Foreign Perspectives

From about October through to March each year anyone who rents out holiday accommodation is usually innundated with offers for free trial listings from a range of listings sites around the world.

One thing that almost all of the free trial periods have in common is that they limit the facilities available on your entry as compared to the paid subscription version. Usually, that’s done by a very simple restriction: they don’t publish your website address.

The reason behind that is simple as without that website address most people will use the contact facilities on the listings site to get in touch with you and you’ll know that they’ve done that ie that the site is working for you. The downside of that is that many more people won’t bother contacting you and will instead go to other properties who do have their website listed so overall you get fewer bookings. Fair enough really as you’re not paying the site to list you at that point.

Some would say that if you get one booking enquiry that way then you should take up the paid subscription (which is usually at a discount during the trial period) but I feel that it’s better to wait for the second e-mail from a site in that the first one could just be spurious. If people find you twice on a site then that’s a good indication that the site is going to bring you business and it’s probably best to sign up on receipt of the second booking enquiry.

The only problem is that once you’ve signed up then you will no longer get the direct feedback that the site is working for you and it’s only by looking at your website stats that you’ll know if they’ve sent you any traffic at all.

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