Escapia Blog - Vacation Rental News and Trends

Blogging VRMA: TripAdvisor on Vacation Rentals

by Bill Furlong, CEO

One of the biggest developments in the vacation rental industry in the past year has been TripAdvisor's commitment to the category.  With tab-level visibility for vacation rentals, home page promotions on TripAdvisor and creative approaches like their hotel/vacation rental price comparison tool, TripAdvisor is making a clear commitment to the category.

TripAdvisor's CEO, Stephen Kaufer, gave a talk at VRMA on TripAdvisor and their approach to the category.  Much of the presentation was focused on TripAdvisor itself; though there was some interesting information about how they see the challenges and opportunity in the category:

...TripAdvisor's overall focus in the category
- TripAdvisor is here to grow the vacation rental market by putting it in front of the millions of hotel eyeballs that they have already on their site.
- They want to bring the TripAdvisor reputation for trust and transparency to VRs.
- They want to remove the reasons why people don't try vacation rentals.

...Their perception of vacation rental challenges
- Awareness: only 10% of people have stayed in a VR.  TripAdvisor is addressing that by introducing vacation homes and giving them a high level of visibility.
- Confidence: TripAdvisor are facilitating guest reviews.  Photos are key; their stats suggest that more photos mean more bookings.  20+ photos lead to a 150% increase in inquiries.
- Trust in owner/manager:  37% are worried that they won't have an emergency contact.  TripAdvisor survey suggests that people will pay more for the reliabity that comes with professional management; of 177 people surveyed, 53% would rent from a PM even if it may cost more, 47% said they prefer to rent from an owner because it may cost less.

...TripAdvisor is helping differentiate VR managers from RBOs.
- TripAdvisor clearly labels a listing as being from a "certified owner" or a professional manager.
- The manager has an opportunity to present their brand, provide aggregate rating information, describe their company and have a link to their site.

...Repeat travel is huge
- 24% have stayed in a vacation home 10+ times.
- 14% stay in the same vacation rental property every year.

...Family focus is big
- 66% stayed in a vacation home because they can sleep more people
- 64% like having a kitchen for cooking meals.
- 60% like having more hang-out space.

Blogging VRMA: 25 Top Web Sites for VR Managers

By Bill Furlong, CEO

Trent Blizzard, founder of Blizzard Internet Marketing, presented his list of 25 Web sites that every VR manager should know.  Trent's presentations are always lively and packed with info.  And best of all, they are very practical with some tips and/or sites that present opportuunities for VR managers to improve their online marketing.

Oh, and if you're counting you might note that Trent admitted that he fell a couple sites short of the 25.  But there should be more than enough below to keep you busy.

According to Trent, links drive 66% of Google's search results.  Metatags drive 0% of Google today (still drive Yahoo search results, but Yahoo search will switch to Microsoft's Bing under the recent deal between the two companies).

Social Networking faves:
- Facebook: Good for search engine results saturation.  But you can waste a lot of time.  A lot of people are doing it wrong.
- Twitter: All about last minute stuff.
- Linked In: All about your business.  About business networking and not guests and bookings.

SEO Faves:
- DMOZ.org: submit your self
- PRWeb: for distributing press releases.
- Best of the Web:  Nice listing and link that helps in search engines ("SE"s)

User Gen Content faves:
- Flickr: upload your pictures.
- YouTube: Second biggest search engine in the world.  50/50 split in the audience of how many managers are using videos on their web site.  Consider Wistia.com for hosting videos.  More customizable if you are putting it on your site.  Tubemogul.com will push videos out to multiple sites at once (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)
- CommunityWalk:  Create maps.  Good for search engines.  Especially local SEs.
- Google MyMaps:  Ditto above.
- Google Earth (keyhole):  Ditto above.

>> Tip:  Put full contact info with address and phone not just link.

Review Faves:
- FlipKey
- Yelp
- Judy's Book
- Google Local:  Take ownership of your listing on Google Local

>> Tip:  Try and get reviews in a lot of different places.

Yahoo Faves:
- Travel.yahoo.com
- Local.yahoo.com
- Yahoo Biz Directory: $299/year

>> Spending 10-20 hours can pay off.  Sites are below the radar for a lot of people, so you can do well.

VRM Faves:
- Postlets: Upload homes.  RE and VR site.  Very time consuming to upload by hand.  Free.
- Besttraveldeals.net:  Helps Google page rank as well as passing traffic.  Completely free.

Learn to Fish!
- SEMRush: Most exciting tool on Internet.  Searches Internet phrases and what keywords you rank for.
- Yahoo Site Explore: Top links to your site or your competitors'.
- SEOMoz Juicy Link Finder:  Fee-based tool.  Rich tool set. 

