Blog - Cape Town Holiday Accommodation - Places to Stay in South Africa

This is what I love about Cape Town and why I think surfers should be part of the environmental agency impact team from now on. All week they’ve been getting very excited about the storms about to hit Cape Town. 16-18m swell, 70km/h North Easterly winds (or was it South Westerly .. not sure) and high spring-tide, which all makes for some pretty awesome and hectic waves to throw themselves off and into in the coming days. Read more

I’ve been asked a few times about the best places to stay in Cape Town for the World Cup 2010 so I thought I’d share my local knowledge to help ‘newbie’ visitors find the perfect place. I’ll base this on 3 factors: Cost of accommodation, Proximity to the World Cup stadium and Style (is it a cool place with good restaurants, bars and nightlife). The World Cup stadium itself is in Greenpoint which is very central to everything cool and stylish that Cape Town has to offer. There will also be fan parks in Bellville (Northern Suburbs), Athlone (Southern Suburbs) and in front of City Hall (City Bowl). Read more

Holiday Home Owners don’t use the internet. Yesterday’s blog piece ‘You’re not selling a washing machine’ eluded to that fact and then writing ‘The Ultimate Holiday Home Owners Marketing Guide’ just confirmed my suspicions. The World’s No.1 marketing tool, which I dare say brings in more bookings and enquiries than all the other marketing combined, is a Pandorra’s box of wizardry that only bespectacled nerds know how to use. Proof of this fact has been landing in my inbox all month. A recent owner, we’ll call them MrX, wrote and saved their establishment description in MS Word and was very disgruntled that our website wasn’t able to see this document, suck out the contents, re-format and insert it into their listing and post it live on the site using cosmic interwebby magic. “Surely your site can do that, I thought it was supposed to be clever” … hmmm!

So my advice to all holiday home owners who want to get ahead in the holiday rental game is LEARN TO USE THE INTERNET. Spend 15-30 minutes each day surfing, joining, uploading and viewing. Do this for a couple of weeks and then see if you get it. If you do, then great … you’re on the way to increasing your bookings … if not, then increase the time to 30-45 mins. Keep increasing the time until you have palpatations if you haven’t switched on your machine for a day or so. This is called Online Oxygen Starvation and is roughly the state we’d like you to achieve. This is also the point at which enlightenment occurs and the wonderful world of the web opens it’s doors and lets you in. Happy surfing!

Having trawled through literally hundreds (maybe thousands) of Holiday Accommodation details I’m still bemused to find that owners think that advertising their holiday rental accommodation is similar to advertising a washing machine on Ebay. The recipe goes like this; add a few photos taken with their mobile phone, write a small ’sellers description’ and then post it on as many random (and hopefully free) sites as they can hoping for someone to ‘make them an offer’.

I even encountered a very proud owner who rejoiced in the fact he hadn’t updated his website in 10 years and that guests were ‘amazed’ at how much better the establishment was in real-life. This is the same as buying an old Toyota on Ebay and pitching up to collect it to find you actually bought a New Mercedes Benz. Yes, you’d be surprised too!

The holiday rental marketplace is crowded, particularly in Cape Town, and competition is fierce. The only way you will be successful is by being smart and being ‘better’ than the person next door. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be offering tips and advice for getting you to the top of the tree and in turn increase your enquiries and bookings. It’s not rocket science and we won’t be asking you to learn anything new, we’ll just be pointing you in the right direction to kick-start your business and move it into the 21st Century. Stay tuned or even better sign-up to receive our updates in your inbox, that way you won’t miss a trick.