Apart from our own website ...
(How do they know we're lovely?)
We've also listed on a couple of the apartment rental websites which it's free to advertise on and these did produce a few bookings last year but we decided it was time to get serious and start - ulp! - paying for some advertising. I approached this by doing a Google search of "holiday accommodation azores" to see who came up tops and was fairly flabbergasted to find that our own website comes out on the first page!
Be that as it may, I decided that an entry on top listed holiday-rentals.co.uk was the one to go for at £209 for a year's listing.
Now I've been through the mill of listing one's property on these holiday accommodation websites, the free ones, before. It's a riot of checking boxes to list the facilities available. But it has to be said that holiday-rentals.co.uk took this to an entirely new dimension. Apart from the fairly routine is there a hairdryer and tumble dryer etc., I was asked such esoterica as how many oars did my kayak have, did I have WiFi access - there wasn't a checkbox for "don't know" and I was beginning to feel like I was in the Not the Nine o' Clock News sketch "We don't sell gramophones here, grandad! Do you want woofers and tweeters? Do you want a bag over your head?"
Even more astonishingly was whether we were a "low allergen environment"? That would surely depend on what you were allergic to, wouldn't it? And perhaps most bizarrely of all was, does the property have a fish cleaning table? I kid you not.
It does as it happens.
Not recommended if you're allergic to cats, though. Or fish.
5 comments:
I ♥ the cat. Could you please arrange so that s/he sleeps in the palheiro with my husband and me?
BTW, I already have hyperlinks to Azores Choice, Neil's video and this blog on the Cultural Tourism References page of one of my websites:
http://www.inolongerlikechocolates.com/cul-tour-refs.htm (in the two sections below the list of articles)
I'll try to remember to add the hyperlink to your photo album next time I update the page.
Your Palheiro is very cosy, "simpático e acolhedor". Unfortunely, due to the conservation and restauration of my grandmother house, that appears in your pictures, with the fountain in front of PL an sr. Padre,we (me and my sister) had to sell our Palheiro, wich is now being transformed in a sort of a museum, near your house in Assomada. It was a very cosy place too aranje, but.... no money for both.
I am worried about the focus of your advertising spend. Should you not have gone for www.holiday-rentals.co.whatever-the-two-letters-are-for-all-of-scandinavia. The Scandinavians seem better versed on the attractions of the Azores than the Brits, and yours will be a lonely flag to fly in the face of our sun seeking 18-30 crowd.
Following up on David's comment: The word "holiday" as a synonym for vacation is largely unknown in the US, so Americans are most unlikely to be Googling on that as one of their keywords. That's a pretty large share of the Azores tourism market to be freezing out linguistically. Can you add some material using the term "vacation" so you can attract North American tourists (goodness knows there are plenty of us, somewhere close to 2 million of at least part-Azorean ancestry in the US and Canada).
Unless, of course, you'd prefer not to lure Ugly Americans to your little corner of paradise ;-)
I want to sell a Harley Davidson touring motorcycle.. my husbands baby ..any suggestions to advertise? Tx sue
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