5 Things Your Vacation Home Rental Needs To Do In 2016 To Be Successful
New Year, New Challenges. Follow These Vacation Home Rental Tips For Unlocking The Door On Reservation Opportunities.
It’s been a long year. The hassles and headaches of travelers you are aiming to please by trying to keep up with the pace of your inventory and being mindful of the wear and tear of your properties was enough for you take your own vacation. You’re feeling just so-so about the seasonal renters in 2013. In the back of your mind you’re thinking “we can do better”.
Now that the new year has begun, 2016 will be the year of the Sharing Economy – where travelers and owners alike are exchanging information and resources at the speed of technology. By following these five steps, you can ensure this year will become your most profitable ever.
1. Experience Is Key To Unlocking The Reservation Door
With the increased demand by younger audiences, travelers this year will be looking for more than just a place to stay or what they want to pay. They want to know that your property will give them the life experience they are searching for. Based on the latest industry report*, 73% of travelers are making their decisions based on “Activities specific to my interests”.
Learn about what is driving travelers to inquire in the first place. As they age, the baby-boomers of yesterday will evolve into the Generation X’s and Y’s seeking your reservations. Forget traditional marketing and think about the traveler experience. When it comes to things to do nearby, focus your attention on how to capitalize on the surrounding area in a non-marketing approach.
2. Past Experiences Pulled Forward
One of the most overlooked characteristics that vacation home rental owners make when appealing to travelers is past experience. With the majority of travelers digging into places like TripAdvisor.com and review engines, it’s no doubt that decisions get made from those who have stayed at your vacation home already. Instead of leaving third party websites to hold previous comments hostage, look to apply direct reviews right up front.
You can gain more recognition and credibility through by using social media outlets like Twitter timelines or even places like TripAdvisor that offer an embedded review feed to place on your website using their widgets. Not only will travelers feel more adept to making a reservation, you will also reap the benefit of growing your followers as well.
3. Stop Chasing Your Short Tail
When it comes to travelers’ first steps to begin their reservation process, 58% begin through search (up from 56% in 2015 and only to grow even more this year) and rely on places like Google for giving them their query results. Although you may be saying to yourself “Sure…we’ve done search engine optimization before”, what ends up happening to most vacation owners is the missed opportunities with long-tail keywords that drive an exponential amount of visitors to your website.
For example, having a villa available for rent in Cabo San Lucas for the month of February you want booked, quite often travelers will apply standard keywords like “Cabo Mexico Vacation Villa” into their website. And, as you know, that ends up competing against all of the other villas in the area. Instead, focus on more detailed keywords that will separate you from the competition with the places nearby or other unique attributes that attract travelers. Having a search result for “Mexican Vila Rental Lap Pool” yields only 10% of the search results, but the odds for reaching the top spot on the results will be far greater.
4. Location Is High Demand
Your property does not have to be located adjacent to the hottest restaurant in town or your luxury chalet being a ski-in and ski-out property; but, you do want to be upfront about the easiest way your travelers can reach their destination. You want to explain to them their ultimate “Getting Here” experience – honestly.
It’s never fun for them to end up having to read a bad review by a past guest who ultimately had to puddle-jump their way all day just to unlock the front door after a long haul, so having links to “Getting here” is critical to creating as much transparency for your guests as possible. You can even add some fun to the trek as long as it’s in good taste so your travelers will know ahead of time what the expectations are for arriving on time.
5. On The Go…So You Can Grow
If your website isn’t mobile friendly by now, your #1 priority this year is to make your site available to mobile and tablet users immediately. Although only one in four travelers are booking their reservations on mobile devices, three out of four travelers are booking by tablet as well. This means your site should be easily available for quick-loading and fast response times for travelers on the go.
If you need help with establishing a mobile friendly website, there are plenty of third party resources for instant mobile sites that will help with traveler conversion such as dudamobile.com, mobilized.com and instantlymobile.com all of which can generate full previews at no charge in a matter of seconds.
2016 is going to be your BEST year ever.
Are you ready?
Matt Heady
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