Getting bookings for peak weeks is easy! Or, if not, some serious revising of your marketing and advertising plan is required.

The main challenge all owners face when marketing their holiday property is getting bookings outside the school holidays. That’s about 38 weeks in the year -  a huge potential revenue source.

Getting bookings for shoulder seasons, i.e. the weeks on either side of the school holidays between March and the end of October requires careful planning. 

Read this list of 5 marketing goals from Guesthook to help you decide who and how you'll market your cottage to attract more bookings between Easter and the summer and autumn holidays.

If you would like to recommend another proven tip - add it to the comments below.

 

Here’s a summary:

Buddy up with your local tourism bureau.

Buddy up with your local tourism bureau.

Build your social media following.

The best house rules for a holiday cottage ensure guests can relax and enjoy their holiday without being confined by draconian terms or doing something unwittingly naughty. Having a clear set of do's, don'ts, and responsibilities also makes it much easier to deal with possible problems. Use this template of 'acceptable' rules from Lodgify to identify those that you feel will be relevant to your own holiday cottage.

A good policy to adopt is working to create a set of house rules that, if anything goes wrong, don't leave a good relationship between an owner and their guest still intact (and likely to return) without either party feeling hard done by. It's not easy - but this list may help! Above all, they apply to an owner's expectation of guest behaviour and set out what the guest can rightfully expect from a property's owner.

Read More: Holiday Cottage House Rules To Avoid Guest Trouble and Attract Excellent Reviews Instead.

When deciding where to invest your advertising budget for your holiday cottage, the aim for independent holiday cottage owners is to get the maximum amount of bookings for the least amount of money.

Put aside Google Adwords and Facebook for the moment and concentrate on the main sources of revenue for most independent holiday cottage owners: Adverts on directory sites.

These fall into two camps: the mega-international sites, owned mainly by USA-based Expedia, such as VRBO, Holiday Rentals, and AirBnB, and then the smaller, mainly UK-based sites, such as My Favourite Holiday Cottages.

You’ll get – or you should get – a goodly number of bookings from advertising on the mega-sites, but so you should, given the amount of money you pay in charges, fees and commissions for each booking.

Then there are those in the middle of the pack – such as My Favourite Holiday Cottages, Independent Cottages, and Country Cottages Online. You’ll probably

Are you missing out on enquiries and bookings because you haven't listed your cottage on one of our Location Search pages?

We've noticed that many people search for their favourite holiday cottage by geographic location instead of by county or town. For example, people looking for a holiday cottage in the Lake District search using that phrase in greater numbers than those using Cumbria, Windermere, or Hawkshead.

Here is a list of the most recent LocationSearch Pages we have added. If you have a cottage on My Favourite Holiday Cottages in one of these locations, it will only appear on these pages if you have selected it on your property edit page. So, log in and bring your property to a location where it is relevant.

Location pages are very popular, and many of these pages now have pages on rankings.

South West Coast Path

Jurassic Coast

Lincolnshire Wolds

North Cornwall

North Devon

Llyn Peninsula

The Fens

 

7 IDEAS TO BRING INSTANT LUXURY TO YOUR VACATION RENTAL

Luxury holiday cottages don’t have to be about a house brimming with the latest branded appliances or having facilities such as a swimming pool, home cinema, or hot tub—far from it! Focus on creating a luxurious feel. Wonders can be achieved through simplicity of design in creating an elegant ambience from the most basic of materials and fittings.

Rattan furniture, pot plants to add spot colour and an Ornamental lamp.

Essentially, it’s all about simplicity over bling, and experiences over things

Here are seven clever tips from Lodgify on creating a luxury feel for your holiday cottage without spending a fortune.

Keep it minimalistPlay with textures – they are your friendCreate illusions with mirrors and framesRemember that lighting is the linchpinEmphasize the entrywayUpcycle inexpensive, plain furniture to transform it into something specialEnsure a guest’s

How to Use Photos to Get Bookers Dreaming of a Holiday in Your Cottage

If you like story-telling and want to harness its power in your holiday cottage marketing, exercise a little more imagination when adding a title to an image so that it stimulates the viewers' imagination and describes a benefit rather than a literary translation of an image. This is what marketers call 'selling the sizzle—not the sausage'.

The two images illustrating this article were part of a series used to illustrate the lack of traffic in North Devon during the summer - encouraging people to spend time in an area where traffic jams are  (almost) unheard of. So much more impact than 'An empty road on Exmoor'.

 

 

This video from Rentals United talks about the future of holiday cottages. Well, if you read the case study from Alan Egan on Vacation Rental Domination, you'll realise that the future is already here. The good news is that it doesn't involve buying a raft of technology or expensive furniture. In fact, you'll just need to be good at story-telling for the immediate future.

Watch the video or read the transcript to find out how you can subtly adjust how you present your holiday cottage to make it the holiday of choice for all visiting your website while seeking their favourite holiday cottage to book.

According to Vanessa de Souza, it's mainly about creating and conveying experiences that a holiday in your property will deliver. It goes back to that marketing adage "sell the sizzle, not the sausage", which proves that the future doesn't always need to be new - just reinvented to fulfil a contemporary human desire.

However, the article goes beyond

If you haven't got a business card or need to replenish your stock, this is a 5-minute read with helpful guidelines to share with your designer or use yourself. 

Deciding what to say on your business card for your holiday cottage - and designing its appearance is probably something that didn't take a lot of thought - just slap on the necessary contact details in a readable way, hand them around and bish-bash-bosh in rolls the dosh.

Oh, if only.

Like the best things in life, simplicity is essential but never that simple. This blog from Lodgify outlines the information your card should contain while pointing out the role that 'white space' plays in ensuring people can and will feel encouraged to put your card to good use, i.e. to start a future conversation with you about your property. Read it: WHAT TO INCLUDE ON YOUR VACATION RENTAL BUSINESS CARD.

Remember, business cards aren't a bit of 'vanity ware' - they are a valuable tool

Love it or hate it - you cannot ignore the increase in the popularity of online booking software. It's been a while since the number of independently-owned holiday cottages booked online exceeded the number booked manually. 

These days, having a website with an enquiry address and phone number is not enough. And one thing we can all be sure about is that there are plenty of choices out there! People want to book straight away and, if they can't, look for another suitable cottage with that all-important online booking option.

My Favourite Holiday Cottages allows owners to display their online booking calendars to get bookings direct from their listing (without any commission charges or booking fees applied, I might add). 

If you are still managing bookings by hand, it's probably a reasonable assumption to say that you are now missing out and losing revenue. One of the benefits is that you get the full contact details of your guests