So you now own a little piece of France and you want to share it with the world because it’s so wonderful you think everybody deserves just a little piece of it, or you might just want to rent your house out to cover any costs and maybe make some money, whatever your motivation, if nobody knows about your holiday heaven, they won’t be able to come. So how do you tell people about it?

The answer to this conundrum is marketing, or advertising, or both. I am not a guru on either of these topics (can you tell?) and quite frankly I don’t really know the difference between the two, so I apologise to you marketeers and advertisers out there for my simplistic view but I’ll mix them up and treat them as a single topic (I don’t think Saatchi & Saatchi will be beating down my door any minute now with a lucrative job offer!).

Basically you need people to be able to find out that you have a place to rent and once they have found it, convince them that they should rent your holiday home over everybody else’s, simple. So how do you go about that? Well you can use several tactics, a holiday listing site is an obvious way forward, your own website, word of mouth, paper based advertising, advertorials or a management company and I’m sure a lot more.

Which is best? Well you probably need to combine them and the balance you use depends on a few factors, your budget, how much time you have, do you have a flare for writing, your technical skills and your target guests. Think about your target guests, who are they, what methods are they likely to use in finding their holiday and what are they looking for when they do find it?

Holiday Listing Site

There are plenty of holiday listing sites out there and the good thing about these is that you can get your property out to the world within a few days and you are immediately available for bookings. You are also using up there marketing / advertising budgets, which will be greater than yours and their technical expertise. Obviously though you are in very direct competition with a lot of other properties. If you look at these sites you can see the number of properties listed can be quite large and unless you have a large budget, you can only choose a few to list on.

So which one to use, well if I knew that I’m sure I could make a fortune advising holiday home owners. There are whole discussions on this very topic on various forums (Lay my Hat is a very good example) and some people can advertise with the same site and one gets no bookings, whilst the other is inundated.

So how do you find the right one for you? Some basic guidelines to choosing your listings site would be:

• What sites do you use when looking for a holiday?
• Look at Google, search for your location, what sites come up top?
• Read the forums, find people with properties in a similar location and a similar type of property and see what sites they recommend or don’t.
• Look at the listing sites at properties similar to yours and see how booked up they are (be careful with this though, some people don’t update their booking calenders and also you don’t know where they got there bookings from but it’s a good start).
• Do you have your own website, if so does the listings site allow a link to your website?
• Do you like the site, would your potential guests like it?

It really does seem to be horses for courses with the listings sites and some work well in certain areas / countries and not in others. As well as paid for listings sites there are also quite a few free ones out there. Are they any good? Well some people get some bookings from them, I have had the odd enquiry so I wouldn’t not use them but I would definitely say don’t rely solely on free listings for your bookings.

Your Own Website

This is a little trickier to get going than just listing on a Holiday Listing Site and is a little longer term. There are various tools out there that even a novice could use to get a website up and running but will it do you any good?

I decided to set up a website, as well as list on a holiday listings site, and when my site first went live I was proudly sitting on page 54  of the Google Search Results for Gite in Brittany (so there were at least 530 other relevant results before mine). Was anybody going to find my website, no way!! If I only relied on my website then I would have no bookings. Now, after 6 months and quite a bit of effort I am on page 2 of Google for the same search so people may start to find my site (if they use this term for searching for a holiday but that’s a different problem) but I still can’t just rely on my website. I go into how you can improve your rankings in Google (and other search engines) here.

However I do think that having a website really helps, even if most people find it through the Holiday Listing sites initially. It allows you to describe your property in far greater detail, have some more information about the local area and it gives you total control of the look and feel and you can hopefully set your gite up as something a little different than everybody else’s. Remember, there is a lot of competition out there so you don’t just want people to find your holiday home, you have to convince them to choose your holiday home over everybody else’s. Holiday Listing Sites can be quite prescriptive on the number of photos you are allowed, look and feel and the amount of content, so having something like this could make the difference between getting a booking and not.

Word of Mouth

If you have a lot of friends and family that holiday in the same area maybe you could rent it out to them, obviously this can provide different challenges, like getting the money from them, but it could help start you off. Also, maybe your workplace has a bulletin board / notice board that you could advertise on? Join forums and post comments (only if you have something useful to say), that way people get to know about you and your holiday home.

Paper Based Advertising

There are still people out there who don’t use the Internet to book their holidays, amazing I know, so you could use paper based advertising or get listed in paper based brochures. This definitely works for some people but it is not cheap so could eat up your whole marketing budget immediately! I haven’t tried it as I don’t have the money so I can’t comment on it’s effectiveness.

Advertorials

If you have a flair for writing and have an interesting story to tell you could write an article for a website or even a newspaper. Obviously this is limited to those with a talent for this (amazingly I have never done it, even with this natural gift I have for writing!) and could get you some free publicity. You could even appear on a TV show as there seems to be a few out there but I’m not sure I would have the guts to do that and I don’t know of the benefit, especially if it didn’t quite come out as you had hoped. This one is definitely in the “use in conjunction with other methods” category as I don’t think you’d fill your holiday home up year on year from just using this method.

Management Company

Finally you could hand the whole problem to a management company who will find guests and take the money and deal with everything for you, for a price. I have no experience of these but as with everything in life, I’m sure there are some great ones and some who don’t seem to put the maximum effort into letting your property. I would definitely recommend you speak to other owners who use the same management company as you are thinking about using, get an idea of how many bookings they get, what the service is like, have they had any problems and how were they handled and did their guests have any issues. Also check whether you can get bookings yourself or are the management company exclusive?

When to Start?

The other question is when should you start to market your property? This is a very tricky one. In an ideal world you should start after you have signed the Acte de Vente but this could lead to a whole summer of being empty, not ideal. If you market it beforehand you must ensure that you leave plenty of time for the house buying process and also time for you to get out there and get everything just right for your first guests.

We started marketing it in April but only took bookings from the last week in July onwards, giving us 5 months from starting the house buying process to before the first guests arrived. We also booked the two weeks prior to this first booking for ourselves, to get out there and get everything ready and we really needed it, but that’s another story!

If you are going to market it before you sign the Acte de Vente then you need to have a backup plan. If things start to get tight and you may not sign before your guests arrive you still have to ensure your guests have a really good holiday. Will the current owner accommodate them if the property is vacant, is there somewhere else that you could put your guests up? This would have to be of a high standard and getting somewhere at short notice would be difficult and expensive, but if you decide to market your property before signing the Acte de Vente then this is something you will need to consider. You must have a backup plan as your guests are your number one priority!

Well that’s a very simple introduction to getting your property out there in the big wide world. There are various options for marketing your property:

• Holiday Listing Site
• Your Own Website
• Word of Mouth
• Paper Based Advertising
• Advertorials
• Management Company

Have a look at the property owners forums as they are an invaluable source of information form property owners and basically think like a holiday maker, how are the people who are likely to come to your property going to find it? This is a lot of work but can be fun and could really make or break your rental business.

 2 Bedroom Cottage / Gite near Dinan, Brittany, France

Buying, Owning and Running a Gite in Brittany Blog

©Derek Arkwright 2007

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