VRBO is expensive. I spent $600 to place an ad with them last year and after 7 days, the ad was still not approved. They have no customer support phone number, they don’t provide updates on support tickets and they just plan don’t communicate at all with their customers. The CEO of Homeaway is a complete buffoon having spent all this money buying all of these companies, he’ll just lose market share are companies with better customer service and better business models slowly eat away at his market share.

Back to my story, so last year I ended up telling them to cancel my ad and refund my money. They actually did that, after 10 days of waiting. I promptly took that money and spent it at one of their competitors. I thought I would try again this year. On Sunday I posted a beautiful add and again paid them $600.00. Today it’s Wednesday and guess what? The listing is still pending and no one answers my customer service inquiries.

Tomorrow I can going to process a chargeback against VRBO for the full amount. Once again they will lose my business and they’ll also get charged a chargeback fee.

And now they have this negative blog post as well. I just can’t fathom why a company would treat their customers this way. There are so many great competitors out there…you can spend $600.00 at a multitude of 2nd tier sites like this site, vacationrental4s11, flipkey, vacationsfrbo, etc.. If you are in florida vacationrentalhotspots or vacationrealty…and get similar results as vrbo and be treated a hell of a lot better.

Not only that, they expect me to pay for my listing while it’s in a “pending” state? I got news for them, that sh*t doesn’t fly around here. We treat our customers with respect!!!

Check out the MUCH improved method of searching and sorting for vacation rentals in France:

We’ve finally began the process of making it easier to search for vacation rentals in areas that have many small, relatively unknown cities and municipalities.    For example, in Italy, the entire collection of cities and regions was just too difficult for the average American to navigate.

What we did was assign all the Italian vacation rental listings to their appropriate region and province in Italy and then map them to a drillable flash map.

Check it out:

http://www.vacationrentaldirect.com/vacation-rentals/132/Italy.htm

We’ve always had the ability to share VacationRentalDirect.com property listings on the top social networking sites.  However, we recently updated this technology to allow Facebook users to post their property directly into their Facebook “Wall”.

Here are a couple of examples:

Periodically posting your listing to your wall is a great way to introduce your property to your network of friends.   If your friends like it, they in turn will visit your listing on VacationRentalDirect.com and may add the listing to their wall, thus introducing your property to their network of friends, starting the process all over again.

Social media vacation rental marketing, if done correctly, can be a powerful way to gain exposure for your vacation rental.

To share your listing on Facebook,  first mouseover the “+ Share Listing” image at the top of your listing.

Next click on the Facebook icon

and finally, add some introductory text to introduce the property to your friends on facebook, choose the image of your property that you would like displayed in the posting and then Share it with all of your friends!!

Renting a vacation home or condo around Disney World in Florida can be quite a task. The area is very large and comprised of many mega residential developments which are primarily owned by investors who rent out the homes to families visiting Disney World. Thus when searching for a Disney vacation rental it’s important to search in all the categories that contain vacation homes or condos near Walt Disney World.

These categories include:

Kissimmee Vacation Rentals
Disney Area Vacation Rentals
Orlando Vacation Rentals

Many of the property owners are from the UK. I’m not really sure why this is, but if I had to guess, I’d guess it’s because Disney World is a popular spot for the British and many bought up homes as investments when they were visiting.

The competition is fierce with 1000s of homes and condos being marketed to Disney World visitors.

I am just going to feature one home now that I feel has a great set of owners who care about the rental and really keep it up:

Come stay at our pefect villa in the sun United States » Florida » Disney Area View This Listing at VacationRentalDirect.com This privately owned villa is situated on an established residential development called Santa Cruz with a mixture of permanent and short stay residents. There are only 71 houses in this neighbourhood. There are several golf courses in close proximity Property Details Listing: 3009 Type: Villa Sleeps : 6 to 8 Bed(s): 3 Bed(s): 2 Pets: No Children: Yes Pool :Yes Smoking: No Amenities Air Condition Phone Radio Washers & Dryer TV Cable DVD Player

Contact: Phone: 01293 538769

Vacation Rentals By Owner | VacationRentalDirect.com | Vacation Rental Software

]]> http://blog.vacationrentaldirect.com/disney-area-vacation-rentals/feed/ 0 http://blog.vacationrentaldirect.com/vacation-rental-marketing/ http://blog.vacationrentaldirect.com/vacation-rental-marketing/#comments Sun, 04 Jan 2009 02:55:43 +0000 Brent Kleinheksel http://blog.vacationrentaldirect.com/?p=241

Happy New Year!! I’ve been hearing from a lot of vacation rental owners and property managers about how the economic slowdown is hurting their business. Many are talking about reducing their marketing budgets for 2009. Hold up. Did I hear that correctly? Business is slowing and you want to decrease your vacation rental marketing dollars?

