The stats just came out! We have our top 5 most booked holiday rentals of 2011 on Holiday Velvet and the winner is........ TOP 1: DAM PALACE DUPLEX - Amsterdam Rental TOP 2: GIGLIO - Venice Rental TOP 3: MICHELANGELO II - Rome Rental TOP 4: COSY FLATIRON - New York Rental TOP 5: ALFONS - Barcelona Rental

At Holiday Velvet we are not only passionate about traveling, we are also crazy about new technologies. Soon I'll be posting about NFC on Holiday Velvet and today I'm happy to introduce QR codes on our property pages. We hope this new tool will further improve the user experience and client satisfaction. For those of you who are not familiar with QR codes, here's an example: - now download a QR application on your smartphone ( I use the free RedLaser QR application) - scan the above with your app - read my message! So in a short sentence: a QR code is similar to a barcode and is used to save information on your phone. It's been 6 months we use QR codes on our booking confirmations: owners and travelers can easily scan the details of the booking with their smartphone and there is a link to access their full confirmation online. Today we went one ...

As we start the low-season period, we thought to introduce you formally to the new "Discounts" tab you can see in your Holiday Velvet Owner Account. The simple question we've asked ourselves is "How to entice people to travel during off-season dates and fill empty calendars". The simple answer is: modulate your rates according to demand and availability. The hotel industry has been doing this for many years: it's called yield management. To put it shortly yield management in hotels is selling rooms and services at the right price, at the right time, to the right people. The trick is to decide when a room is likely to remain empty and then either package it up or slash the prices. What we are offering today is certainly not a yield management system but it aims to help you easily set-up discounts for dates that you have recognised are worth slashing rates for. ...

I've been looking for a widget allowing us to display real-life stats from our Google analytics account but without success. There is a way but it requires programming time and there are more vital tools we need to develop.... so I thought I'd give you, our owners and partners, a little overview of Holiday Velvet Stats - we' ve always made a point to be transparent to our customers. Given that we only 3 years old and that we are self-funded, you will find that our stats are mind-blowing! Visits In February 2009 we had 92,000 visitors (10% increase from last year); on average, a visitor to Holiday Velvet sees 6.75 pages and spends 4.45 minutes on the site. Enquiries We generated 37,400 enquiries in the past 6 months (Sept 08 to March 09) Traffic Sources 74% of our traffic comes from search engines (google being the top one by far); 16% is direct ...

In response to a growing demand for eco-tourism, today many hotels, resorts and B&Bs are green-minded. This trend is slowly catching up with the holiday rental industry but if your property is not exactly a log cabin in the Norwegian Fjords and you haven't go the money to invest in solar panels then what easy steps can you take to prove that you too are green-minded? Here are 5 tips to get you started: TIP 1: Collect rainwater To water your potted plants with (plus green plants inside your rental will act as natural air filters). TIP 2: Provide guests with a shopping trolley So they won't bring tons of plastic bags back. TIP 3: If you have the space buy 5 bins (if you don't invest in an ecopod) 1 bin for plastic, 1 for cans, 1 for paper, 1 for bottles and 1 for rubbish. Label them clearly (with large icons for ...

There is a thread going on about us at the moment on the popular forum for rental owners: Lay my Hat. I thought I'd answer everyones concerns in a blog post so our other rental owners can also read it - and comment, I hope. As I understand there are 3 major concerns about the way Holiday Velvet carries its business: 1) the renewal price is too high (I have good news, read on!) 2) some destinations are not listed (you'll find our reasons are valid) 3) we only update our destinations once a year (good news again!) THE RENEWAL PRICE IS GOING DOWN The renewal cost is going down to 100 Euros for 1 property, 120 Euros for 2 properties and 150 Euros for 10. The downside is that new members will now have to pay to join, no more free memberships. This is valid as of Monday the 2nd of March 2009. HOW ...

Unfortunately during our first years of business between 2006-2008, when Holiday Velvet was still offering free advertising for holiday rental owners, we learned first-hand the techniques that fake owners employ to scam holiday makers. When an Australian father of 2 small children flew to New York and called us to ask why the apartment he thought he rented out didn't exist (yes, this is a true story), we knew we had to take action. Scammers use free rental portals to advertise "too-good-to-be-true" property deals. Since this New York story we are checking the credentials of every registration we get: unless we are satisfied with the outcome the property doesn't get published on our website. We are now confident to have eradicated fraud on Holiday Velvet. This doesn't mean to say that you shouldn't trust owners that advertise on free websites - 99.9% of our owners have always been professionals. They ...

(photo credit: banky177) Is bad publicity good publicity? A while back, when Holiday Velvet wasn't yet 2 years old, a forum conversation started about us on "Lay my Hat". This forum allows vacation rental owners to discuss tips and news about the industry. I highly recommended it: as you will read below, the partakers are extremely witty.  The post about us didn't start off very well and ended even worse. Firstly we were labelled "total incompetents", "spammers", "excruciating use of English"... I read this and I thought "well this might be tough to hear but I can fix all those issues". At least two owners said that they were happy to give us a try because they had found us high up in Google.  Trouble is the conversation then turned into a joke about our brand name. I can laugh about these comments now but I must admit that at ...

When I saw the Time's Culture supplement last Sunday I jumped with joy: the cover page boasts "The top 100 blogs- Intelligent, Informative, bizarre: there are 200 million blogs in the world. Don't panic we've pick the best". I avidly searched for the article inside the supplement just to find out that they had not listed any travel blogs - whether in this first part or in next week's part 2.So nothing on travel? How disappointing! The article divides the top 100 into world affairs, celebrities, style and words sections to name but a few. Next week we'll see the contributors pick on film, art, theater, pop and more. I mean I highly recommend the article: Did you know that Paris Hilton runs a blog on myspace? Or that seeing a Dutchman running away from his camera is most entertaining? Seriously now, I can recommend the snippet "How to search the ...

The idea to write a blog about our industry has been with us for a long time. With the advent of social networks and the ease of disseminating information, it seems that having a blog equals to having a voice. So in January 2009 we finally sat down and started discussing the kind of things we will like to blog about. During this process we learned that to write a compelling blog you need to know who you are writing it for; what you will discuss, a greater subject threading the posts; If you own a blog maybe you sat down and asked these questions too, and maybe just like us you had a million answers. Trouble is: you need a concise answer for each question. So after much deliberation here are ours: who: this blog is for holiday rental industry experts and enthusiasts what: this blog will try to engage others by sharing our knowledge ...