A

Availability calendar: Holiday Velvet provides subscribers with their own on-line availability calendar so Internet surfers can see at a glance whether a property is available for letting or has been booked. This kind of service is popular with Internet users: nobody wants to waste time making enquiries about dates that are unavailable, and it cuts down the number of fruitless enquiries that owners have to deal with. On Holiday Velvet, advertisers are free to use our availability calendar, or they can link to an existing Rentors.org availability calendar.

B

Blog: A Blog is an easy-to-create homepage allowing the instant publishing of thoughts & ideas. Blogs come in many shapes and forms; Holiday Velvet's Blog - "the Velvet Blog"- for example is a "professional blog" where we openly talk about the holiday rental business, about our website, and where we publish travel-related stories.

C

Crawlability: The Search Engine Crawlability rate of a website is the ease in which search engines manage to crawl a particular website and find relevant content in it. Search Engines find it easy to crawl pages of a website that have little Javascript; are no more than 3 clicks away from the homepage; that have text-based navigation; have a static URL (without a question mark in it); that are built in XHTML; that have relevant meta-tags; that are well inter-linked; that are linked to by other websites. The Holiday Velvet website fulfills all these criteria, meaning every page on the website has a high chance of being found by search engines - that the engine finds relevant content depends greatly on the owner's ability to write good online copy. 

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D

Deposit: Vacation rental owners may ask for a deposit payment before arrival to secure the booking. In this case a cancellation policy should be drawn up by the owner giving clear guidance on what happens if the renter cancels, or if the owner cancels.

Please keep up-to-date with news on internet scams: owners & site users may not always be trustworthy. We publish all the warnings we hear about on the Velvet Blog and we carefully monitor our owners and site users but we cannot guarantee that either are completely trustworthy. Please note, therefore, that we are not liable for any claim between renters and owners (as per our Terms & Conditions).

H

Holiday Velvet: A state-of-the-art internet advertising company allowing private individuals and businesses to successfully market their holiday accommodation across the World.

Holiday Velvet Themes: We offer our subscribers the opportunity to market their property(s) to particular target groups by featuring them under specific holiday headings - e.g. golfers, beach holidays, yoga retreats. Other themes include surfing; skiing; scuba-diving; safaris; retreats; boutique-hotels; and cooking.

Holiday Rental: Renting out a furnished apartment, villa, hotel room or B&B room to tourists and others visiting a destination on a temporary basis.(This term is common among English-speakers outside the US & Canada.)

I

Internet Advertising: The Internet has quite literally opened up a whole new world in terms of marketing, giving advertisers instant access to a vast but highly targeted global audience. Travel related business on the Internet grew to $8.9 billion in 2002. In 2004 Internet travel sites attracted 30% of the UK's 20.7 million on-line population; 93% of leisure travelers in the USA searched for information on-line (compared with 66% in the year 2000). The use of High Street travel agencies has meanwhile declined. Internet advertising offers a wealth of opportunities which are simply not possible with traditional marketing methods and is considerably cheaper, especially when you consider what you get for your money.

Internet Advertising Company: A company that allows vacation rental owners and agents to display full details of their property - with colour photos and comprehensive descriptions - and promote it to a global audience, 24/7, all year round.

J

JPG/JPEG format: JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group - is the format used to compress photographic images so that they can be displayed on the Web. Print photographs should be scanned and saved as file extension .jpg.

L

Links: Web pages have links so that one can "click" and jump straight to another point either on that page, or that site, or anywhere else on the Internet. A link comes in the format of a URL.

Letting Agency: Letting agencies handle the marketing of a property in the place of its owner; advertising costs are sometimes, but not always, built into their commission. Some agencies have brochures with colour photos of each property for rent - but in many cases properties are not advertised individually.

P

Paypal: Founded in 1998, PayPal [new window], an eBay company, enables any individual or business with an email address to send and receive payments online securely, easily and quickly. PayPal's service builds on the existing financial infrastructure of bank accounts and credit cards and uses one of the world's most advanced proprietary fraud prevention systems to create a safe, global, real-time payment solution.

R

Rentors.org: The Rentors.org calendar [new window] allows vacation rental owners to maintain a single vacation rental availability calendar and use it across different marketing sites. On Holiday Velvet advertisers may use our availability calendar or link to their existing Rentors.org availability calendar.

T

Top Seller: On Holiday Velvet a property becomes a top seller if it has attracted at least 15 positive reviews and if its average number of requests per month amounts to at least 15. Top sellers get increased visibility on the Holiday Velvet website and on Holiday Velvet's newsletters.

U

URL: A URL - Uniform Resource Locator - is the location of a file on the Web. It usually starts with "http://www.". A typical property URL on Holiday Velvet for example is
http://www.holiday-velvet.com/rome/rome_apartments/details/campo+crystal/id/750

Uploading: Uploading means to copy files (such as photographs for example) to a location on the web. When we ask advertisers to "upload" their pictures, we want them to copy their pictures to our server so that they can show on the website. Note that photographs must come in the JPG/JPEG format.

Please remember, too, that our staff are always on hand to assist if you have any problems. Choose any form of contacting us listed on the Contact Page.

V

Vacation rental: Renting out a furnished apartment or house or hotel room or B&B room to tourists and others visiting a destination on a temporary basis.(This term is common among English-speakers in the US & Canada.)

Velvet Pack: A single Velvet Pack allows a paying subscriber to advertise one property for one year on Holiday Velvet. Property owners can advertise multiple properties by purchasing mutliple Velvet Packs: one, two or ten. To see a list of available Velvet Packs for purchase follow this link.

Care to share your thoughts on the glossary?