Up for developing another Holiday Rental Search Engine? Here is an executive summary for you, ready for fund raising:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The idea is to create a true Holiday Rental Search Engine, similar to Google but only for holiday rental websites.

Vast numbers of holiday rental owners have personal websites for their properties. The search engine will discover and index these websites and will make them searchable by prospective guests using any keywords they contain, just like Google does it. For example potential guest will be able to type this into the search box:

heated pool villa in mallorca sleeps:3 bedrooms:1-2 price:120-180GBP/week

or simply:

pool villa in italy

Search results will be presented in a convenient way, as a list of matching holiday rentals. Each holiday rental on the results page will have 2 large pictures, short description and most important attributes (such as sleeps: n, bedrooms: n, rate: x-y, pet-friendly: yes/no). Clicking on any match will lead directly to owner’s personal website for this holiday rental. That is where potential guest can find exhaustive information on the property and book directly with the owner.

Holiday Rental Search Engine is a relatively new idea that has been tried by  very few. (Though there is one online business that is trying to masquerade their usual rental listing website selling it as “holiday home search engine”, however it has absolutely nothing to do with a real search engine and simply does not work even on simplest searches. It’s important to realize that solid state-of-the-art know-how technology is mandatory for a true holiday rental search engine implementation. Few specialists can develop such a technology and few interested companies can afford the development costs.)

Do not confuse Holiday Rental Search Engine with usual holiday rental listing website. Holiday Rental Search Engine shows personal rental websites in a convenient form where usual holiday rental listing website shows paid advertisements previously placed there by rental owners.

These days holiday rental owners are very reluctant to place advertisements on listing websites because:

• There are so many of them
• Good ones are quite expensive
• It takes so much time and effort to fill out all the online forms for an advertisement

Our Holiday Rental Search Engine will not suffer from any of the above problems: it will be free for all, quick to add URL to and unique in the functionality offered.

Advantages over usual holiday rental listing websites

• True holiday rental search engine, full text search of holiday rentals by any terms, e.g.: “heated pool villa in Florence sleeps:3 bedrooms:1-2”.
• Our search engine will be free for both holiday rental owners and tenants.
• There is no need to convince owners to advertise their rental on the website (very hard business these days!), we simply add the URL to our database. Usual holiday rental listing websites perform tremendous work to attract owners.
• Adding URL to the search engine will be half a minute process where adding an advertisement to a usual holiday rental listing site is often a 1-2 hour job.
• Our database of holiday rentals will only grow where for usual holiday rental listing websites it often diminishes as a result of owners leaving for another listing site.
• Our holiday rental search engine will offer the most direct way of reaching rental owners, not even using a listing website middle man: guests will get right to the rental owner’s website where they can discover more information and book directly.
• Usability (ease of use), friendly UI (user interface) and handy useful functionality will be the top priority. 99.9% of usual rental listing websites feature awful interface and cluttered design.

Means to generate revenue

Means of generating revenue will be similar to the ones used by Google search engine – sponsored listings and (possibly) selling advertising space.

• Up to 3 sponsored rental adverts on the search engine home page (they will take same space and will be changing). An advert won’t be a usual banner but a nice large picture of the property being advertised, it will be a natural part of the search engine home page design.
• Up to 3 sponsored keyword-sensitive rental listings on top of the search results (same as in Google).
• Unlimited number of sponsored keyword-sensitive rental listings on the right hand side of the search results page (same as Google AdWords – pay per click advertising).
• Possible sale of the search engine to a big holiday rental advertising company.

Competitors

Holiday rental industry leader, HomeAway Group, has revenues of around $150 million and $50 million in EBITDA. HomeAway Group has acquired at least eleven holiday home listing sites, including Holiday-Rentals.co.uk, VRBO.com, VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr and OwnersDirect.co.uk.

Low running costs

Once the software is developed the business will not require substantial running costs:

• Web hosting
• 2 x Developers for system maintenance
• Further marketing and promotion

Yesterday HomeAway announced acquisition of Homelidays.com, a well-known player on European rental listing scene. Value of the deal wasn’t disclosed. Thus HomeAway continues consolidation of the holiday rental market. What does it mean to a holiday home owner? Well, it may mean a few things:

• Losing diversity. Lack of choice of good listing sites may lead to standardised “one size fits all” approach. But is one size going to fit every home owner in every region?
• Soulless corporate marketing. Giants need to employ standard company operation procedures, protocols, policies, etc. etc. Won’t corporate culture kill the creativity within the company itself?
• Losing competitive pricing. Clearly limiting the number of players in the holiday rental market will lead to artificial pricing that suits those who are in control.

Interesting things going on in the holiday rental industry. After securing a much discussed $250 million funding HomeAway has at last redesigned its set of aesthetically awful websites. Now they indeed look far better and more professional. As a result of its aggressive acquisition strategy, HomeAway has taken up just about every major player in the market. Here are the HomeAway websites: Holiday-Rentals.co.uk, OwnersDirect.co.uk, VacationRentals.com, Abritel.fr, VRBO.com, FeWo-direkt.de, TripHomes.com, A1Vacations.com, GreatRentals.com, CyberRentals.com. So what else are they going to do with the funds apart from redesigning their websites and acquiring competitors? Snap up all the smaller rental listing sites and establish the total monopoly? Or maybe purchase HolidayRentals.com domain from Tim Hall, whom Holiday-Rentals.com Limited has previously brought to the court trying to take away this totally generic domain?

