be enjoying the economies of scales from these OTA’s.  They get paid big money across the blanket in order to offer you a piece of the pie and put the pressure to make sure they are performing.

4. Participate in search engine optimization and social media. If your are not in the SEO game, it’s not too late.  No matter what kind of site you have, you don’t want to be linking out to other sites for content.  Hire us or a content writer to fill in the blanks and give your site the “stickiness” you need to keep people on your site.  Offer reviews from your customers about their stays, information about local area attractions, and think of unique and current things you can offer on a blog that will make people share your content.

5. Add Value before you discount – Before you start slashing prices, remember everyone loves something for free.  Whether you can offer breakfast, dvd’s, chairs and umbrellas, show tickets, do what you can with local vendors via trade or in cash to offer some better value.  Tell the umbrella company to give you a deal on 100 umbrellas and two chairs, it’s their job to upsell them on the other rentals they offer.  Tell a show you’ll give a way 2 free tickets, but most people come with more than that.  If it will help them drive sales, many times they’ll work with you on a price and it’s a win win for everybody.

It’s hard work to put heads in beds, but you don’t need to give away the farm.  A good, easy to use site that offers a lot of value and information can be all you need to bring home the bacon!