Author: Horizon Cottages - December 30, 2021
Last updated: March 27, 2023
Whether you have an established holiday cottage business or you're just starting out, where to advertise your holiday cottage needs careful consideration.
There are lots of options available for advertising your property, but how do you pick which one will work best for you?
In this article we look at some of the best ways to promote your holiday cottage.
Creating a website for your holiday cottage should probably be the first thing you should do to promote your holiday cottage and generate booking enquiries. Your website can start off by giving potential guests all the information they could need about the holiday cottage, along with lots of photos for them to look through.
If you're not ready to incorporate online bookings yet, then the guests would need to phone or email you to book. But an online booking option should be high on your list of website features to help reduce your own admin as well as giving guests instant informaiton on availability and allowing them to book your holiday cottage at any time of the day or night.
If you have more than one holiday cottage you need to decide whether you build seperate websites for each cottage or whether to have a website for each cottage.
You can use of one the many online tools to create your website or you can contract a professional website designer to build a website for you. Budget a minumum of £1000 for a simple one page website, domain name registration and website hosting. If you are quoted less than this it may be a sign of the quality of work or reflective of the lack of experience of the web designer.
A professionally built website which looks great on both mobile devices and larger screens, is optimised for search engines and loads quickly takes skill and experience.
Ideally you will be able to budget for a website which contains much more infomation, detailed descriptions of the cottage and rooms, things to do in the area, online booking, terms and conditions of booking and so on.
Although uncommon, some holiday cottage owners skip having a website built and go straight to creating a Facebook Page for their cottage instead.
This is probably something most people can acheive themselves as it's easy to crate a Facebook page, and this is one of the reasons some cottage owners choose this route.
However, although Facebook has billions of user accounts, not everyone is on Facebook, and even those who are on Facebook wouldn't necessarily head to Facebook to look for a holiday cottage.
Also, and we don't expect this is likely to happen any time soon, what if Facebook ceased providing their service and it was the only place details of your holiday cottage could be found on the Internet! Or what if Facebook were to suufer a major outage which takes their service offline for an extended period of time.
We would suggest that you create a Facebook page and use Facebook to drive traffic to your holiday cottage website rather than be the only source of information about your cottage.
As we've just said about Facebook, some holiday cottage owners may choose to skip building a website and go straight to creating an Instagram account for their holiday cottage.
All the reasons we were against skipping the creation of a website and going straight to creating a Facebook page instead apply to skipping the creation of a website and going straight to building an Instagram presence.
Having said this, Instagram is a great way of quickly uploading lots of photos of your holiday cottage for people to see. Assuming people are following your new Instagram account!
So perhaps you can create an Instagram account and start uploading photos while your sparkling new website is being built. Create a buzz about your holiday cottage by uploading some photos and start building awareness of your holiday cottage ready for when the website is launched.
You may decide that you do not want to promote your holiday cottage yourself and, instead, go directly to one of the many holiday cottage agencies who will handle everything for you. The photography, the copywriting, the bookings, even the cleaning in some cases.
This is a great option for cottage owners wishing to go with a 'hands off' approach. It also means your cottage is likely to benefit from the business the holiday cottage agent has already built up so bookings could start to come in very quickly. But this convenience comes at a cost. The booking agency will take a percentage of your booking income meaning you may only get 75% of the income your cottage generates, possibly less.
Each holiday cottage agent will have their own terms and conditions and charging structure. Check whether they charge a listing fee, a photograhy fee, a copywriting fee or any other fee associated with onboarding you or the ongoing inclusion of your holiday cottage on their platform.
Also check whether you are able to take bookings yourself, or if the agent requires that they are the sole booking platform.
Horizon Cottage lists over 26,000 holiday cottages all over England, Scotland and Wales on behalf of bookings agents and individual cottage owners.
We have a simple charging structure. You pay an annual listing fee, but no ongoing commission when bookings are made. This means you receive all of the cottage rental without the deduciton of booking fees or commissions. All booking enquiries are directed straight to you to process.
Typically, the listing fee is £249 + VAT per cottage, but we also have upgraded listings available as well as discounts for multiple listings.
For booking agents we do consider commission arrangements. Please contact us for details.
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