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Top Seven Features of Vacation Rental Websites

Beyond your rental properties themselves, there is nothing more important for property owners than your vacation rental website. Your vacation home and it's business website, layout, design, and theme are the face of your business to the traveler, boosting bookings and improving the guest rental experience. But it can also eliminate the heavy lifting of management, acting as sales and marketing staff, booking agent, even accounts receivable. No matter how much you depend on partner websites such as Airbnb to drive bookings, your own website should be playing a critical role in building your business.

Most of us would probably not ask Google how to fix our car engine because they are complicated beasts. Building an effective vacation rental website is also complicated. Don’t take our word for it, go ahead and search “how to design website templates” or “how much is a website template”. Unless you're a designer already and have built templates before, taking on a project like this will cost you a lot of time and money as you work through design, theme and style issues. If designer is not already in your work portfolio, leave it to Kigo and our web design templates to take the hassle out of website building project.

The good news is that you can use a Kigo website template to create a world-class vacation rental website without any expertise at all – one that works just as well as a site that would cost tens of thousands to develop from scratch.

Here are seven features that our professional WordPress website templates bring to your business to help you increase online visibility and bookings:

1. Elegant & Professional Vacation Rental Website Design

Potential travelers rarely can check out your vacation home in person. Your vacation rental website is all they have to form an impression. Naturally, this means you need an enticing style, hi-res property photos (and videos, ideally), but that’s not all: the site design itself must radiate professionalism and elegance. Even the most alluring rental property will lose bookings when presented with a mediocre design on a site. Airbnb illustrates how a rental property can be presented to lure travelers. Website templates such as Kigo’s that are pre-designed by talented, experienced website designers give your rental a huge advantage when marketing your rental property. And a pre-designed template does not mean one size fits all though, Kigo’s professional website templates can be customized and tailored to your rental business.

2. Responsive Website Templates

Google has provided statistics that state that over 40% of online transactions are happening on mobile. With this in mind, Kigo has built responsive website templates that are mobile-friendly and that focus on fast pagespeed.

3. 3-click Website Navigation

The 3-click rule is a usability best practice stating that users should be able easily to navigate to any page on a website layout within 3 clicks. Modern web trends debunked this rule, but the general idea still applies. It’s amazing how many rental websites in the travel business still make it difficult to find the information you’re looking for due to poorly thought out site structure. Along these lines, the site should also have a powerful responsive search feature with filtering, such as Airbnb and HomeAway. Travelers can search based on whatever criteria matters to them (cost, number of bedrooms, views, pet-friendly, service fees, amenity or whatever you choose to include). And cross-selling, which Kigo sites offer, present alternate rental accommodations if what travelers are looking for isn’t available.

4. Built for High Conversion Rate

Online sales are about more than just driving traffic to your website. If your site has a low conversion rate and high abandonment rate your users are progressing through the entire sales funnel and exiting right before booking. When it comes to online booking of vacation properties, it’s all too frequent. The website doesn't feel trustworthy, there is no logical progression between landing pages, or the layout is confusing and not responsive enough. Let’s face it: how much patience do you have for a clunky, slow responsive website. A smooth, straightforward website such as the style used by listing sites like TripAdvisor, HomeAway or Airbnb is now the norm. Selecting the right template for website makes responsive booking a no-brainer – like Kigo’s sites, which feature templates that are no-hassle for quick booking.

5. SEO Friendly Website

Before someone books with you, they first have to find you. Online visibility and SEO go hand in hand, and your Kigo vacation rental website comes out of the box optimized for search engines. One way to increase traffic to your website is by adding fresh content. Kigo makes this easy to do with a built-in blog. We also make it easy to share this content with built-in social media links. We realize that as a property manager you have enough to do without having to manage your website daily.

6. Feature Properties Carousel

Your vacation rental website should be designed so that when time’s running out to get a property rented, or you the vacation rental owner want to showcase a certain property to a traveler, it’s easy to create a "special" or “featured property” theme into a highlighted position on your modern and responsive site. This is the kind of design that is very hard to do on your own unless you’re an experienced website designer – but the right template makes it easy to drop a "special" right into place.

7. Email Integration

The easier and more responsive it is for prospects to get answers quickly, the less likely they are to move on to other properties and the more bookings you’ll get. Your vacation rental website layout should enable both email and phone calls, and support should be responsive long after normal business hours for travelers. Kigo sites do all of this and offer multilingual options to reach global audiences.

There’s more to great vacation rental websites than what we’ve looked at above, but take care of these and you’re way ahead of the pack.

New website packages from Kigo

We’re proud of how new and improved Kigo websites are taking so many vacation rental managers’ businesses to the next level, featuring all of the advantages listed above and many more. Here’s some of what they deliver:

FOR GUESTS:

  • Elegant & Professional Vacation Rental Website Design
  • Simple three-click booking
  • Easy payment options
  • Responsive website template
  • Multilingual support (up to seven languages)

FOR YOU:

  • Super-simple set up, customization and maintenance
  • Dashboard for fast, easy updates and content changes
  • Seamless integration with Kigo reservations, Channel Manager and listing portals
  • Highlighting of featured properties and special offers
  • Cross-selling for alternate accommodations, so you don’t lose customers
  • SEO Friendly Website for improved online visibility

Our experience with the new Kigo website has been nothing short of impressive. The simple and functional design is in keeping with today’s trend. We really like the property search feature, which is fast and easy to use. Property search results are clear and eye catching, similar to what you’d expect in popular website portals for holiday rentals. Performance has been consistently fast. One priority we always had when evaluating Kigo Websites and other similar technology offerings in the market was mobile responsiveness, knowing that a growing number of our clients are accessing our website from mobile. Very early on we realised Kigo Websites have a remarkably mobile responsive design. And we can tell the team behind it are committed to improve on this even further from the constant updates to the platform, with each update resulting in the website looking even better on mobile. The CMS is very easy to use and makes updating the website a pleasurable experience, as you’d expect with a WordPress website. There are a few improvements we would like to see with how special offers are presented, and how quotes are displayed on property pages. We’ve requested some minor changes regarding these features and we’ve been advised the team understood our concern and are working on improving them. We’re happy with our decision to go for a Kigo Website and would definitely recommend it to anyone considering a new website for their holiday rental business.

-Ishmael Portelli, Operations Manager, Gozo Village

kigo-website

 Starter and Premium packages give you a choice

Are you fine with a standard template, or do you want to customize things like layouts, fonts and buttons? The Starter Package is just right for some, where those who want more customization choose the Premium package. The Premium package also adds advanced marketing and search features.

Kigo vacation rental websites give you the sophistication and effectiveness of the top websites in the industry, without the arduous and expensive process of building them yourself or paying someone to do it or you. And our experts are here to help you every step of the way. Schedule a demo to and learn how Kigo can help you create a website that grows your business like never before!

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