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!

Holiday home advertising is quite a competitive area these days. It therefore requires a lot of creativity from your side. Every smallest opportunity should be employed and made work towards the goal of letting your home.

Did you know you can attract visitors to your holiday home site using Google Images? Google Image Search that is. This has proven to be the source of high numbers of visitors for several home owners. Not many of these visitors would turn into guests, but even one real guest out of many visitors is worth the effort.

How does it work? Go to Google Image Search and look up “italy pool villa”. See the results? One of these pictures could be your Italy pool villa picture, attracting potential guests to your personal rental site.

In order for your images to appear in the search results you need to do a few things. First and most important, image filenames should say exactly and precisely what is shown on the picture, that is:

italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg

instead of 2369878.jpg, which tells nothing to a search engine. italy-villa-001.jpg isn’t good enough either because it does not include the details. Best to be precise and include any details in the filename.

Next important bit is specifying picture description in the alt and title attributes of the img tag. As below:

<img src="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg"
alt="Italy pool villa front"
title="Italy pool villa front"
/>

Width and height attributes are always good to include (with width being a little more important than height). It is a good practice and Google appreciates good practices. So the final img tag will look like this:

<img src="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg"
width="200" height="200"
alt="Italy pool villa front"
title="Italy pool villa front"
/>

In case you link to images with anchor tag (using “<a>…</a>” that is) use the detailed description phrase as link text:

<a href="/images/italy-pool-villa-front-001.jpg">
Italy pool villa front view
</a>

At last make sure your images are accessible by Google. If there is a restriction at all, it usually exists in robots.txt file (or less often in .htaccess file).

That’s all for now. With Google Image Search you can significantly increase the number of visitors to your personal rental website so this small effort is worth it. Have fun with your holiday home advertising!