We’ll see.

By the way, why does HomeAway want HolidayRentals.com so much? Because of the traffic leakage: an A-B.com domain will always lose substantial amount of traffic to AB.com. People tend to remember the terms (”A” and “B”) and dot com is burned into their minds, but they never remember any hyphens in between. So HomeAway’s Holiday-Rentals.com loses a lot of traffic (read “revenue”) to HolidayRentals.com. That’s why it is best to avoid hyphenated domains. If it isn’t possible then it’s relieving to know that hyphenated domains can still do a good SEO job: from the search engine’s point of view phrase “AB” isn’t different from “A-B” - same keywords in the domain.

Let’s go back to the holiday rental industry.

It is young and thriving, rough and actively developing - thus offering space for innovative ideas. One such idea is to tackle the fragmentation of the holiday rental market. Aggregation of rental information, an aggregator website that is. Similar to TravelSupermarket.com but for holiday rentals. While there is a lot of aggregation attempts in the package holiday sector, in the holiday rental world it’s quite a new idea.

Otalo is a new rental aggregator, claiming to be “The Vacation Home Search Engine”. A simple test reveals it doesn’t come close to a real search engine: searching for my all time favourite - “italy pool villa” - yields: “Drats! We couldn’t find any vacation homes with your criteria…“. It reminded me of another, older website - PerfectGetaways.co.uk - that also claimed to be “The Holiday Home Search Engine” but failed on the same search with: “Sorry, there were no results found for your search“. Ah, marketing tricks! A search engine without a search functionality Sales people seem to have no idea of what a search engine is. PerfectGetaways.co.uk isn’t even an aggregator, just a regular listing site and despite that its creators didn’t bother building full-text search against their own database.

Are there any aggregators that work? There are some, such as WeGoRound.com (which is also a true holiday rental search engine), but unfortunately the biggest problem for aggregators and rental search engines is aggregation of availability calendars and presentation of accurate information in general. With so many calendar formats in use it’s technically challenging to write a software that “understands” all of them. And by and large, it’s virtually impossible to scrape the content automatically in a reliably accurate way. No machine understands content better than a human yet. So far no one has reliably solved the problem of full and accurate aggregation of holiday rental information. And I bet it won’t be sorted till there is a single common database of holiday rentals exposing a formalized API for querying. Similar to existing systems serving the package holiday sector. By the way this should also allow for real-time bookings - another wanted feature. To sum up: clearly the holiday rental industry is entering the aggregation and search engine era - I am sure we will face more innovative ideas soon.

The number of listing websites is on the increase. Indeed they spring up like mushrooms after the rain. Adding nothing new, they simply clone each other’s functionality (and the mistakes!). 99% of the rental listing websites are aesthetically awful and practically useless, but the amount of them is still impressive. Interestingly, despite the legion of listing sites, the principal owner’s question is still there: Where should I advertise? What are the best holiday home advertising sites? This nice site I found recently may help you in answering the question. It is a directory of listing websites along with reviews and ratings. Just note that the site is still starting off and hasn’t got a lot on it now. Also don’t forget that something that works for one property/area doesn’t work for another and vice versa. So you need to try a few listing sites before you find the best one for you. Don’t forget to vote and add your impressions about the listing sites you tried yourself.

I hope you enjoyed my subjective insight. Good luck and have fun advertising!

Come across a precautionary article in Guardian today:

“Thousands of holiday homes in the glitzy southern Spanish resort of Marbella have been saved from the bulldozer by an amnesty on illegal buildings in a town whose name has become a byword for corruption on Spain’s costas.

The amnesty comes after 18,000 villas and holiday flats in the town were found to have been built illegally over almost two decades while generations of corrupt mayors took bribes or turned a blind eye.” Read more

Nice - not just a mayor, but generations. Once again this reminds and emphasizes the importance of homework one needs doing before diving into a dream holiday home deal. A reputable local lawyer is highly recommended. They can often tell straight away if a property is built illegally simply because they know local matters.

Take a look at this other example, now from Koh Samui, Thailand:

“Purchasers of raw and undeveloped land must be aware that because of corruption at the Koh Samui Land Office and mafia like activities fast areas of forests and hill side land on the island have been encroached and land ownership papers have been issued illegally. Forest land is classified as government property, as such, they are under the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and cannot be owned by any private entity and no building permits are allowed. Issued land titles may be corrected or revoked and illegally obtained land will be seized and returned to the State.

In Samui encroached public land has been bought and sold several times before ending up with their current owners, however, it is the present and mostly foreign owners of the land who bear the risk of being charged either with illegal possession or encroachment into the reserved areas like public and forest land (see news in the homepage).
…
It is and has been common practice for land speculators in Koh Samui to subdivide a larger plot(s) of land into less than 10 plots (less than 10 to circumvent the Land Allocation Act) and to offer the smaller saleable sized plots for sale to foreigners through nominee structured holding companies suggesting a licensed housing property development. Using this trick local and foreign land speculators have been able to subdivide land not suitable for development into more than 9 plots without having to apply for a land allocation permit or permission to develop the land and make huge profits suggesting a residential housing development in an area where this normally would not be allowed.” Read more

There is plenty of articles on the net on how to avoid common pitfalls and what to look for when buying a holiday home. This is one of them.