Florida Villa Marketing – Part One

I thought it might be time to write about various aspects of marketing vacation rental properties in the Orlando area.

Its a Hard Sell
Well actually, it isn’t. When you have the opportunity to explain to potential customers the very real benefits of renting a vacation home rather than cramming everyone into one room in a resort, then they are usually convinced. The hardest part is finding someone who is going to the Orlando area in the first place!

So the hard part is actually deciding where to cast your net. The next hardest part is deciding how to seel your villa to anyone you have managed to attract! You may not be a talented salesman and you may not be available to answer the phone when it rings or to get to email enquiries.

Standing out from the crowd

Advertising your villa on the web is a favourite. But for me, its a bit like looking at a bowl of garden peas and trying to decide which one you’re going to eat! There are over 2 million web pages featuring Florida Villas alone. For Florida Vacation Rentals there are 6.5 million pages! So how do you compete? How does the vacationer wade through this ’swimming pool of peas’ and find you?? And supposing they find you, how do they know that your villa is the one for them!

Daunting – Well its not so bad really

Some people use listing sites. There are masses of them and they rank pretty well in the search engines. Some listing sites get good traffic, others very little. The problem is that some have hundreds of listings – at least we’re in our own bowl of peas now so our chances are higher! But its important to know a few things about the bowl before you sign up.

One of the most important things is the way the listing engine deals with enquiries. You see, they don’t care if the surfer books with you or not – the chances are they’ll book with someone from their site. So they cater for the needs of the surfer by allowing them to produce mass emails to all the villa owners in a particular area or for a particular type of villa. What this means is that rather than the client searching for the villa they really want, balancing the features and look of the villa against availability and price, they blast email the owners and wait for the lowest price to come back.

This is bad for owners and bad for clients too! Owners get fed up with all these emails because they usually lead to nothing. A trial over a few months in 2006 led to several hundred enquiries and no reservations. Tiring to say the least!

What Sells Villas?
There is no doubt that pictures sell. In fact, the more pictures the better as long as they are good quality. Add a Panoramic Virtual Tour and you have an edge too. There are few sites that don’t charge a premium for these services.

A good description is well worth spending time on. I don’t just mean a huge list of everything there – I mean text that really captures the imagination of your potential guest! If you’re not a great writer, ask someone you know to go through your draft and make it more reader friendly!

Anyway, that’s all for now – take a good look at your marketing and see what you can improve. I’ll be back soon with more.