UK Map Search

Using some technical wizardry, we’ve used your cottage’s postcode to pin it to a map of the UK. As a result, bookers can now see the exact location of your property, making it even easier for them to work out how close your property is to the beach, countryside or the nearest town. We’ve also colour-coded the ‘pins’ so you can immediately see the size of each cottage, making it quicker and easier for relevant people to arrive at your website.

Quick Tip: If your postcode shows your property in the wrong location, login, and you can change it by using the Map Icon under ‘Your Properties.’

 

My Favourite Holiday Cottages are outperforming Owners Direct.

Over the previous months, we’ve continued to see significant improvements in the amount of traffic to My Favourites. Our website often outperforms Owners Direct; see the statistics below for Devon Beach Court in Woolacombe. With over 2,920 visits since January 2011, My Favourite Holiday Cottages has delivered over three times more traffic to Devon Beach Court than Owners Direct. This is not the only example we’ve seen.

Over the last year, My Favourite Holiday Cottages has shown incredible growth (1,700% in the past 12 months). Traffic and enquiries to our owners are increasing daily. Our goal is to get as many potential renters to see and book your holiday property, hence our constant improvement of the site, its optimisation and promotion.

 

Holiday Cottage of the Month!

Launched last month, we are running a monthly competition to find our favourite holiday cottages. The winner for September was Bodlondeb Holiday Cottage in Conwy, a stunning period property which wowed us with its high-quality website and its effective use of Twitter. October’s competition is now open, and we’re looking ahead to Halloween! We want to know how you plan to prepare your cottage and its guests for the 31st of October. Will it be free pumpkins for them to carve? Or does your cottage have a haunted past you can tell them about? Anything and everything you do to make their stay extra spooky is welcome. Please send your suggestions to info@mfhc.co.uk, and the owner with the best suggestion will win one of their cottages a 2-month Featured Favourites listing worth £20.

In other news…

- We’re adding some new rules to our Late Availability section. You will now only be allowed to make two late availability listings per property, which must be within six weeks of the offer’s start date.

- We’re in Take a Break magazine. In conjunction with us, Sherrill Farm Holiday Cottages offers a 7-night holiday to anyone who enters their competition. With a circulation of over 3.3 million, it’s sure to boost traffic to My Favourites and onto your listings.

 

Finally...

If you have any comments or recommendations for how we can make My Favourite Holiday Cottages even better, send your thoughts to info@mfhc.co.uk.

We are launching our new Availability Calendar!

We’re happy to announce that our new Availability Calendar is available for you to use for your listing. We’ll shortly be sending out an email detailing how the calendar works. We’re also making the calendar available for you to use directly on your website if you don’t have an availability calendar already, making it an excellent piece of software for managing your bookings.

Half Price Premium Websites

As it’s Christmas, we’re offering half-price premium websites for the first four owners who apply before the end of December. Starting 2012 with a modern, fresh website is an ideal way to attract even more bookers to your property, and our package includes a professional photography session. We’ve already produced many high-quality cottage websites, proving incredibly popular with owners and bookers alike. They not only look good but, like a Formula One car, it’s the combination of superb design principles driven by a powerful engine that guarantees their performance. Examples of our work include Higher Mullacott Farm Cottages, A set of period farmhouse-styled countryside cottages. Oyster Cove is a modern beachside holiday home. To make the most of this offer, email us at info@mfhc.co.uk or phone us on 01598 710631 for further details.

Launch of our Supersites

Alternatively, for those owners who feel their property doesn’t need a premium website, we are launching our new Supersites. Owners can now use the service to have a new website produced for them quickly and easily from a variety of attractive templates. With a whole host of additional features that can be attached to the package, it’s an ideal way to have a customised website that works for you. You provide the content – we upload it for you. Prices for the design start from £198, so for full details, have a look at our page here: In this season of Goodwill, we’re offering to produce a Supersite for just £98 (Save £100) to the first four owners to contact us before the end of December. To make the most of this offer, email or phone us on 01598 710631 for further details.

Top Tip: Using QR Codes

Many of you have probably seen square barcodes popping up frequently in newspapers and magazines, which look like the one above. These are called QR (Quick Response) Codes and can be used by anyone with a smartphone to easily access a website without having to type in a website address. The best thing for owners though is that producing a QR code is completely free. You can use a website such as ‘QR Stuff’ to make your QR Code. All you do is add the website address you want to turn into a code; it does the rest for you! We currently use them for some of our offline publicity, and for owners, it’s a brilliant way of directing people to your website who might be reading your printed materials in the real world. Check out our blog post for further details.

 

Festival Cottages

2012 sees the launch of our new ‘Festival Cottages’ section on My Favourites. This exclusive section will promote holiday cottages to potential bookers attending local festivals. Visitors to the Festival can find accommodation, owners can get more bookings, and festival organisers gain increased ticket sales. As well as providing another search function on My Favourites, you’ll also attract extra traffic from a link placed on the Festival’s own website to the Festival Cottage page. The venture is still in development; if you know of any festivals close to you that would like to be involved in this exciting partnership, please feel free to pass our details on to them or tell us!

Ongoing Publicity

We were delighted to be mentioned in The Times on the 14th of December for an article on where to spend New Year. Crooked Lake Cottage was featured and should provide an excellent boost to website traffic in the run-up to Christmas. This coming February also sees the launch of three competitions in national publications carrying the My Favourite Holiday Cottages brand: Country Living magazine will offer a short stay at the fabulous Emmett’s Grange in Exmoor National Park. The publication has an impressive monthly circulation of over 206,000, so the property should be popular with readers. Lavender House in North Devon is also the prize for a short break stay featured in Coast Magazine, which has a circulation of 42,000. Finally, Cloven Stone Cottage in the Lake District looks set to receive some good publicity as the magazine hits the shelves in the prime booking month of January.

 

Finally...

We would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas. As always, we’d love to hear from you about the articles in this newsletter, or if you fancy a chat about the services we can offer you, feel free to get in touch.