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 ...

(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 ...