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The Best Vacation Home Rental Marketing Websites | Add Comment

    • The Worst Vacation Rental Marketing Websites 8/28/2008
    As a Florida vacation rental owner who lists on three websites, two of which (VRBO and HomeAway) you mention, I must comment on how unsuccessful these sites have been for me. You say HomeAway and its sister sites have "a top notch search function." One cannot even search by price, which for a lot of people is the most important criteria. Almost every inquiry I get requests the price and availability, although this information is available in my listing. And if you want a place on the beach, you have to go through all the listings to find out if any are on the beach. I've found the majority of my actual rentals come from a little boutique site, www.WeNeedaVacation.com. Talk about a top notch search! It takes about two minutes to find rentals that meet all the criteria you want, are available and within the price specified. Although this site only lists rentals for Florida and Cape Cod, it manages to have a traffic ranking as good as or better than many national and international sites. I get a similar number of hits but a much higher ratio of inquiries. Many owners are fed up with these huge sites that require you to pay for a ton of pictures or for placement to be high in the list. I'm fed up with inquiries that are nothing more than mass emailings to which I reply and never hear a word back. More than 30% of my inquiries from WeNeedaVacation.com come via phone -- I rarely get a phone call as a result of a hit to my listing on VRBO or HomeAway. I used to list on Vacationrentals.com. 40% of my inquiries were from people who had previously emailed me. These huge directory sites confuse people because it takes multiple visits to find what they are looking for. The inquiry to hits ratio is important to me, as is the number of visitors per listing and page views per visit, information which can be found at Compete.com I'm surprised that you would tout Rentalsnow.com, which has a traffic ranking of 6,978,885! And I found them nowhere on page one of a Google search for vacation rentals. There are literally hundreds of rental by owner sites out there. Rental owners are beginning to realize specialty sites are a good option. There's such a thing as being too big.

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      • Marketing Study on the Top VR Directories 9/3/2008
      Very insightful post with complete information about vacation rental directories. When it comes to investing our marketing dollars in online advertising, it is definitely not an easy decision. Especially that we have more than 1,000 different directories out there, all offering similar features and benefits at comparable rates. I would like to invite you to see our Marketing Study (http://rentalo.com/web/client/marketingStudy.cgi ) on the top performing vacation rental directories which we prepared with the help of Hitwise, an online measurement company. In this study we provided market shares and valuable statistics of the top vacation rental directories and tried to answer the question of how much to invest in marketing our property online. I hope you will find it useful. Marta Olszewska, Rentalo.com http://blog.rentalo.com/owners/

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      • Vacation Rentals 11/10/2008
      I manage 4 vacation rentals and am constantly trying to keep up to date with marketing. Recently a new website has come along that I think is a much better value than the vacation rental sites listed here. If you own or manage vacation rentals and want to make your life easier, try www.rentalspacenetwork.com. This site allows you to post your listing for just $39 per year and you are able to auto post your ad to Craigslist as well as have your listing on another keyword specific site. The unique thing about rentalspacenetwork.com is the full range of property management tools that you get with your posting that enable you to do take care of all of your rental paperwork online. You can easily create, exchange and sign lease agreements with your renters using electronic signatures. This has been great for me as I no longer have to hassle with the printer and fax machine and my renters absolutely love how convenient it is. As a long time vacation rental owner, anything that can make my life easier without breaking the bank is wonderful.

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      • vacationrentals.com DECEPTIVE 12/11/2008
      Regardless of the "risk free" advertisement on the homepage of vacationrentals.com, there is no way to get your money back. In the fine print of their 6000 word "disclaimer", it says there is a $75 fee if you cancel a yearly subscription and no refund at all for monthly subscriptions. It is a LIE that the subscription is "risk free".

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