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.

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!

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Hoseasons, who have over 12,000 properties for rent in the UK and mainland Europe.

I recall from my childhood that Hoseasons was THE company to deal with for Holiday Park, Boat and Cottage holidays. I spent many a happy summers as a child in a Hoseasons park or cottage. Since then they have moved into mainland Europe and now have some best of breed villas available.

Here is a great example of one of their holiday villas in Costa Blanca, Spain.

I have spent quite a bit of time this week reading various research into holiday homes and the challenges of renting them on the Internet. I think the most interesting thing I read was a survey on why people who rent a hotel room did not consider renting a holiday home.

• An amazing 39% of people did not consider a holiday rental property as they only travelled for 3 days. Their perception was that a minimum stay in a holiday rental is 1 week. So for any holiday home owner who wants to double the size of their market, adding a 3 day option is an absolute must. That message is loud and clear.

• 22% of people wanted the services and amenities of a hotel, in particular a maid service and convenient eating arrangements.  Of particular note is the check-in/check-out arrangements, with lack of clarity striking fear into the hearts of many people who are unfamiliar with holiday rentals.

• 21% of people felt that the extra space meant extra cost, and so went for a small hotel room to save money. In the majority of cases that is simply untrue. We have on Direct Holiday Bookings several well placed rental properties that cost 50% less to rent than a local hotel - and the rental properties look a lot nicer too.

• 18% of people were travelling alone or with a small party and felt that a holiday rental was not appropriate.

I think 2 things strike me here.

Firstly, there is a lot of misunderstanding about how easy and convenient renting a holiday home is, and that is a message we all need to keep pushing at potential customers.

Secondly, customers have a few key requirements in mind when they are beginning to consider staying away from home, and it is up to the holiday home owner to ensure that their listing on our site addresses these concerns quickly and concisely.

We welcome today the TWO latest Agent to join our community.

European rental agent Belvilla provides some spectacular holiday homes with more than 12,000 properties available in 16 countries. I really liked that they also have a dedicated quality control team personally select and check all accommodation so you are guaranteed peace of mind.

Here’s a link to a great example of one of their rental properties:

Georgous Belvilla holiday villa

James Villas list some of the most beautiful holiday villas. Established in 1984, James Villa Holidays is the leading villa tour operator in the UK. They pride themselves on offering you hand-picked, quality accommodation, at an affordable price. Truly beautiful!

Here’s one of my favourites:

James Villas beautiful property

Today we welcome onto our website Clearstay, a leading US based holiday rental listing site, with loads of great holiday rentals throughout the USA.

The thing I really like about Clearstay is that they allow you to pay for the holiday properties on their website in real time. Due to lots of clever technical wizardry, the availability of their properties is  always 100% accurate, so if you book a rental property with them you know that the booking is guaranteed.

Here is an example of one of their properties:

Holiday Apartment In California

I read with Interest over the weekend a report by PhoCusWright market research about the holiday rental market and it’s massive growth in the US, and therefore inevitably here in the UK.

They specifically note that websites like ours, that bring together Agent and Private managed properties into one place, are set to meet their customers needs best.

Here’s their summary:

Vacation Rental Marketplace: Poised for Change

Large, complex, fragmented, long understudied and definitely underestimated, the U.S. vacation rental market is poised for change.

Vacation rentals represent a more than $24 billion opportunity in the U.S. – that’s more than one fifth of all hotel room revenue and 8% of the total U.S. travel market. And vacation rental consumers are a market to covet. They’re well-off, well-educated, and they travel – a lot. Nine in 10 take at least four leisure trips a year.

The online segment is growing in both transactions and advertising, as some players large and small move quickly to tap this fast-growing opportunity. But not everyone is moving so fast. The majority of bookings are done the old-fashioned way, at a time when nearly $100 billion in leisure travel will be booked online in 2008. Many property managers and vacation homeowners have yet to leverage the emerging business models, technologies and services that are spurring change.

So there you have it. Holdiay rentals go mainstream and we are leading the charge here in the UK. Looks like we are all in the right place at the right time…..

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”.