Dedicated Holiday Letting Websites With Live Availability Calendars & Online Booking System
Convert Visitors To Paying Guests
Giving your visitors the means to make a booking
2. Converting Website Visitors Into Paying Guests
The second problem facing small holiday home websites is converting visitors into customers - even the best websites with perfect information, options, checkout system & online payments will be over the moon with 5% of visitors becoming paying customers, 1-2% is probably nearer reality.
Getting website visitors is easy compared to converting them to customers - you can buy more advertising, place adverts in holiday cottage magazines, advertise your holiday home at the local newsagent or start a Google AdWords campaign, but if you can't get these website visitors to book, it will be all money down the drain. Not being able to convert visitors to paying customers is the number one problem for small business websites and why they fail or fall into disuse.
If you opened a high street shop, you'd want plenty of footfall, people would come in, look at your products, check the price then go to the till, pay for it and leave. If you opened a shop the same way most holiday cottage websites are run, there would be no sales assistant, just pictures of the product on the shelf and a book near the door saying "Contact The Owner for stock and the price of the product you are interested in and we'll get back to you". You'd go bust within a month.
If your holiday home websites relies totally on people filling out a form asking about availability and waiting for a reply, only a few will bother to ask and even fewer will go ahead and book.
Most people will have booked airline tickets online - it's the number one way to do it. You can easily compare routes, times, connections, prices with near 100% certainty that when you decide to book, you'll have paid and printed out your tickets & boarding pass 10 minutes later.
People's expectations change, today they expect to visit a website, find all the information, choose their options, pay online and get the confirmation email 5 minutes later. If they can't do that on your website, they will go to another one that will.
Getting website visitors is easy compared to converting them to customers - you can buy more advertising, place adverts in holiday cottage magazines, advertise your holiday home at the local newsagent or start a Google AdWords campaign, but if you can't get these website visitors to book, it will be all money down the drain. Not being able to convert visitors to paying customers is the number one problem for small business websites and why they fail or fall into disuse.
If you opened a high street shop, you'd want plenty of footfall, people would come in, look at your products, check the price then go to the till, pay for it and leave. If you opened a shop the same way most holiday cottage websites are run, there would be no sales assistant, just pictures of the product on the shelf and a book near the door saying "Contact The Owner for stock and the price of the product you are interested in and we'll get back to you". You'd go bust within a month.
If your holiday home websites relies totally on people filling out a form asking about availability and waiting for a reply, only a few will bother to ask and even fewer will go ahead and book.
Most people will have booked airline tickets online - it's the number one way to do it. You can easily compare routes, times, connections, prices with near 100% certainty that when you decide to book, you'll have paid and printed out your tickets & boarding pass 10 minutes later.
People's expectations change, today they expect to visit a website, find all the information, choose their options, pay online and get the confirmation email 5 minutes later. If they can't do that on your website, they will go to another one that will.
Live Availability Calendar
Once a potential customer lands on your website, they will quickly check the location, occupancy and that your tariff is in their price range, then they will want to know about availability. We've seen many cottage holiday websites in developing this booking system and most have no availability information at all, a few had a "Check Availability" which lead to a variant of "Contact Us" form to be filled - 95% of people won't bother, a few had embedded a Google Docs calendar into the page, but most where the free or cheap plug in variety that you update manually. All these were out of date - most have a "last updated on" message somewhere and none were dated today. If you use a manually updated availability calendar at least log in every day and change the date.
"live availability calendar" is a more popular search term than plain "availability calendar", so website owners obviously recognise the need for the "live" part - an out of date availability calendar is as much use as a chocolate teapot, potential guests are not interested in what was available yesterday, last week or even 5 minutes ago.
99% of all the "live availability calendars" are not live at all - once you have a booking, you have to manually update the calendar. With a live availability calendar, the customer is updating the calendar as they make a booking, until they have paid or confirmed their booking, the dates are "reserved", nobody else can have them i.e. no double bookings, then after payment or confirmation the calendar changes to "booked".