Blogging VRMA: Measuring Online Success

by Kris Lande, Product Marketing Manager

At this year's VRMA show in Washington DC, I got the chance to attend some great educational sessions throughout the week.  One of my favorite sessions was "Measuring Online Success: Following the Metrics the Matter" presented by Mark Randle and Rebecca Lundregan of Visual Data Systems.



In the session Mark and Rebecca discussed how to measure your company's website success by looking at the nine metrics that they feel matter the most.  Here is a rundown of the metrics that matter according to the presenters:

1. Average Time on Site: What is the total time for all visits when divided by the total number of visits?

2.  Average Pages per Visit: What is the total page views divided by the total number of visits?

3. Bounce Rate:  Bounce rate represents the percentage of initial visitors to your website who see a single page and immediately leave to a different site. Also known as 'hit and run' visits, and not to be confused with 'exit rate.'

4.  Exit Percentage: This is the percentage of visitors leaving your website from a particular page.

5. New Visits vs. Returning Visits:  This shows you data for new visitors compared to returning visitors and is determined by a tracking code and not by an IP address. 

6. Goal Conversions:  Setting up goals on your site is a great way to measure if your visitors are navigating through your site as you'd like them to.  An example of goals to set up would be getting visitors to a 'contact us' page, the booking page or the 'email a friend' page. 

7.  Paid Traffic vs. Organic Traffic: This is the overall visits brought to your site by either your SEM (search engine marketing) pay-per-click efforts versus the traffic brought to your site by SEO (search engine optimization) organic efforts. 

8.  Map Overlay:  The map overlay is a great way to see where your website visitors are coming from by geographic area.

9. Google Custom Search Statistics: Google Custom Search creates a customized web search on your site with results from your website pages.

Blogging VRMA: Consumer Travel Trends

by Bill Furlong, CEO

Peter Yesawich, President and CEO of the Ypartnership, the PR agency used by the VRMA,  gave a very informative and entertaining presentation on how the consumer travel landscape is changing.  The following were his main points:

...Travel is down from the peak
- 55% of households took 1 trip/year75 miles or more from home.
- That number has dropped from a peak of 66% in 1999 and 63% as recently as 2007.
...the Web is the dominant way people are planning travel
- % of households with web access has increased from 11% in 1996 to 80% in 2008 and 2/3 of that access is high-speed.

How do people plan and purchase travel:
- 61% use the Internet exclusively
- 24% use a travel agent and the internet
- 7% use a travel agent
- 8% use neither
(sample base is leisure travelers using airlines and hotels in 2009)

- % of people using the web was 53% of people in 2002.  That number has increased to 66% by 2009.

...and the % of people using the Web to book travel is also a majority
- 35% used the Web to book travel in 2002.  56% of people used the web to book by 2009.  BUT, the % using the web to book has been flat from 2007-2009.

... what do people think is important on a Web site
- 87% lowest fares and rates
- 74% easy booking
- 72% photos
- 46% user reviews

...the next generation of search is meta-search sites like Kayak that search a large number of travel sites for rates, availability and more and let people compare
- only 5% of travelers use meta-search today.

...Meta-search powered price shopping will make it more important to build equity into a brand
- But consumers today care less and less about the brand. 
- A survey asked people when they fly whether they prefer to use a legacy carrier that they have used before, a low fare carrier or had no preference.  21% said a legacy carrier; 29% said the lowfare carrier; 50% said they had no preference.  So half of consumers didn't care about the airline brand.
- A survey asked people how important the lodging brand name was.  57% said the brand name was very or extremely important in 2006.  That number has dropped to 44% in 2009.  So brand importance is dropping for hotels.

... blogs and advisory/review sites are increasingly important.
- 19% use blogs and advisory sites today to plan travel.
- 1/3 of next generation, younger travelers use them.
- What do they use?  42% use YouTube, 33% use Facebook, 30% use MySpace, 27% use TripAdvisor.

Google Internal Study on Search Engines and Travel

by Bill Furlong, CEO

Ever wonder what people at Google think about search engines and travel?  Today, TechCrunch reported on a 2005 study from Google analyzing how search engines impact consumer decisions in a number of categories including travel.

Keep in mind that this study is from 2005 -- four years ago.  And, as you'd expect, it skews towards airlines and hotels.  But it is packed with info that might well be helpful for vacation rental managers thinking through whether to invest in search advertising.  And since it is an internal Google document, the information is not directed to selling online ads as much as internal decision-making.

Use of Online for Travel Information and Purchasing -

Google Places and Search 3.0

By Bill Furlong, CEO

A few weeks ago, I wrote here about the battle for Search 3.0 -- the phase of search where the underlying content itself on the search engines gets rich, detailed and structured for filtering.

Last week, Google launched Google Places -- an enhancement to Google Maps that fits squarely into the Search 3.0 strategy.  In their own words... "A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.  By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world."  Could those places also mean vacation rental homes?  I think so.

