Direct Holiday Lets Blog

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 3^rd 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!

Hello,

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we are now offering advertising on the site for just 25 GBP per year for all properties. This is a saving of 10 GBP from our previous price.

The reason for the change is that there is so much competition within the holiday rental listing market I felt that trying to follow suite and do as the big boys do would be neither practical nor financially viable as a lot of the big sites are owned by large corporations and have large marketing budgets to play with.

So, I felt that it would be better to offer what I still believe to be a very good service at a really competitive price. Lets face it, 25 GBP per year is not that much money considering we are still getting around 20,000 visitors per month. I think this does represent great value for money.

This does not mean that we will be working less on the site and promoting on the web on a regular basis. I will be working even harder to reach as many holiday makers and owners as possible in order to show both that Direct Holiday Lets is probably the webs most cost effective form of advertising and a great source of quality holiday home rentals.

If you need to contact me, please use the contact form on the site. I am only too happy to hear from you all.

Have a good day.

Rob

Good Afternoon,

Over the coming weeks I will be adding a series of holiday destination guides to the site.

I have already added a guide to France and also a guide to Italy. I hope to added many more guides to the most popular destinations very soon.

These guides are mainly for renters but hopefully they will be of some use and interest to all.

Have a good week!

Rob

Firstly, I would like to wish all of our owners and renters a happy christmas and very healthy, peaceful and prosperous new year. I hope you all have a wonderful time.

Now on to my favorite subject. Scammers.

It does appear that the more successfull that Direct Holiday Lets becomes due to our excellent rankings on the major search engines, the more we will all become targets to internet scammers looking to rip off holiday home owners.

Although we do not receive too many scam emails(and all listing sites do) I have decided to create a brief guide on what to look for and how to deal with such attempts.

Please read our “How to identify and deal with scam attempts” page so that you are aware of what these look like and how to approach them.

I wish everyone every success in the new year.

Happy New Year!!!

Rob

Evening,

Wow, I cant beleive it. U.S based Home and Away Inc have now purchased http://www.ownersdirect.co.uk/ which is their fourth holiday listing site acquisition in less than a year!! Read it officially here http://www.homeaway.com/index.cfm/tgt/od_press_release_100207

This means that they now own a whole host of holiday rentals sites inlcuding holiday-rentals.co.uk, vrbo.com, abritel, cyberrentals and many others.

My thoughts on this are how is this going to affect the online holiday rentals market? And more importantly from an owners point of view how is this going to affect you?

As a lot of you know that Direct Holiday Lets is still a relatively young site as it was only established in early 2007, but already we have almost 200 properties listed which is great(big thanks to all you owners).

My main concern though for an owner of a properties listed on one of these “mega sites” is “Will they ever be seen??”. Afterall, when a holidaymaker has the choice of hundreds if not thousands of properties in there chosen country or region how do you know whether yours is going to get the exposure you want and not lost in that proverbial haystack?

I think that having too many properties listed on a listing site can also have an effect on the holidaymakers whole search experience.

We already know that a lot of the big sites have special deals for placing your property further up the listings or making them more prominent on the site but WHAT NEXT with these “mega listing sites”? Well, you know about Google Adsense dont you and cost per click? Yes Mr and Mrs owner, have your property listed across our 500 sites pay per click style!!

Think im kidding? It could be the only way you will be able to have your property consistently viewed on these sites in the near future. Pay more dear owner and someone will actually see your rental property!!

Im proud to say that Direct Holiday Lets still only costs 35 GBP per year for the first property and 25 for each subsequent property. Now, that I think is great value! Oh and your property will be found!

Just a thought!

Rob

Hello,

Good afternoon from sunny spain.

I thought I would take a few minutes to let you all know that we are now offering all owners 6 months FREE listing on Direct Holiday Lets in the event that you do not acquire any new bookings through our site after registering and paying for a years advertising with us.

So, this means that If in the unlikely event that after a year you have not had any bookings via our site, simply let us know and if we are satisfied that this is the case, you will receive 6 months advertising completely free.

If you have any questions in regards to this, please contact me via our contact form on the site.

Happy renting.

Rob