Latest Activity...
Thanks! I guess it's actually bad news that everyone is low, since they'll be competing with me with their vacancies, but seems comforting that it isn't my property that now seems unappealing...
I'll spend some time and light up some more local ads and turn vacationhomerentals.com back on.
I feel like I should get more traffic from being pet-friendly. I see there's a site called "bringfido.com" with a free trial period, maybe that'll help. Time to get to work, I guess...
thanks,
-JJ
This listing site is pretty good for the money: VacationHomeRentals.com. They always send a bunch our way. I think this year is just a down year. All the VR owners I know aren't doing well this year. I'd also recommend getting on small regional websites. For instance, if you're in the Shenandoah Valley in VA, you could get on ShenandoahCabinRentals.com I've found that the small regional websites send quite a bit of traffic and can be cheap (or free!) to get on.
I filled up pretty well last year with vacationrentals.com listings and a little bit of Craigslist, mass emailing to old customers, and Facebook work. I have quite a few more summer gaps this year (even though Spring was better than last year), and vacationrentals.com inquiries are way down. I actually paid for a homeaway.com listing for my most expensive property, and that doesn't seem to be doing much, either. Anything working particularly well this year?
Hmm, it's possible that webchalet will change the format for you if you ask. They claim to offer flexible customer service, you'd have to ask them. Failing that, you could substitute their email forms for some other generic ones like what Wufoo offers. But that would also depend on webchalet being willing to allow you to embed HTML forms into their templates. I don't know if webchalet allows that or has rigid templates.
Thanks. I use webchalet so I can't modify my email (it is their template). Any other ideas?
Thanks for the feedback! I'm so glad we're able to make your management easier.
FYI - on the inquiry wizard screen, you can actually bypass that for emails that come from your personal website. We have a custom inquiry parsing format that you can use so that emails from your website can be turned directly into inquiries. You don't have to fill out the What Is This email screen for those.
This support article shows the format to follow:
https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/inquiry-parsing-for-custom-emails
I discovered some things this weekend that I didn't know existed but I love:
--Google calendar sync. Awesome. If u included phone number in the sync and enabled reminders I would get a notification on my phone when they arrive, open it and with 1 click call my guest and welcome them.
---Wizard for integrating queries from different sites. AWESOME. Now I have everything in one place.
--Refunds. Worked perfectly and sent a professional email confirming to guest
--Third party notifications. Cool and simple
Looking forward to new features!
