Tips for Choosing the Right Vacation Rental Listing Website

Connecting your vacation rental properties to multiple property listing portals is an excellent way to expand your marketing reach and increase bookings. With a  myriad of options available many agencies and owners have difficulty with knowing which vacation rental listing website to you choose. There are a number of factors to consider when choosing the best portal for your vacation rentals, and a few things to look out for when finding the best fit for your properties.

Pick a portal with high search engine ranking:

You want to make sure the portal you choose receives a significant amount of visitor traffic. With guests preferring to find vacation rentals through search engines,you want to make sure that the portal you choose ranks high on search engines. A quick and easy first step is to search for keywords such as "vacation rentals in XYZ", "holiday rental homes in XYZ" on Google. This will give you a good indiciation of which sites have good search engine juice. If your audience is more international, you can use international search engine ranking tools to see which portals pop up for search querries in other countries.

In addition to these, it’s worth looking for more niche markets to focus on too, like pet-friendly portals or family-friendly sites.  The visitor traffic numbers may be less, but the visitors will be more likely to book as they are searching for something far more specific.

Find a suitable pricing model:

Another factor to consider is the pricing model in which the portal operates. When it comes to receiving payments, some portals take full payment upfront, others might keep payment until the stay is completed or until the first day of the holiday.  When it comes to the cost of using a portal, some will take a commission from the booking and others will add a commission to your vacation rental listing prices and just keep the difference.Another charge you may incur is pay-per-inquiry models and annual subscriptions.

A few good questions to ask yourself are: Do your rental owners  want to receive payments as soon as the booking is made?If so, do you have enough liquidity to pay the owners and wait for the commission to come through? Do you have enough up front to buy a years’ subscription for all your properties? Can you afford a cut in your commission to go to a portal? .

Find information on forums:

There are a number of useful blogs and forums where vacation rental owners inquire about the best vacation rental portal, including LinkedIn groupsfor vacation rental owners. HomeAway also has a large community section, where all portals are discussed. It’s worth looking around the internet to see what people think of the portal you are looking at, if they have a history of positive feedback and if their current customers are happy with them.

The above tips are just some of the things that it’s good to be looking out for when deciding which portals to work with.

If you are in need of connecting your properties to multiple portals, be sure to utilize a Channel Manager, to avoid costly double-booking. For more information or to sign up for a free demo, please feel free to contact one of our vacation rental software experts at [email protected] or on the phone (Spain) +34 512 702 105 ‧ (France) +33 1 84 17 04 18 ‧ (USA) +1 (786) 292-0030