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.

I love facts and stats and on Friday The Guardian Newspaper (where I incidentally used to work) published a new South Africa country profile. No long prose, no fluffy narrative just a good old fashioned stat sandwich with a healthy topping of ‘wow, I didn’t know that’ facts to finish. You can read the full profile here but here’s just a few of my faves to be getting on with:

• Modern humans have lived here for more than 100,000 years
• Size: 470,693 square miles
• Population: 48,687,300 (24th largest in the world)
• Population mix: Africans (blacks) 79%; Europeans (whites) 9.6%; Other (11.5%)
• Average life expectancy: Male 50, Female 53
• Average number of children per mother: 2.7
• Foreign tourist visitors per year: 8,508,806 (yip, and they all need somewhere to stay)
• Media freedom index (ranked out of 173): 36

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.

I’ve been feeling a bit down of late. The seemingly constant negative reporting from overseas (particularly the UK) about increasing crime in South Africa and the impending recession (the first in South Africa for nearly 17 years). And this week we’ve had the debacle of the SA Elections with all it’s finger pointing and inevitable uncertainty for this beautiful country. However, this morning, I stumbled across an article by Graham Boynton of the Daily Telegraph in London who restored my faith in this beautiful country and the reasons why I chose it as my home. Read the article in full here and then print and stick this last paragraph next to your holiday rental calendar.

‘Over the next 12 to 18 months, British travellers are going to swarm through the Cape in the wake of rugby, cricket and football tours and, given the beauty of the place and the relative price advantages, it’s hard to see South Africa anything but full up for 2009 and 2010. So the time to book is now’.

Are you fully booked? If not, then you’re probably missing out already. Add your Cape Town and Western Cape Holiday Accommodation to onelocation.com now, there really is no time to lose.

Here’s the rather disturbing advice and Travel guidelines from the British Government for UK travelers to South Africa. You can read it in full by clicking this link. And if you’re planning on traveling to South Africa don’t be too disturbed by this advice, the government are quite rightly telling us all the bad stuff we should be aware of. (I’ve read the one for Spain and France and it’s equally disturbing!).

• There is a high level of crime, but most occurs in townships and isolated areas away from the normal tourist destinations.
• The standard of driving is variable and there are many fatal accidents.
• More than 460,000 Britons visit South Africa every year (Source: Statistics South Africa). Most visits are trouble- free. The main types of incident for which British nationals required consular assistance in South Africa in 2007 were for: replacing lost or stolen passports (over 750 cases); deaths, mainly from natural causes (over 50 cases); and dealing with arrests or detentions, for a variety of offences (17 cases). You should keep photocopies of your passport with you in a separate place to your passport.
• There is an underlying threat from terrorism. Attacks, although unlikely, could be indiscriminate, including in places frequented by expatriates and foreign travellers.
• We recommend that you obtain comprehensive travel and medical insurance before travelling. You should check any exclusions, and that your policy covers you for the activities you want to undertake.
• South Africa authorities state that officially only one blank passport page is required for entry. However, recently several visitors have been refused entry and sent back to the UK as some officials are insisting on two blank pages. We advise that you have two blank pages in your passport on arrival.

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

Did you know that over 80% of travel research is done online prior to a booking being made and that over 393 million (almost 50%) of Europeans are internet users. Compare that with just 5% in Africa and you see how crucial being web savvy and visible online really is to attracting some of the 1.7 million overseas visitors who visit the Western Cape each year.

As a holiday home owner you should consider the internet as your no.1 marketing tool. Rand for Rand it’s the cheapest form of marketing you can do. If your holiday rental accommodation doesn’t already have a website then get one, it’ll be the best few grand (quid) you’ll ever spend on your Cape Town holiday accommodation! If you need help or advice on building or upgrading your website or making it more search engine friendly then contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction.