Dedicated Holiday Letting Websites With Live Availability Calendars & Online Booking System
Get The Website Your Guests Want To Use
3. Getting The Website Your Guests Want To Use
It should be obvious that if you run a holiday letting business your potential guests need to see accurate up-to-the-second availability and online booking all integrated into your website, a seamless process from beginning to end. So why are there so few, if any, cottage holiday letting websites out there that work as well as your average online shop? Simply down to cost.
10-15 years ago if you wanted an online shop selling widgets, it would cost around £30k-£50k for a bespoke website, that was all that was available, 5 years ago you could have a better widget website for maybe £5k-£10k, nowadays £2k-£3k will get you a tidy little widget shop or even for free if you do it all yourself.
Well sort of free. Usually things are free because they are useless and have no value or there is a sting in the tail later - disk space is so limited you can only build 5 of your "unlimited" pages, bandwidth so tiny the search engines have used it all up by the 5th of the month or search engines are blocked so they don't use any precious bandwidth and you get no visitors, there's a small transaction charge on every widget that is sold or the free website has advertising on it, and as "targeted advertising" is the latest thing, your widget shop will have all your widget competitors down the right hand side. The hidden cost of building a free website yourself is all the lost sales while your shop is closed, unless you are a web designer with a sideline in widgets, so you could easily lose £10,000 of sales while you're building your "free" website.
The reason e-commerce websites are so cheap now is because it is a huge market, probably 100 million websites out there selling all sorts of things and competition is fierce. Every size & type of e-commerce website has been written now, no need to reinvent the wheel by starting from scratch with a custom solution. Even the smallest web designer can install WordPress or Joomla, add the necessary pages and then get a shopping cart plugin, all for a couple of thousand pounds.
So why has it never happened for cottage holiday websites?
The simple answer is there isn't the market for anybody to develop an complete integrated website and booking system for holiday rentals. Whereas there maybe 100 million online shops, there are probably only around 50,000 owner-run holiday letting websites, so we are still back in the 1990's - if anybody wants the holiday cottage website of their dreams they will have to pay £30k-£50k to have one developed. Which isn't going to happen and why you have never seen one. Until now...
10-15 years ago if you wanted an online shop selling widgets, it would cost around £30k-£50k for a bespoke website, that was all that was available, 5 years ago you could have a better widget website for maybe £5k-£10k, nowadays £2k-£3k will get you a tidy little widget shop or even for free if you do it all yourself.
Well sort of free. Usually things are free because they are useless and have no value or there is a sting in the tail later - disk space is so limited you can only build 5 of your "unlimited" pages, bandwidth so tiny the search engines have used it all up by the 5th of the month or search engines are blocked so they don't use any precious bandwidth and you get no visitors, there's a small transaction charge on every widget that is sold or the free website has advertising on it, and as "targeted advertising" is the latest thing, your widget shop will have all your widget competitors down the right hand side. The hidden cost of building a free website yourself is all the lost sales while your shop is closed, unless you are a web designer with a sideline in widgets, so you could easily lose £10,000 of sales while you're building your "free" website.
The reason e-commerce websites are so cheap now is because it is a huge market, probably 100 million websites out there selling all sorts of things and competition is fierce. Every size & type of e-commerce website has been written now, no need to reinvent the wheel by starting from scratch with a custom solution. Even the smallest web designer can install WordPress or Joomla, add the necessary pages and then get a shopping cart plugin, all for a couple of thousand pounds.
So why has it never happened for cottage holiday websites?
The simple answer is there isn't the market for anybody to develop an complete integrated website and booking system for holiday rentals. Whereas there maybe 100 million online shops, there are probably only around 50,000 owner-run holiday letting websites, so we are still back in the 1990's - if anybody wants the holiday cottage website of their dreams they will have to pay £30k-£50k to have one developed. Which isn't going to happen and why you have never seen one. Until now...
In The Beginning
This complete holiday letting website and booking system started life around 5 years ago when we were developing an enterprise level e-commerce system for a local company and the MD wanted a website including online-booking for his gîte in France included in the deal. It seemed easy enough - how hard could it be to build a website for one small cottage?
Not that easy. Even though our lead developer had written a point and click booking calendar back in 1988 for the Atari ST, looking and functioning near identical to now, a rolling year-to-view with one week per row, this was before the Internet and was missing the myriad of discounts, options, deposits and balance payments. Turned out the simple cottage booking website would cost about the same as the company website, so it was a non starter and he got a 4 page brochure website for the gîte instead - but the seeds were sown.
Not that easy. Even though our lead developer had written a point and click booking calendar back in 1988 for the Atari ST, looking and functioning near identical to now, a rolling year-to-view with one week per row, this was before the Internet and was missing the myriad of discounts, options, deposits and balance payments. Turned out the simple cottage booking website would cost about the same as the company website, so it was a non starter and he got a 4 page brochure website for the gîte instead - but the seeds were sown.
