Direct Holiday Homes Advertising Advice

Tips for getting the most out of your holiday home advertising

Making the most of your holiday home listing page.

Many of you will have been advertising your properties for some years and will know how to get the best from your listing page, but if you are new to holiday lettings, or just need some fresh ideas, we offer the following advice:

Your property description:

If your property is identified only by a street number, consider giving it a name. Potential guests may have viewed your property online, but will have viewed many others too and may forget where they have seen yours. And past guests may wish to return sometime in the future. A unique and memorable name will help if they need to search for your holiday home again online.

Use all the property description fields to give a full but concise description of your property. Try not to be repetitive and overly wordy. Promote the properties best features and advantages, but most importantly, be accurate, and do not oversell your property as something it is not. Before you start, browse other Algarve rental property advertisements as if you were looking for a holiday home yourself. This will help you decide what will work well for your own property.

Your photographs

A good set of photographs is the most important tool in the box when it comes to promoting your property.

Prices

Use of the price chart is optional, and if you prefer to remain ‘Price on application’ this is fine. However, if you choose not to use the chart, please ensure that you enter the minimum and maximum weekly price on the property details page, as this is a necessary system reference to order your property correctly in the search results. A displayed price range also gives visitors the confidence to enquire, when they can be sure the property is within their budget.

Calendar

Please make sure you have initiated your calendar. The absence of a calendar does not affect searches by area or property, but, if there is no calendar present on the listing, your property will NOT be included in ‘by date’ search results (as the system doesn't know whether it's available or not). This means that the visitor misses out on a full list of property options, and you could be missing out on valuable enquiries.

Please keep your calendar up to date by entering booked dates as soon as they are confirmed. Users of the site only become exasperated when properties they have carefully selected and enquired after, are not available as advertised. This reflects on the site, and therefore all our advertisers, as a whole.

To make all this a bit easier, our system enables you to automatically update your calendar from other listing sites via iCal, or alternatively, to export your LLA calendar updates to other sites (including your own website if you have one) via an iCal feed. It is simple to set up, just logon, go to edit, availability, and follow the instructions.

Reviews

The review system is by invitation to past clients. You will find instructions if you log in, go to ‘edit listing’ and then to ‘reviews’ on the menu bar. Having reviews draws attention to your property not only in the search results on Letsletalgarve, but also in the Google search results. For example, a past guest making a Google search for your property details by villa name and area will find it displayed with a star rating as per the example

If you would like the submitted reviews of your property to be automatically shared to your personal website, instructions and a code are supplied that you can copy and upload.

Offers

Our offer section is a great way to draw attention to those last minute out of peak season weeks that may be still be available. Posts in the offer section must include a genuine discount, on the original advertised price, otherwise the amount of discount and the offer conditions are up to you.

Enquiry Form

The enquiry form at the bottom of your listing page is the first point of contact for a potential customer. For security, your email address is not displayed on the listing page, but the message will be delivered by our system directly to the email you have registered with us. It is then up to you to respond directly to the enquirer. Apart from the initial enquiry on the site, your email communication remains private between you and the enquirer and is not stored at LLA. Your registered telephone number is displayed on the form so that the enquirer may choose to telephone you direct.

Please make sure that your contact email and telephone number are updated as necessary and we advise you you to make a test enquiry to yourself, to check that your email address is receiving the form correctly. If your email provider has a particularly strong spam filter you may find the enquiry in your junk folder, in which case you will need to select the email and identify the enquiries@letsletalgarve.com as not spam. Hotmail in particular has a strict spam filter.

Security and owner verification

In these times of increasing fraud, we must do our best to verify that the properties displayed on our site are genuine, and being offered by the real owners. If you have not yet received your AL licence number, you may provide us with either a copy of your certidao, or a services invoice (water or electricity bill for example) which clearly shows the property address in your name. If you are a manager listing the property for the owner, we will require evidence of the property owner’s instruction for you to act on their behalf. Properties providing either AL licence number or other certification will be highlighted on the website as ‘verified’

We hope this guide is helpful. If you have any other questions regarding making the most of your listing, please get in touch.