Running a self-catering holiday cottage business
Thousands of people in the UK and abroad run self-catering holiday cottages. For some it’s an attempt to provide additional income from a cottage they have inherited, or an attempt to keep a family home and make it pay for itself, for others it’s very much a full-time business, especially if a number of cottages is involved.
- Marketing and promotion
- Taking payments
- Cleaning and maintenance
- Bookings Management
- Accounts and Wages
- Insuring your cottage(s)
- Energy Performance Certificate 2011
- Long-term cottage advertising concerns
- List of specialist publications to be added soon
Overview of advertising media
Cottage owners used to advertise in the Saturday and Sunday papers, or local paper, in the belief that people have more time to read the papers at weekends. We know from our stats on the web that Saturday is the day when fewest people look for accommodation - it tends to be the day when people go shopping and do other things.
|
Cost
|
Size of Ad
|
Photos
|
Website URL
|
Link
|
Duration
|
Circulation
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
National newspapers
|
Expensive
|
Small
|
Extra cost
|
Yes
|
No
|
1 day
|
National
|
Local Newspapers
|
Slightly less expensive
|
Small
|
Extra cost
|
Yes
|
No
|
1 week
|
Local/
county |
Internet
|
Free-Expensive
|
Small-Extensive
|
Mostly
|
Some
times |
Some
times |
3 months
– 1 year |
Global
|
Specialist Magazines
|
Expensive
|
Small
|
Extra cost
|
Yes
|
No
|
1 Month
|
Limited
|
Cottage Brochures
& Agencies |
Around 20%-23% of your takings
|
Reasonable
|
Yes
|
No
|
No
|
1 year
|
National
|
The Internet offers the advantage of being available 24/7. Your advert can contain more information, several photographs and a link to your own website if you have one. Coverage is theoretically global and only limited by the users own language. A different difficulty presents itself on the web in that your advert is competing with thousands of others in various web sites and the way that people search for cottages is much more flexible than just searching by country and county.
There are so many different ways to advertise on the Internet, for example shooting a video of your holiday cottage and uploading it free to Youtube.com.
- Advertise everywhere you can for free
- Advertise on portals that provide links to your own website
- If you have your own website which a lot of DIY marketers do, add articles, join mailing lists; anywhere that provides a free link. Do read up about links, because the descriptive text and content matching are all important.
- Ignore any company which charges a fee to submit your website to a large number of Search Engines and directories. The larger search engines will visit your site and index it as long as a link to it exists somewhere on the web. You can also manually submit your website for indexing if you wish.
..... continued
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17 Fennfields Road
South Woodham Ferrers
Essex
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