2007 was our first year renting our gite in Brittany out and we started advertising late in that first season, as we didn’t start advertising until April. Reading forums, such as Lay My Hat, it seems that the peak booking time is January, which we obviously missed last year. So 2008 is our first full booking season, so are we getting any bookings, when are we getting them and where are we getting them from.

Well the first thing is to say where are we actually advertising. Our main paid for advertising is on Owners Direct, which is where we started advertising in April 2007 and it gave us all of our bookings for 2007. We also have a website, which I created in March 2007, and is now appearing well in the major search engines (here’s an article on some of the things you can do to start getting listed higher on Google and the other search engines). We are also on a few free sites, but they haven’t given  us any interest really so I won’t go into those any further.

So how have the bookings for the 2008 season gone? Very well really. We actually had most of high season booked by October, which was amazing and now we have all of June, July and August booked, with a couple of weeks in April, May and September as well, along with the Easter bank holiday.

So where did we get our bookings from? As I have said, in our first season Owners Direct gave us every single booking, as our website was new and not being found by search engines. Since January our website has been ranking highly on the search results. So up to November of 2007 all of our bookings were from Owners Direct, with a link to our website providing extra information for people on our gite. Since then though, and through the peak January booking window, our website has generated a lot of bookings and I would say that the website has generated about half of our bookings since November.

So bookings wise we have done very well for the 2008 season, they are arriving, even though there are a lot of gites our there you can still get plenty of bookings with the right property and price. We have found that October was quite a busy month for taking high season bookings, I suppose people who want high season often book early, and then January was really busy, even with only one gite it did seem frantic at times.

As our website improves it’s rankings on the search results we are getting more and more traffic and most importantly bookings through this, although I certainly wouldn’t give up on Owners Direct, or any other paid for listings site. Relying on the whims of a search engine for all of your advertising seems like a sure way to start to lose bookings. Saying that though the website is definitely paying it’s way and although has a longer lead time to start generating bookings and requires much more effort to get up and going, over a paid for listings site, it is well worth it and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to rent out their holiday cottage

So we’ll continue with our paid for listing and our website as well as keeping an eye out for any other opportunities for marketing our Gite without spending a vast sum of money and hope this level of bookings continues. Which paid for listings site you should use is obviously something you need to research. Different types of property do well on different sites as well as different regional areas and different countries, so do lot’s of research and enjoy it.

2 Bedroom Self Catering Cottage near Dinan, Brittany, France

Buying, Owning and Running a Gite in Brittany Blog

©Derek Arkwright 2008

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