Holiday Cottage Visitors Directory

Our latest blog post was all about the information packs owners leave for their guests. Poor and out-of-date information in these packs can frustrate guests, so these must be kept up to date.

Information packs are also a handy way of working with local businesses. If there is a particular restaurant or tourist attraction that you’d like to recommend, see if they have any vouchers you could put into the pack. Better still, if you can obtain or create a PDF of the voucher, you can email it to your guests as an advance welcome gift. If you include the name of your property on the voucher, you’ll be at the forefront of local business owners’ minds if tourists ask about local accommodation.

Summer Photography

As ever, we’re incredibly keen on owners using the best possible photographs to advertise their properties. Great images create the best emotional response from potential guests, making them much more likely to book a property. If you have any new photos, feel free to upload them to your listing. Again, we do see that listings with good-quality photos attract a higher number of click-throughs or enquiries.

If you have a gap in bookings over the next few weeks, why not use it as an opportunity to take some great summer photos of your property – inside and out? Equally, get some quintessential summer photos of scenic locations and places to visit around your property to spice up your location page. Just make sure some blue sky is included! The best times are early mornings and evenings when the quality of light adds an appealing quality. We provide a professional holiday cottage photoshoot service and have developed a helpful checklist outlining what you can do to prepare your cottage or home before taking photos. If you’d like us to email you a copy, ask! Please Email Us

Holiday Cottage Focus Groups

We’re always keen to hear from owners about how we can improve My Favourite Holiday Cottages.

We’ve recently been running a series of focus groups in North Devon to get feedback on ways to improve our services for owners. They have been handy—not just for us but also for the participants.

We’re also planning focus groups around the West Country. The sessions are very convivial, with owners enjoying the opportunity to get together and share experiences or pick up some valuable tips such as:

• Optimizing your website for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is important.
• What owners love (and loathe) when it comes to online newsletters.
• Why has 2012 been such a strange year so far regarding bookings?

Top Tip: A note on ‘Duplicate Content’:

When you’re making a listing on an online directory or advert site, do you often copy and paste the text directly from your own website? If so, did you know you could harm your site by using duplicate content? If multiple websites display precisely the same information, search engines such as Google have difficulty identifying which website should appear as the best result for a query. If search engines choose an old advert over your website, you could lose out on bookings and enquiries.

How do you fix this? Simple, with any listing you write to, make sure it’s written differently from what you have written on your website. If you’ve made this mistake on My Favourites, then don’t worry! Just log in to your account and edit your listing, and search engines won’t see any more duplicate content. ,

Finally...,

We’re always keen to hear back on any comments, queries and recommendations, and we hope you have an enjoyable June.

The ‘new essentials’ are items that have moved from being a luxury to a standard facility that people increasingly expect to find such as WiFi, dishwashers and flat-screen TVs.