"live availability calendar" is a more popular search term than plain "availability calendar", so website owners obviously recognise the need for the "live" part - an out of date availability calendar is as much use as a chocolate teapot, potential guests are not interested in what was available yesterday, last week or even 5 minutes ago.
99% of all the "live availability calendars" are not live at all - once you have a booking, you have to manually update the calendar. With a live availability calendar, the customer is updating the calendar as they make a booking, until they have paid or confirmed their booking, the dates are "reserved", nobody else can have them i.e. no double bookings, then after payment or confirmation the calendar changes to "booked".
Plug-In Availability & Booking Systems
The other kind of availability calendar we found on our travels were 3rd party booking systems - some are generic, doesn't matter whether it's a holiday cottage or carpet cleaner hire, same booking system. Many were mis-configured, the availability calendar said "yes", but the computer said "no" when some dates were entered and then promptly showed all the the local B&B's, hotels and other accommodation available. Some booking systems did just the basic accommodation, no discounts or other booking options.
Mostly 3rd party booking systems do work well enough, but practically all have the same flaws. First is you have to already have a website to embed their code into - if your website is not attracting many visitors it is like putting Ferrari badges on your car, it isn't going to go any faster. The second flaw is because the booking system runs on their servers, your potential guest has left your website - it is always a bad idea to have visitors leave your website, 90% of the time they've gone for good and not coming back.
Mostly 3rd party booking systems do work well enough, but practically all have the same flaws. First is you have to already have a website to embed their code into - if your website is not attracting many visitors it is like putting Ferrari badges on your car, it isn't going to go any faster. The second flaw is because the booking system runs on their servers, your potential guest has left your website - it is always a bad idea to have visitors leave your website, 90% of the time they've gone for good and not coming back.
Filling The Low Season
Filling your holiday accommodation during the high season should be easy, with or without fancy booking systems. Christmas, New Year, Easter and July & August shouldn't be a problem, there are enough holiday makers around you can put your prices up and make them stay for a whole week, Saturday to Saturday.
But what about the rest of the year? Most people have a fixed amount of holiday time a year, two weeks in summer, maybe a week at Christmas, then they will spread the remaining time around, a long weekend here, a couple of days there. There are not many who want to spend a whole week somewhere in the middle of January (unless you are in a ski resort, in which case make it October).
Without real-time online booking it is difficult to give the flexibility to these potential guests. Outside of the main holiday season, people go away for different reasons, birthdays, anniversaries, attending conferences, courses, weddings, etc. and usually at much shorter notice - if you don't have the flexibility or means for these bookings, the local B&B or hotel probably do.
Above is a slice from our demonstration website, booking three nights in January and even given a 10% discount because it is mid-week. Have a play with it yourself.
But what about the rest of the year? Most people have a fixed amount of holiday time a year, two weeks in summer, maybe a week at Christmas, then they will spread the remaining time around, a long weekend here, a couple of days there. There are not many who want to spend a whole week somewhere in the middle of January (unless you are in a ski resort, in which case make it October).
Without real-time online booking it is difficult to give the flexibility to these potential guests. Outside of the main holiday season, people go away for different reasons, birthdays, anniversaries, attending conferences, courses, weddings, etc. and usually at much shorter notice - if you don't have the flexibility or means for these bookings, the local B&B or hotel probably do.
Above is a slice from our demonstration website, booking three nights in January and even given a 10% discount because it is mid-week. Have a play with it yourself.
Accepting Credit Cards & Online Payments
The final part of the jigsaw in converting website visitors into paying guests is taking online payments - without, you are losing a lot of business.
75% of all accommodation searches are for the next ten days, 60% for the next 3 or 4 - if three guys in an office want to go fishing/golfing/mountain biking next weekend, where are they going to stay? Your cottage is probably ideal, perfect location, plenty of space, they don't have to get up at 7:30am for breakfast, maybe bring the dog too - but you don't have real-time booking and only accept cheques - they will do what everybody else does and book into the local hotel instead. There isn't time to play email ping-pong, post a cheque and wait for clearance and confirmation. The Internet is about ease of use and speed - Amazon patented 1-Click checkout because they reckon people are too lazy or time poor to click two buttons, book sales would be decimated if they introduced the typical cottage booking experience - email to ask if a book is in stock, wait for reply, if it is, post a cheque and 4 weeks later the book arrives.
