Free B&B / self-catering listings sites
February 11th, 2007 | 
Author: Just before the peak season last year we thought that we’d try a mailshot to promote our listings sites and fired off a few hundred e-mails.We offer a listing broadly comparable to that from sites that charge around £100 and up and attract a reasonable number of bookings for those listed too which isn’t surprising as we get around 1500 visitors to the site per day at the moment, more than several sites charging around £50 get. However, the word “free” actually put people off and we even received a number of e-mails accusing of being behind some dasterdly and dishonest scheme.So we added an option of paying £29.
Net effect? Well, our take-up on the mailings this time is getting on for 5% (vs 1% on the trial). Funnily enough we haven’t had anyone actually pay the £29 which is OK because we’d prefer that they didn’t but it seems that putting a value on it is enough to persuade people to put their time into adding their information to our listings.
We’re going to stick with the current e-mail and £29 for the remainder of this batch of mailings but are thinking that perhaps we should put the notional charge up to £59 as persumably that would mean the site was twice as valuable and therefore might attract more people. That might sound slightly illogical but it appears to be the way people value a listing. Our notional competitors is a site which we had the chance to buy early last year but didn’t as we couldn’t really put a value on it. Interestingly at the moment, the new owner is firing out e-mails several times per month trumpeting that he has the fastest growing listings site around. That’s probably true, but unfortunately for him almost all of that growth is through his offer of 6 months free. We’ve just recently taken him up on it ourselves but only because it’s free and don’t expect to renew when the offer runs out which is probably the thinking of 99% of people that he’s picked up lately.
We had the benefit of seeing some of the figures behind the site in the course of our negotiations with the former owner and feel fairly confident that the new guy will go bankrupt if he gets a renewal rate from the free offer of anything below 30% or so yet the typical rate is more like 5% which equates to the people who actually get bookings from the site over the free period.
Compared to charging sites, ours naturally have a 100% renewal rate in that once people go on, their membership doesn’t expire. A typical small commercial site has a renewal rate of more like 70% so they have to replace the 30% that they lose each year with new entries. We’re actually growing faster than that and will probably finish this mailshot with around 300+ entries vs 100 or so this time last year.
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Yes it is strange that your service being free put people off. Perhaps if you explain why the service is free, that might reassure potential listers. I am bit curious my myself why you would rather that they didn’t pay you £29 or £59 to be added to your database?
In part of the trial I did try to explain why it was free but one person seemed all set to report me to the police because I was “obviously” fronting some massive fraud involving the collection of property details. Don’t know what planet he was from but since his property is already advertising elsewhere (on sites from £100 to £500/year) and all his info is therefore publically available it does seem somewhat peculiar reasoning.
It’s free as a consequence of its origins. It grew out of a suggestion way back in February 2005 on the Living France forum (http://www.completefrance.com/cs/forums/525433/ShowPost.aspx) that the property owners themselves could do better than the generally naff B&B listing sites that were around at that time. We liked the idea of it being free but didn’t like what happened to the free sites after a year or two with free listing sites ie that they fell into disuse, became dated and ill-maintained. Hence, the ads which support the hosting of the sites, development, etc.
What we hadn’t allowed for was the gite-owners who are a very suspicious bunch of people and turned out to be very suspicious of anything that was free.
Broadly speaking the sites are intended to be around the quality of a site that would normally charge around £50 to £100 per year. Therefore I’m thinking that were our notional charge closer to that price range then there’d be less suspicion from the gite people. In effect they’d be getting a £59 site for £59 albeit with effectively an open-ended free trial period (which they’re very keen on).
Very interesting! We actually received a discount to renew one of our B&B ads. Maybe they’re catching on to the loss of business otherwise?
I think that it’s the case that you can normally get a discount on the B&B adverts as most of the sites are actually aimed at self-catering which has, of course, a much higher price tag and needs many fewer responses to pay for the advert.
Having said that, a number of the self-catering listings sites don’t appreciate the different pricing structure and so rule themselves out of the B&B market yet which seems like shooting oneself in the foot given that, overall, B&B properties obviously make a whole lot more money per room per week than a comparable self-catering place would do. Snag is that the B&B needs up to 7 times the number of bookings to pull in that cash.