In fact, type in Seattle real estate into Google, check the box for "rentals" and you get the following:

Yes, each of those little dots is a place to rent in Seattle.  But with Google Places, they've now taken one step further.  Click on the "more info" link next to the listing on the left and you get the following:

It may not be pretty (Google rarely is), but that sure looks like a rental listing to me.  As you can imagine, this has big implications for vacation rental managers and vacation rental directories alike.  For managers, having the richest, most accurate data in Google's data source will be critical.  And for vacation rental directories, the question is whether there is value in vertical search if Google covers the category with a Place page.

Of course, what also matters is how much visibility Google gives to this within Google.  And that is also becoming a controversial question as this post from TechCruch indicates.  When Google had Google Base, the content gained little visibility from web serches and thus little value to those who listed.  Time will tell whether Places takes a different path. 

Bing.com - From Search Engines to Decision Engines

By Steve Murch, Escapia Chairman


In 2006, I delivered a keynote presentation at the VRMA annual conference that included several predictions for the future.  One of the first on the list was that Search Engines would evolve beyond serving up 10 blue links to structuring the search and delivering answers.

Bing.com, from Microsoft, went live on June 1.  While it took a little longer than I predicted to get to this milestone, I believe continued structuring of the search experience is inevitable and benefits consumers, suppliers (and in turn Escapia) greatly.  Bing's launch will necessitate competitive responses from Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines, and their response will in turn garner a response from Microsoft, each trying to outdo the other in helping consumers make decisions. Over a period of the next few years, this competitive dynamic will meaningfully shift the search experience on the Internet and have profound long-term impacts. 

Bing.com represents the beginning of a gradual but major shift, where results can be filtered and displayed before handing off to third parties. 

Here’s a commercial that gets at the change:

Let’s look at the way people search for vacation rentals today.  If you’re looking for a Maui vacation rental, chances are, you’re going to start by launching your browser, and Googling “Maui vacation rental”, “Kihei vacation rental”, etc. 

But here’s the thing.  You’re probably very uninterested in seeing any Maui vacation rental option that won’t work for you. 

This may include:

• Spots that are already booked for the dates you want to go
• Those that aren’t in your price range
• Those that don’t have any photos
• Those that aren’t in the specific neighborhood or location you want
• Those that don’t have the bedroom configuration or amenities you want
• etc.

You don’t want to waste time firing off dozens of emails to property managers asking questions, and then wading through the results.  Chances are pretty good you want to narrow your search down to just those that are right for you.  Should you really have to waste time wading through all those bad results to get to the one you want? 

The search engine that doesn’t waste your time is the one you’ll continue to go back to.

Bill Gates has described it this way:  “The future of search is in verbs, not nouns”.  In other words, he’s saying that when you go to a search engine, it’s usually because you’re trying to do something.  Like decide on which car is best for you.  Or what to cook with leftover chicken.  Or decide where to go on vacation.  Or find the best vacation rental that meets your desires and constraints.  Perhaps the two biggest constraints in vacation lodging decisionmaking are dates of availability and pricing.  These are items that, in the professional property manager world, reside only on the backoffice system; going any other place for this information with most systems can result in an answer that is wildly wrong.

For the consumer, the pages and pages of blue links are just a means to an end. 

The question Microsoft now poses is:  What if that end could be more quickly surfaced for you?  Don’t believe Google’s feigned indifference here.  Google and Yahoo! as they exist today in 2009 will continue to change, and get closer to delivering answers and insight for those trying to make decisions.

In the lodging segment, I see this eventually evolving as search engines actually placing availability filters and structured filters right on the search page, and then (optionally or not) showing you the search results in condensed form before handing you off to third parties.  You’re starting to see this with Bing Travel. 

For instance, try a hotel search for Las Vegas, and here’s what you get before you even leave Bing.com:

Let’s apply that to vacation rentals.

What is required for search engines to answer the availability question right on the search page?  Well, for starters, it requires accurate answers to the query posed. 

Therefore, it requires that it can connect into platforms that provide availability, pricing, and amenity information.  Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! don’t want to be in the business of writing to multiple third party platforms or kludgy screen-scrapers to get this data – they’ll want a standard.  (I think it’ll eventually evolve as an adoption of an Open Travel Alliance (OTA) or some other industry XML standard, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)

At Escapia, we’re committed to supplying that electronic pipeline, and advocating for this kind of change at the major search decision engines. 

Regardless of how it happens, it’s a future that’s great for consumers and property managers alike.  Onward!

Twitterpated!

By Kris Lande, Product Marketing Manager

The Urban Dictionary defines the word 'twitterpated' as "being completely enamored with someone/something."  You might recall from a popular Walt Disney cartoon, when Bambi learns from the wise old owl that springtime makes everyone get 'twitterpated.' That said, I am officially 'twitterpated' for Twitter, the social networking service that lets you micro-blog your thoughts and updates 140 characters at a time.  And I'm not the only one - Twitter is everywhere lately.  It seems to be all the rage on the Today Show, Fox News, CNN, the John Stewart Show...and the list goes on and on. 

