LiveRez Online Vacation Rental

The question about the “right amount of questions” to ask of potential guests for your vacation home rental signing up to your opt-in form is a tough one to answer.  The answer: “it depends.”  It depends on what you really need for your business. Here are a couple of guidelines: QuantityIf your business relies on sheer quantity and “just ok” quality of email addresses then you might only ask for email address and maybe first name if you want to ever personalize your email marketing campaigns. QualityIf you need your email addresses to be quality and be “real” verified email address, than a double opt-in verification or a CAPTCHA can be used.  Postal Address - Some businesses need a full address because they’ll be sending postal mail to them. If you do need this make sure to make it required so your visitor can’t leave the form without filling it out. What’s also great about getting a postal address is if your recipients email bounces you can send them a direct mail piece asking them to call you and update it.If you’re not going to be sending your recipients anything by mail but want to know their location, you might want to just ask for postal code. Phone Number - Phone numbers can be especially important if you need to call your customers at any given point to confirm something. And just like gathering postal information, you can call them if their email bounces to get an update. Expect to get a percentage of people giving bogus information as well, but many won’t especially if you give them the reason why you’re asking for it. Vacation Interest – Property managers who want to market to their recipients by seasons or services they have an interest in.  If you do this, tell visitors why certain fields are required and ask what  they’d like to receive information about. Age - Asking for age is a bit tricky. One way around this is by having a birthday club where you give something to your registrant as a gift. It can be in the form of a discount or something free.  Danger Zone Data - Credit Card information, household income & gender can all be a bit personal and turn off your registrant especially if they’re required. Expect a lot of bogus information here if you’re asking for it, there are just too many scams going on online and people are generally afraid. 

The better your information, the better you can market your vacation home rentals.  Be careful to balance the desire for detail with the potential abandonment rate of asking for too much.

Lets us know what has worked and what has not worked for you?  Do you have any online Jedi mind tricks the rest of us could use?

Ralf

LiveRez

Experience can come in many forms.  Mostly it seems to come from making decisions and then looking back upon what worked and what did not work.  Now, what if I could just have knowledge without having to go through this adventurous and sometimes painful?  How can I get experience without the time & decisions? 

Easy!  Bring on a guy who has been there, done that, and can use that experience to help me.  How lucky am I to have Gary Gigot joining our team and using his experience to help me in my decisions?  Very lucky.  Gary’s addition to our team has been significant already and established some fantastic plans of how we can grow our business and services to vacation rental property managers. 

Former Microsoft and Visio Marketing VP, Gary Gigot, Joins LiveRez Team in Creating New Brand in the Online Vacation Rental Booking Space

The bigger picture here is about making the most of experience.  Chances are that you do not know everything (assuming you are not my 13 year old daughter).  Finding the right resources that will complement your knowledge can have a tremendous affect on your ability to drive your business.  Not only because your ‘concilieres’ provide you great advice, but also b/c they allow you to focus your energy and mind on the things that you are really great at.  And that, what you are really great at, is what makes your business a reflection of you, different from anyone else, and something that customers value.

Ralf
LiveRez

A big week for our industry.  My friends over at FlipKey collected on an investment from TripAdvisor, and then Orbitz announced a partnership with Zonder to provide a vacation rental referral service to their travelers.  This activity resulted in an article in the Motley Fool about Expedia and the vacation rental industry.

Motley Fool article about Expedia and Vacation Home Rental Market

So what does all this mean?  Not sure any of us know for sure, but it tells me a couple of things:
- The big travel companies are very interested in the vacation home rental industry
- Online bookings, not just referrals and reservations, is going to be come even more critical
- Taking their business online is essential for vacation rental property managers
- Vacation rental property managers stand to win, and win big, if they are ready for a new era
- HomeAway has some big decisions to make about their strategy
- We need to stay very focused on the Customer - the Traveler

What do you think it spells for our industry?

