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

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.

If there’s one area you should NEVER skimp on with your holiday rental accommodation it’s the photographs. Why? Because holidaymakers scan properties on sites, they NEVER read what you’ve written until you’ve given them a reason to read it. AND the reason they read it is because they like what they see. Think of it like dating, you walk into a bar and are confronted by hundreds of potential matches, but which ones do you engage with? You engage with the ones that catch your eye and push your buttons. The same goes with holiday accommodation. You only view the ones you like the look of. So get a professional to take some killer shots of your rental accommodation and then use them everywhere. I guarantee you’ll have more enquiries and more interest as a result and the cost of getting them in the first place will soon be swallowed up in the avalanche of increased bookings.

Twitter is cool. Twitter is addictive. But most of all Twitter is a simple way to tell people (those who might be interested) about your Holiday Rental Accommodation. Twitter is a free micro-blogging tool which, unlike conventional blogs, has a character count of 140 characters per entry. Each entry is called a ‘Tweet’. It’s a bit like sms’ing to the masses. And when we say masses we’re talking a lot of people. It’s estimated that Twitter has around 6 million users per month posting in excess of 55 million tweets. The way it works is you follow people your are interested in and then people follow you if they are interested in what you Tweet about. There’s loads of beginners guides but here’s one I found recently which seemed to sum up what it was all about and how to get started Twitter for beginners

By the way celebs also use Twitter. My fave is @stephenfry and the top Twitter is Ashton Kutcher who has, at the time of writing, 1,381,762 followers!

Please also join Steve Villiers, CEO of onelocation and Holiday Rental Accommodation expert blogger for live updates, news, special offers and general advice @onelocation

Often the last thing you want to do when you get a booking is update your availability calendar on the plethora of sites your accommodation is listed on. However a few minutes spent doing this could be the difference between a booking and not being seen. Here’s why it’s so important:

1. It increases your search result ranking. Most Holiday Accommodation sites list their most recently updated properties near the top of the search results. The reason for this is obvious. If you regularly look after and maintain your availability calendar and listing then the more chance is that the holidaymaker will get an accurate insight into what you’re offering. Sites like onelocation.com also tell holidaymakers when your calendar was last updated so they know that the information is accurate.
2. You will appear in date specific searches. Some date searches ONLY display accommodation where the calendar is marked as available. If you leave your calendar blank or only partially filled it means you could be missing out on all the date specific searches by holidaymakers. And believe it or not this is possibly the most popular filter used by holidaymakers because it saves them time looking at suitable holiday accommodation only to find they are fully booked.

Keeping your availability up-to-date shouldn’t be a chore and is a vital part of any successful holiday accommodation marketing strategy. If you find it difficult to keep track of all your sites then get a white board, or a spread sheet. List them all (with login details if necessary) and whether they have an online availability calendar or not. Whenever you take a booking go through the list and amend your listings. 10 minutes spent doing this will keep you ahead of the game and more importantly the competition.

Tags: increase bookings, Marketing tips, Online availability
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How do you fill those annoying gaps in your calendar or those last minute cancellations? Here’s 3 simple ways that literally take minutes and won’t cost you a penny.

1. Add a late deal listing to onelocation.com
   As an owner you get these for FREE. Just enter the dates, the price reduction and click submit and your late deal will be live on the homepage within minutes. You’ll also appear higher in the search results and on the Late Deals page. We also mention your late deal on Twitter and Facebook.
2. Place an ad on Gumtree
   This is a super-quick way to get your availability out there. It’s free and only takes a couple of minutes.
3. Send an email to old customers
   You should have details (email addresses) of old clients. Why not drop them a quick email informing them of late availability. Not only does it keep your accommodation in their minds but it also spreads the word to other people who may be looking.

Tags: increase bookings, Late deals
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As I was driving back yesterday from the Coke Zero Fest I started thinking about the difference between the two headline acts and why one outshone the other. Oasis vs Snow Patrol. I’m a big fan of Oasis, have been for years where-as Snow Patrol I’ve never really listened to. Not my cup of tea, a bit MOR (Middle of the Road) for my liking. So the odds were stacked heavily in Oasis’s favour even before we began. Read more

We’ve all done it. Been to the estate agents, given them our details and taken home a whole bunch of leaflets and sales particulars of potential properties. A couple of A4 sheets with room sizes, features and a short line of prose telling us that this is a very exclusive sought after property in one the best streets in Town. We then sit at the kitchen table and narrow them down to the ones we want to view. Then with sales particulars in hand we visit the properties only to find that pinocchio had a hand in writing them … hmmm. Read more

You looked at the location, bought the house, villa or guesthouse, decorated it, bought the furniture invested in satellite TV and upgraded the swimming pool. But how many of you know you’re accommodation as well as you think you do? Have you ever stayed as a paying guest? Have you ever opened the fridge after an 11-hour flight with children to find nothing in there. Have you tried to figure out how the pool pump works so that it doesn’t come on in the middle of the night? Read more

Yesterday Bullet for my Valentine pulled out of the Zero Coke Fest citing studio commitments as the reason. Zero Coke Fest is an annual rock festival in Cape Town and Joburg hosting some the world’s biggest bands, this year Oasis and Snow Patrol are the headle acts. Tickets for the event are around R600 for the Golden Circle (the mosh pit area!). So the point is that hundreds of Bullet for my valentine fans have scrimped, saved and borrowed to get a ticket to see their idols up close and personal. They’ve committed their time and money to support them and now they’ve been jilted at the altar. Ask any one of those fans whether they would rather the boys spend the day in the studio so they could hear the new album 1 day earlier or share a day of excess and loud live  music with their loyal fans and guess what the answer would be? Read more