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

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 step further and created QR codes for all our properties: travelers will have yet another option to bookmark and share rentals they like on Holiday Velvet. The code will show on their phone:

- the name of the property
- location
- number of bedrooms
- number of bathrooms
- from price
- how to book it

Browse our worldwide holiday rentals, try it out and let us know what you think!

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. You can now find the following features in the “Discounts” tab in your owner account on Holiday Velvet:

• choose discount offer or last minute rate
• choose a fixed value discount or a % of the total
• decide when this discount applies
• and whether it is for all your properties or just one
• SOON: decide on the length of stay for the discount to be valid

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 traffic, i.e. people who know our web address and type in directly; the remaining 10% comes from referring websites, i.e. people clicking on a link to us from another website. Our top 2 referrers (out of 1455 last month) are Facebook and Twitter in this order.

Keywords
We were found for 39,000 set of keywords In February 2009.

Content
There are 62,000 pages on our website.

Newsletter
We send out a monthly newsletter to our users filled with special deals given to us by our owners. Last month (feb 09) 11,484 valid emails were sent. 11% of those clicked on a link in the newsletter. There were 2 people who unsubscribed.

Anymore stats you’d like from us? If we have them we will give them out, just ask us below.

PS: a big thanks to Paul, our head of SEO, who helped make all of this happen.

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.

(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 the time I felt like crying:

“the rental listing name sounds either rude or like toilet roll to me”

 ”It sounds like a tame soft porno term to me”

So overnight our brand was associated with toilet paper? As you can imagine it was a bit of blow. When you work so hard on growing a business and you get the likes of “sue dyer” “giddy goat” and  “loopy lou” destroying it, you may for a second – and I did – feel like giving it all up. Of course, we didn’t give it up **sigh of relief**.

Today I’m happy to report that 30% of the people who commented on this thread are now – or were at one point – advertisers on Holiday Velvet. I cannot tell you how many referrals we got from this post (there is no hyperlinked URL to us) but even if only 1% of the people who viewed the thread decided to give us a try then we should have gotten 33 registrations from it – to this date.

So is bad publicity good publicity? Well in my experience if it is a benign as this then absolutely! Anyone else wants to comment on our brand name? Bring it on!

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 of the industry

Our business is probably the best to be in because it is about people and experiences, so why not join forces and proactively promote it, together.