When times get a little more lean or when competition heats up, there is never a better time to spend more money on marketing. Margins will be thinner, but at least your properties are occupied and cash flow is strong.

For my own vacation rentals, I am always revisiting my marketing mix. I find print advertising to be very expensive and it offers little in the way of return on investment. My website remains a good source of leads and I make extensive use of pay per click campaigns as well as advertising on a select number of vacation rental listings sites, including, of course, vacationrentaldirect.com.

I am spending a little more this year to generate the same number of inquiries as in previous years, but the results are well worth it. My summer 2009 bookings are already nearly 85% booked, and that’s for seven units, with one week minimums, at rents rangins from $1500 to $5600 per week.

The vacation rental market remains very strong, but the economy is taking a tool. On the flip side, more people are traveling closer to home so the local markets are stronger.

In short, don’t reduce your vacation rental marketing dollars because you budget is tight. Spend your money wisely and diversify with a nice mix of a personal website, targeted long tail ppc, a variety of vacation rental listing sites, craigslist, eBay, free listing sites, some print advertising and don’t forget word of mouth and email marketing.

2009 will be a great year for vacation rentals, but dont’ skimp on the marketing budgets!!!

Located on the Northwest hillside of Pointe Milou, overlooking the Bay de Saint Jean. This place is secluded but convenient. Featuring a private infinity pool, incredible views and a shade terrace with waterfall this vacation rental has it all for the discriminating traveler!

Private 2 bedroom villa magnificent view. Caribbean » St Barthelemy » Pointe Milou View This Listing at VacationRentalDirect.com A new, premier vacation villa, Écoute Ton Coeur (Listening Heart), is professionally designed to bring the most magnificent ocean view of Point Milou into it’s living space. This private, two bedroom villa offers comfort and luxury, harmony surrounds Property Details Listing: 10472 Type: Villa Sleeps : 2 to 4 Bed(s): 2 Bed(s): 2 Pets: No Children: Yes Pool :Yes Smoking: Yes Amenities Air Condition Phone Radio Washers & Dryer TV Cable DVD Player

Contact: Michael Melesurgo Phone: 732-735-8656

VacationRentalDirect.com | Vacation Rental Software

Note (12/18/08): I received a call from AlwaysOnVacaiton requesting me to take down this post and threatening me with legal action. Apparently they haven’t researched the recent free speech rulings handed down by the courts. However, I will remove the few choice words I had for their management team, as they don’t materially add to the post anyway. Blows my mind the tried to intimidate me with a phone call threatening legal action, I say “bring it on”. It would be great PR for me. I’ll send it to every press outlet in the nation.

Gotta love the *!@# at alwaysonvacation. First they hired Indian call centers to harass me to list my personal properties on their junk vacation rental listing site. Now they are hiring Indian link building firms trying to get reciprocal links to a bunch of no content regional sites that only serve to feed into alwaysonvacation.

Ding..ding. I’ll be the first to report them to Google.

It’s one thing if they were smart about it, but they’re not. Their tactics are so old. They might have worked years ago, but not Google will catch on sooner rather than later and then bye bye alwaysonvacation. I’ll be glad to see them go.

Here is a copy of their most recent spam to me.

Dear Webmaster,

I am webmaster for some vacation rental sites. I came across your site and liked it very much, while searching for some quality and informative travel sites. I would like to do link exchange with your site.following websites are categorized as vacation rental, travel, real estate, hotels, car rentals, etc. and I found your site to be in a related segment. So that I am inviting you regarding link exchange.For more details, you can visit our website.

Title:Arizona Vacation Rentals
URL:http://www.greatluxuryrentals.com
Description:Arizona vacation rentals in popular destinations such as Scottsdale, Tucson and Phoenix are available at Greatluxuryrentals.com. Find the perfect Arizona vacation home, villa or condo for you and your family.

Title: Maryland vacation rentals
URL: http://www.greatmarylandgetaways.com
Description: Directory of more than 1500 Disney Vacation rental homes, condos, villas, cabins and cottages by owners!

Title: Disney vacation rentals
URL: http://www.orlandodisneygetaways.com
Description: Directory of more than 1500 Disney Vacation rental homes, condos, villas, cabins and cottages by owners!