Ralf
LiveRez

Again and again I run into a discussion about ‘trust accounting’.  Trust accounting is one of those terms that people throw around, but usually mean many different things.  So I thought I would put my ’stake in the ground’ about how I utilize the term trust accounting. First, I use the term ‘formal trust accounting’ when I refer the requirement of detailed records and separate bank accounts for the owner bank accounts and records.  I do this because many property managers utilize the term trust accounting when they refer to the regular accounting that needs to be done to track the reservations & owner activity.  A monthly statement, a formal trust accounting solution does not make, but it meets all the requirements of most states. The biggest myth – QuickBooks cannot do formal trust accounting.  QuickBooks is the most widely used and extremely user friendly solution on the market and can absolutely be used for formal trust accounting. Formal trust accounting record requirements require a detailed accounting of the following four items: (these vary somewhat from state to state where formal trust accounting is required): 1) Ledger for each owner
a.       Name of the owner and identification of the bank account
b.      Dates of each activity
c.       Amounts received and from whom
d.      Amounts disbursed and to whom
e.       Current balances of funds for each owner, each month, or as of any date2) Journal for each owner trust account
a.       Name of the account (including the bank and account number)
b.      Date of each transaction, each debit and credit to the account
c.       Names of the sources of each deposit
d.      Names of each person receiving a payment
e.       Current balance in the account3) Copies of all bank statements, canceled checks for each owner trust account4) Monthly reconciliation of each of the above items.  

All of the above are tracked and available in QuickBooks for vacation rental property management.  So, find out what the requirements are for your state and do not be confused into thinking that QuickBooks cannot manage your accounting needs.

Ralf

LiveRez.com 

Based on the success and the lessons learned from 2008, the Vacation Home Expo is returning to Atlanta in January of 2009.  This is exciting for the vacation home rental industry - all of us in the industry owners, property managers, suppliers, vacation rental software providers and marketeers.  As a group we stand to gain from a rising tide of vacation home rental that will raise all boats, or should I say homes.

The Vacation Home Expo January 23 – 25, 2009 at the Cobb Galleria Centre in Atlanta the show will bring together various leaders in the industry to present a united front to the attending travelers.  That united front is something that fascinates me.  With a united front, and especially a united message we can make a significant impact in building the recognition and utilization of vacation home rentals by travelers.  It is about bringing new travelers to vacation homes.  Taking away from the hotels, not each other.

Ralf
LiveRez

You know it is time to launch another marketing campaign to get those guests coming in for your vacation home rentals.  But you know the old “spray and pray” does not work.  You need to be targeted, laser focused, a sniper of great vacation guests.  So you spend some time planning, researching, and brainstorming new niche markets to go after.  But how can you know which ones to focus on.This is where my little technique comes in for testing niche targets: 

Overview
–Get a sense of how interested the market is in your offering.
–Ask questions of potential customers before actually marketing to them.
–Cost you less than US$100 and maybe even under US$50.
Step one
–Determine your keywords
Step two
–Set up a survey. –www.SurveyMonkey.com, www.Zoomerang.com are my tools of choice.
–Don’t flog your Kindly Respondents with excessive or dumb questions.
–If you’re asking for email, phone numbers or addresses, be sure to be clear about your privacy policy and why you’re collecting that data. Usually just a zip code will suffice.
Step three
–Create PPC ads
Step four
–Let ‘er rip. Turn on Survey & Ads for a week or so and start collecting responses
Step five
–Evaluate your results.

Follow these simple steps and you will have some great information to base your next marketing campaign on.

What better way to show the spectacular vistas, the cozy living room, the high tech kitchen, and the private pool combined with a local flavor than a video tour.  Vacation home rentals were made to be shown this way.  Flash is great to capture the attention of shoppers and to hook them into exploring your offerings.  But be careful, it has not done much for you in helping shoppers find you while searching the web.  Until now, hopefully improvements are on their way.

