As a rule, travelling in apartments and villas is a cost-effective form of holiday accommodation: they offer a lot more space than hotels, hostels, and bed and breakfasts, and they have amenities that make your stay more comfortable. When researching your holiday destination, and especially for city breaks, you will certainly be overwhelmed by the number of options available (that's if... you remembered to book your holiday accommodation early!) and two types of apartment rental: serviced or private. Serviced apartments versus holiday rentals... which option is the right one for your holiday away? In the past serviced apartments were primarily used by business travelers, but today we see a rise of holiday makers choosing serviced apartments for their holiday accommodation. What is the difference between holiday apartments and serviced apartments? Serviced apartments are marketed most strongly at business travelers, which means that they are designed to meet the needs of the ...

There is a plethora of social media sites these days, from Facebook to Twitter to Tumblr, and it is for this reason that most people are wary of news about new and up and coming sites. Pinterest has recently been touted as the fastest growing social media site, and with a current user base of more than 10 million subscribers, it is fast becoming the place to be seen and market your products if you are business or startup looking to target a particular market niche or demographic.   What is Pinterest? Pinterest is basically a social media site whose selling point are pin boards that one uses to post photos, text and video of things that they like or deem interesting and which they would like to share with others in the community. Pinterest takes a visual approach in telling a story, communicating an idea or passing on a message. Currently, statistics ...

The saying that the early bird gets the worm is extremely relevant in the case of planning a family holiday, although in this case the saying should be that the family who books early gets the best and widest choice of holiday apartments. Holiday rental apartments are very popular and get booked up well in advance. You should book at least a couple of months in advance of your trip to make sure that you get your first choice of apartment at the best possible price. If you're planning to stay in a holiday rental during the summer holidays make sure you have booked somewhere by March. When booking holiday rentals, there are a few potential pitfalls to watch out for. You need to be particularly careful when booking online that the person or agency that you are dealing with is trustworthy. The best advice (maybe obviously so!) is to ...

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 ...

(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 ...