Please accept our link exchange offer.

Warm Regards,
Julia Thomas

For the longest time I’ve used Postlets and vFlyers.com to create ads for craigslist, etc.. Then, about 12 months ago, I saw a small listing site had created a little embeddable widget for myspace…I thought that was neat. So a couple months ago, I thought I’d make it easy for the property owners at VacationRentalDirect.com to create widgets for myspace, their blogs, other social media sites and also Craigslist. It’s been a pain in the ass, but tomorrow we are launching the widgets. They are pretty cool, but they’ll be getting better. Look for them in your tools menu for now…we’ll do a better job of highlighting them later this month after we launch some other features. Here is what one of the widgets will look like:

Rosewood Pointe Retreat House & Cottages United States » Michigan » Holland View This Listing at VacationRentalDirect.com Rosewood Pointe is located on the north side of beautiful Lake Macatawa in Holland, Michigan. Minutes from Lake Michigan, the resort is nestled among stately oaks and fragrant pines. Check out our May 2008 Spoecials! Property Details Type :Resort Pets :No Children :Yes Sleeps :18+ Pool :No Bed(s) :8+ Bath(s) :8+ Amenities Air Condition Washers & Dryer TV Cable DVD Player Fishing near by Stove

Contact: Brent Kleinheksel Phone: 612-501-2548 email: rentals@rosewoodpointe.com

I had to laugh tonight. I stumbled across a recent press release by ResortQuest dated March 5th titled , “ResortQuest Partners with Other Industry Leaders to Heighten Online Exposure of Vacation Rentals”. I wonder who the brainchild is of this attempt at search engine manipulation. It’s one thing to praise a new and innovative link bait product or a great viral marketing / social media campaign, it’s quite another to take a page out of the 2002 link building book and attempt to apply it in 2008.

Let me explain. For years, real estate agents would seek each other out to provide links to each other’s website. They’d publish them under the guise of being “referral networks”. The reality is that there is no reason to promote a competitor, if you are searching for a home in Myrtle Beach, why would you need to be referred to a Realtor in Phoenix? The answer is you don’t. The idea was to get links from other themed sites (e.g. other Realtor’s websites) in an attempt to boost your search engine rankings. For many years it worked, and in some instances it still does. But to all groups participating in ResortQuest’s little scheme, let me tell you, you are playing with fire.

All you need to do is visit any major real estate SEO forum and search back a few months and you’ll see that Google sent a warning shot across a lot of real estate websites and dropped them from the index for a period of months or longer, forcing those site owners to clean and remove those spam directories and file reinclusion requests with Google.

Whoever is running ResortQuest’s SEO operations is seriously a day late and a dollar short and is putting all of their “referral partners” at risk by promoting such a dated search engine manipulation scheme. You can email me until you are blue in the face, I’ll just refer you to other forums and you can read it yourself. It’s a boneheaded move. But one that personally makes me happy, because it won’t be long till I have a bunch of my competitors fall out of the Google Index.

I’m sure I’ll get the usual suspects complaining about my SEO, my link bait, my articles, my links, my widgets, my vast network of sites, that’s fine, unless you really know what you are talking about, and can back it up with higher SERPs than mine, don’t bother because I’ll delete your comments.

Here’s what ResortQuest is doing…they have created a website called resortquestpartners dot com (hell no I’m not linking to that garbage) and there you can find, of course, links to all their partners, as well as the Resortquest regional sites. The partner sites all have links from their index page or other close to root pages, titled “resortquest partnership” (or something similar) which then leads to page with oodles of links to all the other partners!! Starting to see what I am seeing? It’s just the same Realtor referral network, that the Big G slammed the door on in 2007, but resortQuest never got that memo! Worse yet, they aren’t even trying to stay under the radar, they are promoting it under the guise of a legitimate program – a dragging all of their “partners” down with them.

Ummm and ResortQuest is bragging about them showcasing their SEO efforts at the upcoming VRMA (Vacation Rental Managers Association) conference in Myrtle Beach next month. I am going to be there, just to see if they are as dumb as this program makes them appear to be?

For those of you thinking I am jealous, please check the serps for more major keywords for this site versus ResortQuest, it’s definitely not a post borne our of jealousy. It just angers me when ill informed groups put out this junk and then drag down a bunch of hard working chumps who erroneously think “if ResortQuest says it’ll work, it’ll work.” WRONG.

Better start prepping that Google reinclusion request my friends.