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.

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

Okay so it’s been a long week [is it really only Wednesday ... oi oi oi] but this has been irritating me for about 3 years. Not in a daily ’shout at random people in the street with one pupil slightly dilated’ way, more a hmmm, why didn’t they just ‘acknowledge the problem, find a solution and move on’ sort of way. Read more