How to Promote Your Vacation Home Rental
In the past, promotion of the availability of a vacation home rental was limited to a few local avenues – print advertising, flyers handed out or hung up around town, postcards left in local establishments, and word of mouth. With the advent of the Internet, a new option has been created for marketing vacation rentals. You can now promote your rental home across the globe relatively inexpensively and easily. You can create your own website or you can take advantage of listing sites that draw the traffic in for you.
In this first part of a forthcoming series of articles, you will learn the basics of how to promote a vacation rental home. Each additional installment in this series will go into more detail about marketing vacation rentals in a variety of ways.
Marketing Vacation Rentals with Individual Websites
It has become very easy for anyone to buy a domain and hosting package and promote a vacation home rental online. Plus, you don't have to know HTML or be an experienced web designer to take advantage of marketing vacation rentals in this way; there are many programs that have been created that make the creation of a slick-looking website easy. You want to make sure that your vacation home rental site looks as professional as possible and contains pictures of the inside and out as well as details about all of the amenities available. You can also include information about price and availability if you wish, or you can require that interested parties contact you for more information. And make sure that you have a way for visitors to contact you!
At its core, your vacation home rental site should serve as an online version of a glossy brochure that you might hand out to prospective renters. You will learn more about ways to create great sites for marketing vacation rentals and how to get them noticed in future articles in this series.
Vacation Home Rental Sites
Whether you want to create your own website for your vacation home rental property or just want an easy way to advertise your home, you may be interested in looking into the benefits of vacation rental websites. These sites make marketing vacation rentals easy by compiling listings of homes for rent by owners and/or companies to help bring the renters to your door. Many vacation home rental sites charge a small fee for your listing but allow you to incorporate photographs, text, and a link to your own site. These sites may also make it easy for renters to get in touch with the owners of homes. Future articles will teach you what to look for in a vacation home rental site and how to promote a vacation rental alongside the many listings that are available.
Marketing Vacation Rentals with Print Advertising – From Flyers to Newspaper Ads
While the Internet is an extremely important tool in marketing vacation rentals, traditional marketing venues still can make a difference if you are looking to attract renters. You can create flyers with pictures of your house, prices, and a list of amenities that you can post in the town where your vacation home rental is located. This is an extremely inexpensive way to get noticed, but it is important to design your flyers with eye-catching images and easy-to-read text. You can also create postcards with this information that can be mailed to local households or placed in local stores for visitors and residents to pick up.
Another option for marketing vacation rentals is to run advertisements in the classified section of any local newspaper. The downside to this is that you may wind up paying a lot for an ad that will only be seen by a limited number of people, but that same ad will be specifically targeted in the area for your vacation home rental and may get strong results.
Preparing Your Vacation Home Rental Property
No matter how you choose to go about marketing vacation rentals, you will need to have photographs of your home taken to put on the web, in the newspaper, or in a flyer. Make sure that you prepare your home so that it looks its best – that the lawn is trimmed, that the pool area is tidy, that the windows are clean, and so on. Then, take a series of pictures from several angles of the home so that a prospective renter knows exactly what he or she will find. If you can, add something to your home that will make it stand out. For example, use brightly colored curtains, or take your photograph at night. Above all, make sure to give people a reason to look more closely at what you have to offer in a vacation home rental.
Word of Mouth
The simplest and cheapest way for marketing vacation rentals is by word of mouth. Tell anyone and everyone that you have a home available. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell the people at the bank and at the grocery store. While the person you tell may not be the next person to rent your home, he or she may have a friend or relative who is in the market for a vacation home rental.
Conclusion
Above is just a small sampling of options that you have for marketing vacation rentals so that they are booked around the year. Future articles will give you more in-depth information about these options as well as additional tips and ideas about how to promote a vacation rental successfully.
About the Author
Fraser Hannah spent eight years working as a freelance television production manager and researcher before leaving to join his family's business working with the elderly. He founded Traveling2Florida.com in 2003 after purchasing his own vacation home in