I've 'tweeted' (aka: used Twitter) personally for about a year, and recently ventured into tweeting for Escapia.  I've been pleasantly surprised and impressed with all the great networking and the instant circle of vacation rental industry tweeters I've been able to connect with.  So many companies in the industry are tweeting, it is great to see everyone's updates and links to great and valuable vacation rental industry information. 

The other day I attended a webinar hosted by Blizzard Internet and Resortquest on 'Marketing Vacation Rentals on Twitter.'  It was a terrific opportunity to learn more about how vacation rental managers are using Twitter to market their rentals by promoting specials and engaging their audience.  I've also been reading many articles on using Twitter effectively.  Based on what I've learned over the past few weeks as I've started tweeting, here are some Twitter tips I'd like to share with you:

1. Follow interesting people/companies: I've began 'following' a lot Twitterers I find interesting (ex. vacation rental directories/companies, social media experts, etc.). By following them I've already been introduced to lots of interesting articles, studies and tips/tricks that they've posted.

2.  Follow interesting people/companies: Okay, yes I realize this was also #1.  But another reason to follow interesting people is that by following them, they may in turn follow you - getting your updates in front of them.  Great exposure for you!

3. Share a mix of information with your Twitter community: I view Twitter as a great place to not only feature blog posts and company updates, but also to share your company's personality.  Many companies on Twitter only tweet 'new blog posts.'  While sharing blog posts on Twitter is great, I encourage you to share more - such as what you're doing, what you're reading, and what you're working on.  I've enjoyed putting 'fun' company pictures and updates on Twitter as well.  The key is to be personable, yet professional.

4. Engage your Twitter following: Watch the conversations happen on Twitter, and chime in to respond and help as needed.  For example, if you see someone tweet "looking for a vacation rental for 10 people somewhere along the California coast in June," engage with that person if you can point them in the right direction. By the way, below is an actual tweet I saw, and there are tweets like this all the time - potential customers for YOU!

 

5. Use Twitter tools to make it easier on yourself: Twitter can be addicting and a time-suck, so use tools available to make posting, following and searching easier.  I came across a great list of '10 Twitter tools that help you work smarter' - check it out.  These tools can help you integrate your blog, search for keywords, create auto-updates, and broadcast your tweets to your other networks such as Facebook. 

You're feeling a little twitterpated now too aren't you?  If your company is not yet on Twitter, you should definitely see what it's all about. Twitter can be another way to create your own online community to engage, interact and share your company's information.  There are lots of vacationers on Twitter looking for that great rental!

Oh, when you're there be sure to follow us. :)

Here's a Tasty Idea

By Bill Furlong, CEO

Many of you in the vacation rental business know Escapia's Chairman, Steve Murch.  Steve was one of the early pioneers of the online vacation rental world when he built VacationSpot.com.  His interest in vacation rentals has continued for over a decade now as he continues to provide terrific guidance for us at Escapia.

Steve's latest brilliant creation has been BigOven.com.  The product of many years of work, BigOven is a destination packed with cooking advice, recipes and a rich community of foodies.  Clearly, Steve is onto something since BigOven is ranked as the seventh most frequently visited web site from a Seattle startup -- and as many of you know, we pride ourselves for having a vibrant online startup community here in Seattle.

Steve just did a big redesign and update to BigOven.  One of the things he added not long ago was a way for BigOven users to create custom recipe books from their favorites on BigOven or their own personal favorite recipes.

So here's an idea.  Vacation rental guests love having access to a kitchen where they can cook a dinner for themselves.  So how about including in your vacation homes a cookbook with recipes that are typical of your area.  How easy is it?  Well, a search on BigOven of Hawaiian recipes brings up 221 to choose from; "Cajun" delivers 430 results.  And to make it even easier, BigOven offers a custom publishing tool where you can create a custom cookbook in just a few clicks.

Fun with Word Clouds

By Kris Lande, Product Marketing Manager

I came across a blog post from one of our website development partners, Blizzard Internet, on creating word clouds with Wordle.  Word clouds are visual depictions of tags or word content on a website.  In other words (ha!) it is a way to create a visual of weighted word frequency in a given text.

Wordle is a self-proclaimed 'toy' for creating fun and artistic word clouds of whatever content you choose (such as your website, blog, etc.).  Of course when I read the word 'toy' I had to try for myself!  I created 'wordles' for the Escapia site homepage, as well as for a client's homepage...

Escapia Homepage Wordle:

Client Wordle:

It is fun to see the words used most frequently in your content - what a great way to visualize your most important keywords! Check it out - and try it out on your website or blog.