Direct Holiday Bookings Blog

Beta Testers Required For Our Holiday Rental Website

2009-06-22T18:22:24Z

Within the next two weeks we will have our new website ready to launch in closed beta (i.e. using live data, but before everyone else gets to see it).

We are looking for anyone who is interested in trying out the new version of the website and giving us some feedback or telling us about any bugs you find. The site will be about 95% there, it will be just the odd bits here and there might not work quite as expected.

You really don’t need any experience and often the less experience the better. You just use the new site and see what you think. If you want to give us feedback that is great. If you don’t that is fine too. Just being on the site and navigating around it will help us find any bugs.

If that sounds like something you would like to try, please send an email to support [at] directholidaybookings.co.uk or send us a tweet with the title “Beta Testing”. Once we are ready to go I will send you a link and a password so you can give it a try.

Everyone is welcome.

Our Newest Team Member…..Called Harry!

2009-06-19T09:23:00Z

It’s a big day for us. Today our latest team member joins us, direct from his mum now that he is 8 weeks old!

Harry, a yellow Labrador, is just the cutest dog and already has the coolest laid back attitude. He loves the attention of all the people who come and go here in the office and, as people keep pointing out, already has more friends than I do!

We have no plans to give Harry his own Twitter account but we’ll post a few pictures now and again on our own Twitter page.

10 Must Have Tools When Making Your Own Holiday Rental Website

2009-06-08T16:23:02Z

We are big fans of Open Source here. We make use of a lot of community lead development that is done for the benefit of the Internet community rather than to fund a big corporation.

With that in mind, I have been asked by Andrew to talk about a few of the open source or very low cost solutions that we use to manage our site. I recommend each and every one of them, so if you have a website or fancy having a bash at a holiday rental listing site, these are a great place to start:

Free and easy code to build the website:

PHP coding language
MySQL open source database

How popular is my site?

Google analytics is a super tool to measure traffic and manage/improve the customer experience.
Chartbeat.com allows real time measure of traffic and page load times (Small monthly fee).

How do I get feedback from users?

Wordpress provide excellent blog software (this is what you are reading now).
Uservoice.com provide the software we use to get bug reports and allow people to vote on important bug fixes and issues (small monthly fee).

How do I optimise my sites performance?

Google Webmaster central is where Google will flag any problems on your site and show you how well its working.
Google page load speed software is superb and allows quick optimisation of client (user) side performance.

Other bits I like:

Thickbox is the system we use when you click on a link to make the screen black and show you an information window.
Article Friendly is the company who supplied our article section (for a small fee).

So that’s it - the 10 free or nearly free things that we use each and every day to build and manage our website. Beyond them, it’s our time and a bit of luck that you like what we do and use/recommend our service. As I said at the start, if you fancy having a bash at making a holiday rental site, these tools will give you the entire building blocks you need to make something as good if not better than the big boys out there.

These tools are equally useful for any website. Just be careful - like us you may get addicted to it

Good luck!
Chris

Last Chance For Free Listing Of Holiday Rentals

2009-05-22T13:38:15Z

Up until now we have allowed all private owners to list their properties for free. That’s really helped us out, allowing us to grow quickly and listing a combined 110,000 holiday rentals, of which nearly 15,000 are private owners.

We have generated tens of thousands of leads for our charter members and we are delighted that almost all have stuck with us. It’s been great getting feedback like, “Wow - this is the first booking I have ever taken from a free listing site”.

But all good things come to an end, and we are now closing the door on charter member status for any new properties listed with us from Monday 25th May 2009. Existing owners keep their free charter status but new members will have to pay a small monthly fee.

So, it’s your last chance for the free listing of your holiday rental.

What To Do With Holiday Rentals With Bad Reviews

2009-04-23T18:34:13Z

We encourage all of the people who rent holiday properties through our site to leave reviews about it.

As enough time has passed now for the reviews to start, we are getting some interesting issues around what to do with holiday rentals that have bad reviews. For me personally, the answer has always been clear. Providing the reviews are genuine (and we verify every one) then they stay, good or bad. That is the point of a review system.