Google and Adobe have made recent announcements around the improvement in Flash being used in SEO.  Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog used the following example of how a Flash website listing looked in search results before the new Flash crawling technology was installed:

And this is how the same Flash website listing would now appear:

The difference, as you can see, lies within the important descriptive content that Google can now index. This peek into Google’s accessibility, however, begs the questions: How well does Google index Flash? and How effectively can it be optimized for rankings?

Based on the information provided since the announcements, following optimization techniques for Flash pages:

1. The textual content within Flash can be optimized for specific keyphrase(s) to assist targeted rankings.
2. Text navigation within the website as well as text links within content can include keyphrase(s) to boost relevancy of the destination page. However, this is only applicable when Flash is separated into segments housed in separate files. For example, instead of creating a website entirely in a single flash file (i.e. www.xyzname.com/site.swf), the Flash file should be broken into segments housed in separate URLs (i.e., page1.swf, page2.swf, etc.).
3. Emphasizing (bolding) may help to raise the value of keyphrase(s). This seems to be a logical capability, but we don’t know at present if the new technology recognizes text emphasis.

Flash has made some amazing progress, but it still falls short of the efficacy of HTML when it comes to SEO.  Use it wisely.

Ralf

LiveRez.com

I love the Olympics.  Some of the fondest childhood memories I have are of watching the summer and winter Olympics.  In Austria, where I grew up, the coverage was ‘old school’.  Instead of the human interest stories and highlights, the coverage showed the first competitor and then showed every competitor thereafter - just like being at the event.  That clearly has its pluses and minuses……..the marathon……..

Back to my point.  I love the Olympics.  In 2002 I was able to go to Salt Lake City to watch some of the winter games.  Now what if I wanted to go to Beijing to watch and stay at a vacation rental.  I know there are many places to look, but I Googled ‘Beijing vacation home’.  The #1, yes #1, organic listing that came up was from craigslist. 

I love craigslist.  Almost as much as the Olympics.  But to go thousands of miles to Beijing on a craigslist ad.  Whoa!  I think I need a bit more reassurance.  Not that I am a wimpy traveler.  I can tell stories with the best of them.  But there is just not enough confidence for me in booking a place far away, form a person I do not know, without any type of third-party reassurance. 

This underscores the importance of creating a network within the vacation property manager community to validate and endorse certain property managers.  By overcoming these types of traveler hesitations, we can grow immensely.

Good news - if you have what it takes, craigslist has 100s of available rentals.

Higher, Faster, Stronger.

Ralf
LiveRez.com

One of the things we are passionate about here at LiveRez is the partnership we have with property managers.  We call it a partnership, not a customer relationship. 

Why the difference?  Because we believe that the property managers are our partners in meeting the needs of the traveler.  The traveler is the customer.  The traveler is the one who pays the thousands of dollars for a vacation experience that the property manager, the property owner, and all their partners provide.  So here at LiveRez, we dismiss the old-fashioned supplier-customer paradigm for a new partnership where we collaborate with property managers to to create the best shopping, booking, preparation, and vacationing experience.

This partnership paradigm is a principle I have also observed to pay dividends between property managers and owners.  Treating owners as customers is nice and appropriate, but how much more effective that relationship becomes when the property managers and owners collaborate as partners to create the best experience for travelers.

Our industry continues to evolve and make great strides.  I believe we are seeing the emergence of the next growth phase fro vacation rental homes as the industry collaborates in organizations such as VRMA, Discover Vacation Homes, and the Vacation Home Expo.

Ralf
LiveRez.com 

This is an interesting post that was targeted at hotels, but it very relevant to the vacation rental industry.  It speaks to the new paradigm of how vacation rental property managers interact with travelers, and how travelers are expected to interact with vacation rental property managers.

Read the post:  Travel 2.0 and what it means to hotels

An interesting perspective/comment made to the article has to do with time allocation.  Doing all the Web 2.0 stuff is cool, fun, and good for business.  But, it also takes time.  Time that is spent away from other tasks.  So when jumping into the Web 2.0 activities, be careful to take a close look at the amount of time spent on those efforts and what it means in terms of time not spent on other activities.

Ralf
LiveRez.com