To add to our constantly growing range of quality holiday rental property, we have now added 800 properties from Rent Villas France.

Rent Villas France are an agent with properties available in several regions of France, including Provence, Riviera, Languedoc Roussillon, Midi-Pyrénées, Aquitaine, Poitou-Charente, Val de Loire and Pays de la Loire, Brittany and Normandy.

Rent-villas-France guarantees you the quality of the property they offer.

They have local teams that carry out regular quality controls of the properties that they offer for rental.

To see an example of their excellent holiday rentals throughout France, Click Here.

Every day the iphone seems to be building more momentum, with applications that allow you to search property listings starting to appear. The question is, would you ever use a mobile telephone to search for a holiday rental?

We had a quick brain storm here and we came up with the following pros and cons of having such a service:

Pros

- You can search for your holiday rental when you are sat on the train/bus or on lunch at work.

- If you find yourself stuck away from home, rather than pay top price for a few days in a hotel we could show you local holiday rentals with availability. We could even direct you there using the iPhone inbuilt GPS.

Cons

- The small screen makes means the images are a bit smaller.

- With lots of images available you would need a decent 3g/WAN connection to download all of the detail quickly and easily.

- You might just wait until you are at your PC to look for holiday homes to rent.

Personally, I love my iPhone and couldn’t live without it now (although may be forced to if I drop it again!). Question is, would you use your iPhone or other mobile device to search for holiday rentals?

As you may know, Direct Holiday Bookings came about as I am a holiday home owner and wanted to get more bookings for less money (sounds easy doesn’t it!).

I list several of my own properties in Florida and let them take their chances along side all of the other adverts. However yesterday I noticed something quite remarkable.

I had recently let one of my 4 bed properties and asked the renter to leave a review. I didn’t think any more about it.

Then two days ago I had 4 booking requests within around 3 hours. Turns out the renter had left a review and my team had approved it. All approved reviews are shown on our homepage, giving one of my properties massive exposure. With the addition of the review my property was in demand.

So if you want some great homepage exposure while reassuring your customers of the quality of your property, I would strongly suggest you ask your renters to leave reviews.

To leave a review just view your property page and a short way down on the right hand side is a link (in red) that says “write your review”.

Here’s this weeks summary of site changes and improvements.

The first important batch of changes is to improve communication channels:

• We added a “report for admin review” link to every advert. That way, if anyone spots a problem with a property advert they can alert us and we will review it.
• We added a “dissatisfied?  help us improve” link to every main page, so anyone who has been anything but fully satisfied by our service can let us know. We will read every report and take your feedback VERY seriously

We really want to hear from you, good or bad, so please use these tools to let us know how you find our site.

Other changes:

• From next week we are saying goodbye to the adverts from Hertz and The AA. We trialled them for the last 4 weeks and feedback from the community has been poor. So the’re gone.
• From next week we welcome to the site “Rent Villa France” as a partner who brings a further 600 excellent properties from central France.
• From next week we are removing our Google site search and replacing it with a more user friendly search. While the Google search servers were great (and bright yellow in colour too), it just wasn’t able to supply the kind of search experience holiday makers were expecting.

As always, more improvements next week.

We all know about the economy and the woes it’s bringing to many people.

Yet the annual family holiday is one thing that we all try to protect at all cost. When you work so hard all year that we need something to look forward to.

So it’s no suprise that domestic tourism is tipped to “explode” in 2009. Staying in your own country saves the airfair for starters, but also allows you to control some of the other costs that we often get carried away with when abroad.

Tipped for the top is self catering holiday homes, which is a massive 50% cheaper for a family of 4 than a similar hotel based holiday. On top of that the kids get their own bedrooms, you get loads of space to live and you can cook as cheaply as you like.

So if you are looking for a great holiday, with loads of space thats 50% cheaper than a standard holiday, then you are in the right place.

Click here to search and see the amazing value of self catering holidays homes. Starting at £200/week we hope just about everyone can still have a great holiday in 2009.

This is the property owners release note for the code release 7th January 2009.

The following changes have been made:

• Owners emails are now delivered directly to your email. The email will appear to come from the person making the request, so you just hit reply to respond. A copy of all emails will remain in your Direct Holiday Bookings account should you ever need it.
• We now also include a link within the email to the property, making it easier for owners who have multiple properties with us.
• We have now created a section in your account admin called ‘Link back to us’. Here we supply 3 options and the code to allow you to link back to us from your website (if you have one). I would really appreciate if you would add a link. Don’t forget, you now have the ability for you to add your website to your advert.
• We have significantly improved the search functionality, making it much easier for your customers to find your property.
• We have made the process of contacting you even easier by adding the contact form directly on your advert page.
• We have added an article directory to the website. This is a place where you can write an article of around 500 words on a topic related to your property, area or country. You can then post the article and link it to your property, so anyone who reads the article is likely to view your holiday home and book it. The only limit is your imagination - click here to view our article directory.

The next batch of changes will be released w/c 19th January, and a full update will be provided here.

***UPDATE***
We have now moved the Owners Login button to the bottom bar of each page. Here’s a quick link to it as well:

OWNERS LOGIN