Live Availability Calendar & Online Booking
About a year later we built a website for a photography studio that needed online booking. Even though it booked by the hour instead of nights, had simply pricing and didn't need many options, it was close enough to make us think about a cottage booking website again.
The majority of the cost of having a website built is construction and functionality - getting it to work, it doesn't cost anymore to change the colour scheme or add a logo to a £500 brochure website than a £20,000 e-commerce website, it what is happening beneath the skin that costs the money.
99% of websites are built the same way a real building is constructed - find some space, put in the foundations, build the structure, connect the utilities, decorate, then somebody moves their furniture in and hang some pictures. If it's a housing estate, then do it all again.
One thing computers are very good at it is repetition, another is making exact copies of something. You take a photo with your digital camera and you can email a copy to all your friends around the world - they've all got the exact same photo you started with.
And that is exactly what we have done - we've cut the build cost of a website by 90% by pre-building a complete working website, when you subscribe, the server makes you an exact copy of the website you have chosen so we only have to finish it.
The majority of the cost of having a website built is construction and functionality - getting it to work, it doesn't cost anymore to change the colour scheme or add a logo to a £500 brochure website than a £20,000 e-commerce website, it what is happening beneath the skin that costs the money.
99% of websites are built the same way a real building is constructed - find some space, put in the foundations, build the structure, connect the utilities, decorate, then somebody moves their furniture in and hang some pictures. If it's a housing estate, then do it all again.
One thing computers are very good at it is repetition, another is making exact copies of something. You take a photo with your digital camera and you can email a copy to all your friends around the world - they've all got the exact same photo you started with.
And that is exactly what we have done - we've cut the build cost of a website by 90% by pre-building a complete working website, when you subscribe, the server makes you an exact copy of the website you have chosen so we only have to finish it.
The Single Biggest Cost Of Running A Website?
It is not the cost of having a website or the £100's you may be paying for advertising on holiday listing websites to drive traffic to yours, it is all the lost bookings you don't get because your potential guests can't find the availability or any sensible way of booking and paying, so they leave - Can't Book, Won't Book.
Our single holiday home website costs £120 to get you open, usually in a couple of hours, then £12 a month. So for less than £200 you get the next 20+ weeks of a state of the art website complete with live availability and online booking - how many extra nights bookings do you need to cover that? The first year will come to £264 and subsequent years only £144 and that includes everything - some people reading this will be paying more for just website hosting!
Even if you paid a web designer £1000 yesterday for a shiny new website, it is still worth switching, for the extra £120 we can import your designers work so it has not gone to waste. Your first year will be £1264 instead of £1000, subsequent years only £144. Your guests will have preferred you spent the £1000 on making their lives easier with online booking.
Our single holiday home website costs £120 to get you open, usually in a couple of hours, then £12 a month. So for less than £200 you get the next 20+ weeks of a state of the art website complete with live availability and online booking - how many extra nights bookings do you need to cover that? The first year will come to £264 and subsequent years only £144 and that includes everything - some people reading this will be paying more for just website hosting!
Even if you paid a web designer £1000 yesterday for a shiny new website, it is still worth switching, for the extra £120 we can import your designers work so it has not gone to waste. Your first year will be £1264 instead of £1000, subsequent years only £144. Your guests will have preferred you spent the £1000 on making their lives easier with online booking.
How Can You Be Sure We Will Get More Bookings?
Because 75% of visitors to your website are looking for somewhere to stay in the next few days for a short break only, only a quarter will be planning next summers holiday. 99% of holiday cottage websites only do a week at a time with Saturday changeover, because that is all a static online brochure website can do.
Late deals on holiday home websites seems to mean sometime in the next 6 weeks, to most people it's next week. With an easily changeable live availability calendar you can discount this weekend or next week. Selling accommodation is different to most things, you're selling time, if you weren't booked last week, you can't discount it, can't even give it away, it's gone forever.
Try it yourself - pretend you're a potential guest and follow the link to our demo website and book next Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday - shouldn't take long, click, click, click and checkout - about 5 minutes on a real website, start to finish for a confirmed booking with payment in full in Pounds, Dollars or Euros. Now be the same potential guest and try it on your own website or a holiday listing website if you don't have one.
For £120 you can have that website by tomorrow with your photos and descriptions ready to take bookings for next week too.
Late deals on holiday home websites seems to mean sometime in the next 6 weeks, to most people it's next week. With an easily changeable live availability calendar you can discount this weekend or next week. Selling accommodation is different to most things, you're selling time, if you weren't booked last week, you can't discount it, can't even give it away, it's gone forever.
Try it yourself - pretend you're a potential guest and follow the link to our demo website and book next Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday - shouldn't take long, click, click, click and checkout - about 5 minutes on a real website, start to finish for a confirmed booking with payment in full in Pounds, Dollars or Euros. Now be the same potential guest and try it on your own website or a holiday listing website if you don't have one.
For £120 you can have that website by tomorrow with your photos and descriptions ready to take bookings for next week too.