However over the last few weeks I have listened to some well reasoned argument that once a holiday rental is confirmed as bad, then we should remove their property. The rationale being, if the property or it’s owner/agent is that bad then why should it be listed on a holiday rental website?

I suppose I am thinking that if it is bad, and people are aware through the reviews that it is bad, then that is a good thing. It informs renters about the property and the issue holiday makers have had. It is then up to the renter to decide if they ignore the reviews or ignore the property. Reviews are simply opinions. However, if there are enough of them saying the same thing though you need to be really careful if you ignore them.

So what’s the best way to play this - remove the properties with lots of bad reviews or leave them, informing our customers about the potential problems with a certain property?

Direct Holiday Bookings Wins North East Digital Award

2009-04-01T09:07:03Z

I am delighted to announce that Direct Holiday Bookings has won the North East Digital Awards best business website.

While shortlisting is based on votes, the final decision on the winner is made by a panel of leading Internet specialists who look at all aspects of the business, from commercial model through to customer experience. Our whole team were delighted to be recognised at a ceremony held in a renovated museum building in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

I dare say that we had a glass of wine or two to celebrate

Thank you for your feedback and input that has helped us to shape Direct Holiday Bookings into what it is today. I really appreciate all of the help and support you have given us. We have so much more planned for the next 12 months to make Direct Holiday Bookings as good as we possibly can for you.

Search Takes A Step Forward

2009-03-11T14:17:06Z

We have just released the latest batch of search improvements, making it far easier to find what you are looking for.

As we pass 100,000 holiday rentals it is more important than ever that you can find the rentals that match your exact requirements.

The changes are:

- You can now search for anything you want related to your property, for example “dog friendly”. Just search whatever is important to you.

- When searching for a city/town we attempt to match locations in close proximity into the search result.

- The availability search (by date) has been improved and now returns a totally reliable result.

We have also released a change to improve the usability of the availability calendar when a customer chooses not to keep their calander updated. This avoids the need to load a blank calendar page and makes the process of you finding your next rental a bit faster.

Oops - did I forget one?

2009-03-06T13:14:26Z

I may have forgot to mention that we started listing Thomson Holidays villas a few weeks ago.

Anyone looking for a way to start a great commercial relationship with a partner take note! This is a great way NOT to do it.

I really like Thomson as they do great villas and are part of TUI group, largest holiday operator in the world. They also have ABTA approval so your money is protected should anything unexpected happen!

We are delighted to be working with Thomsons and being able to offer you some of the best holiday rentals from the biggest name in holiday travel.

So in a further attempt to make amends, here are a few of their best properties for you to look at:

Nice 4 bedroom villa

Good looking Cyprus villa

Welcome to Premier Holidays and Bungalow.net

2009-03-06T10:40:50Z

We welcome today Premier Holidays and Bungalow.net as the two latest agents to join our community.

Here is a great Ibiza Villa by Premier Holidays and here is a great holiday home from Bungalow.net. They are both great agents with a great stock of good quality holiday homes, all of which can be booked on-line.

I would also like to take the opportunity to thank all of our private home owners, agents and visitors for being part of our community. Thank you.

The Penny Finally Dropped (with me)

2009-03-06T12:47:44Z

We list all holiday properties on our site for free.

Now if I had a pound for everytime someone said ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’ when discussing us, then I would be…….(you get the idea).

So I was speaking to a holiday home owner this week to answer their questions on our service and after I explained what we do, the chap replied back, “So it’s not a free service, it is funded by airlines, car hire companies and other related services”.

Genius! I wish I had thought to put it that way. That’s exactly it.

Put simply, a small proportion of customers who rent holiday properties through our site will also want a flight, car hire etc, and if they take those services by clicking on our adverts we get a small payment, directly from the company involved. That way, there is no cost to our home owners OR our kind visitors who rent properties listed on our site.

So now I have an easier way to explain why we list properties for free. We are now approaching 100,000 holiday rentals listed on our site, so perhaps we can double that over the coming 12 months - especially now we have a better way to explain it!