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 DO WE PICK OUR FEATURED DESTINATIONS
I read in the Lay my Hat post that some people are really quite disappointed not to be able to register because their area isn’t featured. They are also confused as to why we add certain areas over others. The short answer is this:

we rather have certain owners disappointed not to be able to join than having owners disappointed because they don’t get any enquiries from us.

We plan our marketing carefully and build a plan on how many visitors we can bring to an area over a period of time. It’s not cost effective at this stage for our business to market those areas where we have few properties.

We are most successful with google, we rank page 1 for A LOT of keywords – our aim is to get found for all the destinations we represent but it requires a lot of work AND a lot of owners subscribing. You see we will never rank for a destination where only 1 owner has subscribed. The more pages we have that are related to the keyword we are targeting the more likely we are to rank.

Our current 180 destinations receive a lot visits and over 60% of our owners renew with us (we hope this will go up to 100% when the cost goes down!) – we really want to make it work for your destination but we won’t try unless we have a good chance to.

FREQUENT UPDATE OF OUR DESTINATIONS LIST
We have practically finished the tools that allow us to update our list of destinations more frequently – so do email us with your property details or leave a comment below. We will then see whether:

- we can find other owners in your destination
- judge how much work would be involved in ranking higher than the competition

So I guess my answer is: yes, we do want your business and when we get it, we won’t be wasting your time

All the best and thanks for discussing us.

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PS: In reply to LMH User Goosie > Costwold is already added, only a few days left to subscribe free; In reply to LMH Users Saramar & The Olive Grove: I’m sorry we won’t open Le Marche nor Puglia at this stage because at this stage we won’t be able to make it work for you as much as you’d like; In reply to LMH User apexblue: We’ll be opening Wales this week and email you when done; In reply to LMH Users Pepsipuss & Brenda: We’ll be opening Almeria & Malaga asap. If I’ve left out anyone please comment below.

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