Welcome to High Summer and the busiest time of the year. We’ve never known summer to have such great booking demand. We get calls and emails daily from people desperate to find somewhere to book in the summer holidays. So, if you have had any last-minute cancellations, do advertise your availability in the Late Availability section on the sites you use to promote your holiday cottage. NB: This is free and is visited often in My Favourite Holiday Cottages.

Anyway, here’s more advice and top tips for you to digest between changeovers. Remember, click on the title where relevant to access the full article.

Onwards and Upwards!

Rick Bond

My Favourite Holiday Cottages

How to use Pinterest for business

Suppose you’ve dabbled but never really got to grips with the power of Pinterest or dismissed it because you only use Instagram. In that case, this easy User Guide will not only make you aware of Pinterest’s potential to market your holiday cottage – it’ll tell you how to make the best use of it.

We’ve got to stop Airbnb: The ridiculous debate about Airbnb cleaning fees

This isn’t our opinion - just the title of the article!

If you saw this Tweet (it went viral and raised a hackle or two), you might want to read this article from Rental Scaleup, who ‘unpicked it’. As ever, what you see isn’t always the truth, but it still provides food for thought. So please read this and decide whether it’s right to start adding add-on charges to the advertised rental price.

NB: We’ve just booked a holiday cottage in Cornwall, paying £1700 to easily book it through its website. 

We checked it out on Airbnb and found that we’d have paid an additional £300 in add-on fees if we’d chosen that route to book.

NB: All My Favourite Holiday Cottages adverts have links to a property’s website. We don’t charge booking fees or commissions to independent owners or guests.

Tourism Declares aims to make property managers more sustainable

A shining example is The Chestnuts, a multi-award-winning eco-cottage from Eco Chic Cottages.

If you find adopting sustainable business practices overwhelming and don’t know where to start, Tourism Declares can provide a timely helping hand.

Holiday Let Changeover Checklist

We are used to seeing statements such as ‘The Ultimate... The Most Awesome...’ etc., to announce checklists. Unfortunately, so many fail to live up to their advertised expectations. Not so Schofields Insurance: The charmingly understated value of this headline introduces a very well-thought-out article on ways to make it easier to maintain standards at changeover time.

7 Budget-Wasting Facebook Ad Mistakes (+ How to Avoid Them)

Have you considered advertising your holiday cottage on Facebook? It can be satisfyingly effective, but, like so much online advertising, you can (very) easily waste good money if you don’t do it correctly, like so much online advertising. This article from Wordstream identifies common practices that don’t work.

UK holiday cottage companies with the best flexible booking policies 

Like it or not, COVID has brought about the need to review booking policies and find ways to be as fair as possible to future guests while mitigating financial loss. Consequently, we are seeing a myriad of booking policies emerging, some good, some, well, just weird! If this is a topic you are wrestling with and looking for a manageable option, may we draw your attention to this article from Which Magazine? It considers (in its opinion) the best flexible booking policies.

STOP PRESS!

Just as this issue was going to press, we noticed this pertinent article in The Guardian about Cottages.com. Read the article and draw your own conclusions! If you let your property through an agency, you should check the small print in your refund agreement. Cottages.com owners are not happy with theirs. It’s a shame as, in our opinion, Cottages.com has always been one of the better agencies, but this policy isn’t going to make them many friends amongst cottage-owning clientele. I can understand their wanting to retain their commission for work done, but keeping all the money paid by the guest when a refund is not payable seems rather like sharp practice.

Reviewing Your Marketing Budget? A Top Tip

We spotted this on Twitter and think it is essential for holiday homeowners to consider when deciding how much to spend on advertising.

 “Marketers must take a step back and re-evaluate their processes and their role in business by moving from “What’s my marketing budget?” to “What’s my revenue target and how much should I spend to reach it.?”

Four ways to do simple SEO research

When SEO is mentioned, I can hear the sound of many laptops snapping shut as readers suddenly find something better to do. SEO, for the uninitiated, means Search Engine Optimisation. It’s the fine art of creating a website with pages that rank well on Search Engines such as Google, Bing, etc. Some SEO is remarkably straightforward to grasp and do.

This article from Tourism Currents recommends four ways to increase traffic to your site that are staring you right in the face, but you’re not taking full advantage of them! We are unsure about the relevance of the article’s lead photo, but the content should help you reach greater recognition by the search engines.

That’s all for July, folks. May the summer holidays be kind to your cottage and your bank balance. See you in August.

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The Holiday Homefront is published once a month and is free of charge to holiday cottage owners. You can join our mailing list here if you’d like to be told about future editions of The Holiday Homefront. NB: This is a private list. We keep it under wraps and don’t share it with anyone else!