Book a cottage in October Half Term and get into The Milky Way FREE!

We have teamed up with The Milky Way family adventure play zone near Clovelly on the North Devon-Cornwall border to offer you two FREE adult tickets when you book one of these cottages with My Favourite Cottages for the October half term.

Of course, you aren't going to book a cottage just for your kids to have a fantastic day out! So let's get a bit selfish - you want a tremendous cottage to relax, so look at each of the houses on offer and find one that does it for you - AND your family.

Each house has been chosen due to its availability and proximity to The Milky Way!

A 2-bedroom cottage sleeping in The quaint North Devon village of Northam, just a mile from the beach. The cottage is the ideal family hub to explore the area and come home to a lovely meal in the private terraced garden.

A 3-bedroom holiday cottage

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but if your website has an online booking function on your website (and if not, why not?), then you should be able to display its calendar and accept cottage bookings directly from your My Favourites listing at no additional cost. Unlike other well-known sites, we don’t charge a commission or booking fee. It’s free.

As people will be booking using your own booking software, you’ll be the only person who will know who has booked. Other sites may charge you and get access to your data – but not us. We are (or have been) holiday cottage owners and know what it is like to have a site that gets you bookings and enquiries without paying an arm and a leg in these hard-pressed times. Then you can enjoy opening your e-mails in the morning to see how much money you made while you slept.

Not got an online booking facility? We can also help if you want a quality booking software package for your website. We

We compared our stats for My Favourites to see how visitor traffic compared with the same period last year. During March, the number of pages viewed by those looking to book a holiday cottage somewhere in the UK rose from 18,927 in 2014 to a cracking 92,647 in March 2015. We are getting it right, but from our perspective, we will never have enough laurels to rest upon. We will continue striving to attract thousands more people planning a cottage holiday to the site. However, at least we know that the plan is working!

OK, this is a great article, but one that should be well worth reading if you want to find ways to get more value from your listing. We use the wonderful Google Analytics to tell where people leave a cottage page. Unless they have booked the cottage using its third-party calendar, sending an enquiry, or clicking through to that cottage’s website, the reason for leaving is probably because the

Still planning to do the 'same old same old' at home this Christmas? Why not gather the family together somewhere special by booking a cosy character cottage in the UK to celebrate the season of goodwill or ring in the New Year? Alternatively, if not with the extended family, get together with special friends for a few days or a whole week for a relaxing seasonal self-catering holiday in a warm and toasty holiday home.

One of the great things about staying in a holiday cottage compared to a hotel is that you have far more space in which to live, as well as enjoying more freedom in what you do and when. No being tied to specific meal times or sharing everything but your bedroom with strangers.

So, what should you consider when seeking a suitable cottage in which to unwrap presents this Christmas? Here are a few tips to help you plan the perfect seasonal self-catering holiday.

There are some

If life is a beach, there must be somewhere handy to eat. That would be a beach cafe.

My memory of beach cafes in Britain as a child essentially comprises a sun-bleached wooden chalet with a few benches selling pots of tea in stainless steel teapots, a crusty scone or two and a collection of Lyons Maid ice creams. Oh, but how things have changed! British beach cafes have upped their game just like British holiday cottages. While remaining reasonably priced and still with sandy sun-soaked decks, everything else from menus, ambience and customer service is markedly better than in my childhood days.

Here is a collection of beach cafes that can be found dotted around some of the UK’s loveliest beaches. Many now offer full-blown meals in the evenings and during the day. So, if you’re planning to book a coastal cottage in the UK and fancy a night away from the kitchen, make sure there’s a reasonably priced, laid-back beach café in a location near you. It

More and more families and groups of friends are enjoying holidays together by sharing large holiday cottages.

The increasing number of large self-catering holiday homes in the UK sleeping between 10 and 30 guests (or even more) means that there is much more choice available for dual family holidays these days. Choose from large country houses, castles, big barn conversions, farmhouses, or even converted rural railway stations where the tracks have long since been lifted.

In addition to being fun, they offer excellent value for money. Even at the season’s height, you can get more for your money if two families share a large cottage instead of booking two smaller ones. Take Biallid, a historic 7-bedroom manor farmhouse in Scotland that sleeps 14 with fishing rights on the River Spey. A week in the height of summer will only set you back just over £16 per person per night.

Booking group

Success!!! After months of hard work optimising the site, Google's latest algorithm changes handed MFHC a massive rise in its rankings, and we are so very close to getting our coveted Page 1 slots back again. As a result, traffic to the site has increased by 200% and continues to rise. We are continuing to make further improvements to the site to ensure further progress in the site's rankings for several key search phrases.

You can search for cottages on MFHC by town. Each town page describes the town and why it would be a great place to stay. We write these descriptions ourselves. They are not copied from anything we find on the Internet. Writing them is, I confess, a bit of a challenge as while we have a good geographical knowledge of the UK, we do not profess to have an intimate knowledge of every single town. 

As such, while we do a pretty good job writing town

We noticed that one of the influential factors in converting an enquiry to a booking is a timely response. We’ve also seen a distinct correlation between the weather and the number of enquiries received. These things are worth noticing as they help ensure that you can be standing by, ready to receive and respond to enquiries when they arrive. You may well have discovered your own patterns – and feel free to share your thoughts on this, but speaking personally, I love and hate (the latter, just a teeny bit) a sunny Sunday. That’s because people tend to drift outdoors, enjoying the fine weather with a BBQ or day trip into the countryside and loving it. 

This prompts people to think about their as yet unbooked holiday, resulting in an hour or two surfing the internet after tea, looking for likely places to stay. By about 9 pm, they are ready to contact their shortlist of possible cottages and send e-mails winging

We’re starting this month’s My Favourite Holiday Cottages Newsletter with a cautionary tale. If I asked you whether you have ever posted an image on your website without having obtained and paid for permission to use it, the correct answer would be something along the lines of “Never in a million years!.” And that’s how it should be. 

The trouble is that it’s so easy to post something on your site in all innocence without thinking that it will get you into trouble (perhaps in a blog or on your property’s Facebook page of an image sent to you by a friend). This is because Getty Images owns the rights to squillions of photographic pictures and buys more every day, which could come knocking at your door. They continually search websites for illegal use of the images for which they own the licencing rights. Should they find one on your site, they’ll send you a strongly worded legal letter, and an invoice which works out to around £