Foreign Perspectives

Usually the guests thin out a little by this time of year but we’re getting something of a return towards full occupancy for the next few weeks this year.

How come? Well, one key aspect of it is a series of upgrades and promotions that we made to the accommodation website over the last year which have together had the effect that we get a great deal more ownsite bookings than we did previously.

Also, some of the sites that we’re listed with have clearly been beavering away with their own promotion activities. One notable groups of sites in this regard is activehotels.com which was bought by booking.com last year resulting in a very substantial jump in the number of reservations from the combined group and they in turn were bought by priceline.com in the last 12 months or so which has resulted in us being listed on an even larger group of sites and thereby bumped up the reservations yet again.

What’s the strategy for the coming year though?

As usual, we’ll be reviewing the website as there’s always something that can be improved or even simply updated. Beyond that, I’ve built up something of a backlog of sites that we could be listed on so I’ll be working through those from October onwards.

On ‘tother side of the fence so to speak, we have a number of developments on the listing sites pencilled in. They too were considerably more successful over the past year than they had been previously again due to a series of site promotion exercises and some site improvements. We’re moving the focus to our new-generation sites this year of which the key development engine will probably be Whole Earth Guide although as that uses the template of the other new-generation sites, all those in that group will be affected.

Quite noticeable already is that Whole Earth already has over 700 incoming links despite only being around for just over a month. Once we start promotion of it properly, that number should jump quite dramatically and so too should the number of site visitors.