Posted on August 1st, 2010 in Scam Attempts | Comments Off
Below is a copy of an email that over the past two days has been sent to quite a number of owners with properties in a number of countries. Please treat as a scam attempt.
Full Name: David Francis
Email: davidfrancis11@ymail.com
Phone: +1386-490-1783
Message: Hello , Am David Francis from Florida USA and i will like to know if your property is available from : Checking Date : 1 Nov 2010 Checkout Date 30th Dec 2010 2 Adults : 0 children Let me know if the property is available or not and don\’t forget to include the price if the property is available Thanks David Francis .
Customer loyalty is vital to all kinds of businesses in all kinds of fields and the travel industry is no exception. Incentivising past customers to keep coming back is, after all, much less expensive than attracting new ones.
Frequent flyer programmes came into existence nearly 30 years ago when American Airlines introduced their AAdvantage scheme to reward their customers for their loyalty. Since then, it is estimated that more than 100 million individuals have chosen to participate in one or other of the airlines’ programmes.
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Even if you don’t intend doing anything more with your holiday than lying and sunning yourself on the beach by day and relaxing in restaurants and bars in the evening, learning something of the local language can enrich your experience tremendously. Far from needing to become fluent, even just a few words can help you to win hearts, immerse yourself in the culture and even save you money!
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Trying to keep children occupied when you are travelling on holiday can be a nightmare. What to us may be nothing more than a short hop and a few hours of inconvenience can feel like a lifetime of boredom and frustration to them. Away from their familiar surroundings and their beloved toys, and often without much of an idea as to what to expect when they eventually reach their destination, the whole experience just makes them nervous, cranky and downright difficult.
Unless you happen to live and be staying right next door to your departure and arrival airports, the chances are that it isn’t just the flight that your children are going to have to endure either, but probably a car or coach ride at each end too. If you don’t go prepared, it won’t just be the children’s tempers that will have reached boiling point by the time you get there – your blood pressure could well be off the scale too!
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Aside from standing out as one of the coastal resorts on southern Spain’s Costa del Sol to retain much of its traditional charm and avoid the fate of becoming littered with high-rise concrete buildings, Nerja has another very special claim to fame. Just three kilometres from its town centre is where you will find the spectacular Caves of Nerja, or Cueva de Nerja.
Discovered by a group of schoolboys who were hunting for bats in 1959, the caves proved to be an important find indeed, as they not only offered up proof of man’s existence in the area more than 20,000 years previously, but also contain the only known examples of cave paintings dating back to the Upper Palaeolithic era, somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago. Although what is known as the Show Gallery was opened up to the public the year after its discovery, the Upper and New Galleries were not discovered until 1960 and 1969 respectively. Even now, only the various ‘halls’ which go to make up the Show Gallery are fully open to the public, although some of the other chambers and caverns can be explored by over 14 year-olds joining a speleological group, details of which are available by calling or visiting the Caves.
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Experiencing the weather, the sights and the culture of far-off places can leave many of us with thoughts of buying a property abroad, either as a holiday home or even as somewhere to live permanently in the immediate or more distant future. In most cases, however, the image that we have in our minds is one which is based on our experience of summer in our favourite location, and of course that can often be very different to how things look at other times of the year.
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Situated almost exactly at the halfway point between the former and current capitals of Crete, Rethymnon is the third largest town on Greece’s largest island. Dating back to the 3rd century AD and being in a location which was strategically important to its European neighbours, it wears the influences of the many attempts to hold it captive, most notably those of the Venetians and the Turks.
Like its neighbours, Chania and Heraklion, Rethymnon is a delightful mix of the ancient and the modern. Old shuttered buildings dating back to Venetian times nestle comfortably alongside more recently-built shops, restaurants and cafes, leaving no visitor to the town short of interest. Whether you want to explore the ‘Fortezza’, the Venetian fortress which sits at the heart of Rethymnon and overlooks the town, soak up the atmosphere of the narrow alleyways and streets which sit behind the harbour, shop in the many modern boutiques that the town has to offer or do like the Greeks and simply while away the hours looking out to sea over a leisurely cup of coffee, you will never find yourself short of things to do, whatever the time of day or evening.
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Just a quick post to let you all know that although we were doing free advertising for owners on the site, we are going to have to bring this to an early end for a number of reasons.
We have been inundated with new registrations and have had lots of properties added. Unfortunately a lot of these have been of a poor standard probably due to the FREE nature. I feel that this can only reflect badly on the site as people want quality when looking for a holiday home and not some shack out in the boonies. Some of the ads that have attempted to be added have been almost laughable and I cant imagine that for one minute these people can truly beleive that they are going to rent them out.
It would seem that people only really value something when it costs them money.
So from June the site will paid only. The new price is going to be 75 Euro’s per year for the initial property and then 45 Euro’s per year for each additional property. This still represents great value for owners as we are still getting lots of traffic to the site. We are also creating more and more content on the site which should help to bring even more interest.
I wish you all a good summer and hope that your advertising is successful.
Rob
Thought I would make a quick post in order to give everyone and update on the state of play with Direct Holiday Lets.
Its only been a week or so but we have already been inundated with owners adding their properties which has been fantastic. Keep adding them, the more the better.
Don’t forget that for just 20GBP you can make your property featured on the site, giving it lots of exposure.
Also, please, if you have your own website and are using my free service, please place a link back to Direct Holiday Lets. It is appreciated and will help us all. It doesn’t take long to do, so please help us now that we are a free service.
I would like to say one thing though. If you think FREE means that you can just add any old crap then you are sadly mistaken. If any listings are not complete in any shape or form, for example, poor quality photo’s, lack of info(one sentence followed by “take a look at www.xxx for further info”, no rates and poor use of the English language, they will be removed in a HEARTBEAT!! You will recieve no explanation and no warning. Don’t waste your precious time or mine.
Just because we are offering free advertising does not mean we want crap properties OR dirty old bloody caravans listed.
Anyway, just wanted to get that off my chest 
Its been a tough year as a holiday rental listing company and for those who have noticed, we have been changing our pricing structure some what during the last year in order to try and get a feel for the industry and obviously try to attract as many owners as we can to advertise with us.
We have now decided that we are going to offer free advertising. Thats right, absolutely free!
The reason for such generosity is that we feel that the market is so competitive and it is becoming increasingly hard what with the UK credit crunch and Euro to GBP currency exchanges for owners to advertise effectively on multiple listing sites as some are charging so much money for the pleasure but not providing enough value for that money.
We feel that by offering free advertising we can offer holiday home owners what will be the best value advertising on the net. Its free after all, so you can’t get much better value than that. This does not mean that we will not be promoting the site. We will be working as hard as ever to make sure we continue to rank well for our major keywords on google and the other search engines as well as marketing the site in other ways online.
We still have one of the most user friendly sites on the web for holiday rental listings and feel that Direct Holiday Lets will soon be the major player in FREE online holiday home advertising.
Don’t forget that we also have 3 extra portal sites that we use www.directholidayfrance.co.uk, www.directholidayflorida.co.uk and www.directholidayspain.co.uk all of which list the holiday rentals for their respective countries directly from Direct Holiday Lets, so if you add a property in one of these countries you will get even more exposure on the web.
We will also be allowing agents to advertise on the site which has not really been the case in the past. All of these changes should take place within the next few days.
All in all we feel that there are going to be some good times ahead for owners and holiday makers alike. Stay tuned and join us on our journey. Free of course!
