Holiday Rental

Features which can be used on a property rental website

Why You Need a Website

The Goal

Perhaps you already advertise your holiday rental property via one, or several of the online platforms. Ideally you should also have your own website where you can not only showcase your property with unlimited restrictions but also allow direct bookings. Your guests and your business will benefit by avoiding the ever increasing advertiser fees.

Making a website these days is easy, in fact so easy that anyone with almost no skills can have a site online in a matter of hours. Platforms exist where you simply drag and drop your images and type in your text. For some talented and patient people, this may be successful but for most of us, there’s a huge learning curve and the results are likely to look so amateurish that the website could in fact lose clients, scared away by a seemingly cheapskate approach to your marketing.

Before commencing a website project, you should have at your disposal a large collection of photos and details of your property. If you only have a mobile phone to take pictures, consider hiring a photographer or ask a friend who’s into photography. The photographs are critical to your website success.

The goal of having your own website is to attract direct bookings and provide yourself a platform where you can host your own content. Show some videos, information on things to do in the area, a blog. Your website content is only limited by your imagination and time.

Essential Features

The Content

There is no optimal design for a vacation rental website so you are free to explore an infinite number of possibilities. Whatever design you end up using, there are however a few key elements you should always consider.

What are you offering?

Your home page should tell you visitor exactly what you are offering. There’s nothing more annoying than have to dig into a website to find where the property is located or how many bedrooms it has.

How much does it cost?

After years of viewing website statistics it comes as no real surprise that the first thing most visitors want to know is the price. If it’s outside their budget, then there no point wasting their time any further. May your rates easy to find and avoid scaring away potential renters by asking them to “enquire for price”.

Details of the property

Make sure you have photos of every room as well as the exterior. Your visitors are trying to piece together an image of what it will be like staying there

When is it available?

Any potential guest visiting your website wants to know instantly if the properly is available. However, many owners believe that a visitor will contact them for this information. Put yourselves in their shoes. Would you be happy spending hours searching for suitable accommodation and emailing each and every one of them to see if you desired dates are available? If I find a website with no calendar, I hit the back button and go and look for something else. Make sure your website contains a calendar or other means of showing which dates are free.

Where is it exactly?

As with availability, some owners refuse to provide details of where their property is located, saying such information is a security risk.

This argument is true to some extent as burglars tend to target holiday properties when they are occupied as unsecured phones, laptops and holiday money are easy pickings. However, a burglar has easy access to 1000s of properties with occupied dates and exact locations via online listing sites and Google Maps. Restricting this information on your personal website is unlikely to deter a thief unless they've targeted your specific property and looked for your website. The money you lose by visitors leaving your website due to a lack of information could be spent on better security. You don’t need to give the exact house number or pinpoint your house to nearest meter but if I don’t know which street you’re on or how close to a main road you are, then I’m not going to make that reservation.

We therefore recommend the use of a feature such as a Google Map position.

Reassurance you are genuine

A website can be cloned in minutes and the internet is an unsafe place for many people. You may be able to save your guests 15% by booking direct but why should they trust your website?Even worse, why should they trust sending money direct to your bank account to pay for their reservation? Be sure to include information which allows you to be verified. Connections to social media or even other advertising may help. A scammer may be able to clone your website but won’t go to all the trouble of setting up other internet presences which can all be tied together. For payments offer multiple options such as credit cards so that your clients have at least some kind of protection against fraud.

Your visitors like

Knowing immediately if the property is a suitable size for their needs
If within their budget
If the available dates match their plans
To know where the property is located and how much privacy to expect
Floor plans
Contact options - some prefer email, other like to call
Mobile friendliness - More than 50% of your website visitors will be using a mobile device

Your visitors do not like

Unintuitive navigation and having to dig into your website for the key information
Having to send you a message just to know if you have dates which match their plans
Not knowing the price (unless it's luxurious and apeals to a market where price is of low concern)
Extra charges - Try and present all inclusive rates
Book now or sign up to our newsletter pop ups on the home page
Too much detail - No need to list your complete inventory. Leave out a few details to be a pleasant surprise when your guests arrive

Optional Features

A few ideas

Booking Form

Allow bookings to be made quickly and efficiently by hosting your booking form online. Guests can complete their reservation in minutes and both you and your guests will receive their booking details automatically by email. 80 €

Receipt Form

When guests make a payment, they will expect confirmation. By hosting a form online, you can quickly paste the details of your guest into the fields, select the payment that has been made and click send. Your guests (and yourself) will receive an email copy of the receipt. 80 €

Online Payments

Allow your guests to make payments through your website. We can provide you with a payment form which integrates Paypal or Stripe payments into your website. For Wordpress site function can be implemented via a plugin and for non Wordpress, using the Stripe or Paypal API.

Blog

Hosting a blog on your website is a great way of making your way up the search rankings. Post updates on your property and create articles about your region. Good quality content can increase the ranking of your website, as well as providing useful information to potential guests. 80 € setup and template articles

Reservation Procedure

How many times are you asked, “What do we need to do to reserve your property?” Let your website do the talking and give your enquirers a simple to understand pictorial guide. 40 €

Translations

We can arrange translation of your website through a 3rd party and implement your newly translated pages. 20 € /page plus translation costs

Cookie Consent

We can install a lightweight plug-in, to handle the newly introduced EU Cookie Legislation 30 €

Captcha Protected Forms

Block automated spamming attempts via your contact form by protecting it using a Captcha. We recommend the simple MathGuard Captcha or Google Captcha as it is more user friendly than most character guessing Captchas. 30 €

Password Protected Pages

Perhaps you have some information, such as bank details or how to find the property which you provide to your guests. You would ideally like to have this available online but do not want it accessible to everyone. The solution? We can simply protect these pages with a password. 40 € (free on Wordpress)