The second advantage of online payments is you are accepting credit cards - paying by cheque usually means your guests are spending money they already have in the bank or it would bounce. Credit cards, as well as being very convenient, are funny money, people will spend money they haven't earned yet, which is why the world is in a bit of mess, but that's not our problem, filling your empty weeks comes first.
The other advantage of online payments is they are international, people can pay in any currency they like, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the payment processor will either convert the currency for you or you can price your accommodation other currencies at your rate of exchange then convert it later.
75% of all accommodation searches are for the next ten days, 60% for the next 3 or 4 - if three guys in an office want to go fishing/golfing/mountain biking next weekend, where are they going to stay? Your cottage is probably ideal, perfect location, plenty of space, they don't have to get up at 7:30am for breakfast, maybe bring the dog too - but you don't have real-time booking and only accept cheques - they will do what everybody else does and book into the local hotel instead. There isn't time to play email ping-pong, post a cheque and wait for clearance and confirmation. The Internet is about ease of use and speed - Amazon patented 1-Click checkout because they reckon people are too lazy or time poor to click two buttons, book sales would be decimated if they introduced the typical cottage booking experience - email to ask if a book is in stock, wait for reply, if it is, post a cheque and 4 weeks later the book arrives.
The second advantage of online payments is you are accepting credit cards - paying by cheque usually means your guests are spending money they already have in the bank or it would bounce. Credit cards, as well as being very convenient, are funny money, people will spend money they haven't earned yet, which is why the world is in a bit of mess, but that's not our problem, filling your empty weeks comes first.
The other advantage of online payments is they are international, people can pay in any currency they like, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the payment processor will either convert the currency for you or you can price your accommodation other currencies at your rate of exchange then convert it later.
PayPal
PayPal is probably the biggest and best known around the world for processing card payments for small businesses (and some big ones) - it's easy & free to setup and takes a few minutes. "But they take fees", is the usual comment we hear, yes they do, but forget about them until you're taking tens of thousands through them - 97% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
On our availability calendar above you can't see the week beginning 3rd December because it's gone already - was it booked or was it empty? If it was empty then we still have to pay out the fixed costs for that week - ground rent, service charge, mortgage payment, council tax, loan for the new kitchen, advertising, website, let's say £100, so we are down £100. If somebody booked that week using PayPal, there would have been around £20 in transaction fees and £15 for the cleaner, so we'd have 600-100-20-15 = £465. Even if it was only 3 days, similar to the booking shown above, PayPal would have taken around £8 - we have given a £28 discount.
We've seen a few website that do accept PayPal and put a note about a "5% surcharge" - as tempting as this is to recover your costs - don't do it. If you're only taking online payments, it's not necessary and will annoy your customers from the outset. Just add it into your prices along with the other 101 costs you incur. You will lose customers by adding surcharges at the last minute.
On our availability calendar above you can't see the week beginning 3rd December because it's gone already - was it booked or was it empty? If it was empty then we still have to pay out the fixed costs for that week - ground rent, service charge, mortgage payment, council tax, loan for the new kitchen, advertising, website, let's say £100, so we are down £100. If somebody booked that week using PayPal, there would have been around £20 in transaction fees and £15 for the cleaner, so we'd have 600-100-20-15 = £465. Even if it was only 3 days, similar to the booking shown above, PayPal would have taken around £8 - we have given a £28 discount.
We've seen a few website that do accept PayPal and put a note about a "5% surcharge" - as tempting as this is to recover your costs - don't do it. If you're only taking online payments, it's not necessary and will annoy your customers from the outset. Just add it into your prices along with the other 101 costs you incur. You will lose customers by adding surcharges at the last minute.