Advice needed - advertising on portal sites

[Tay]

Before to moving to France, my husband and I became quite frustrated

with gite portal websites when we needed to find somewhere to stay whilst

looking for a property to buy in France. 

At the time, we decided that we could do something better than what was

currently on offer, bought the domain name that we wanted, and until now, that

is as far as we have got with its development.

We have read a number of comments on these forums with

regard to gite/B&B portal sites and the problems with, for example, poor customer

service, lack of search options for customers, and unpredictable pricing

policies.  As there are a lot of

knowledgeable people on these forums, we would be grateful if gite/B&B

owners would spend a little time giving us their comments on what would

constitute the ideal gite portal site and how they would like to see such a

site develop.  If anybody is interested,

please send me an email via this site, and I will send a questionnaire.  As a way of saying thank you, we will offer

discounts on advertising with gitedreams.com to all of those who take the time

to respond.

[Owens88]

He He

In the UK I anjoy asking telephone 'researchers' if they abide by the Market Reserach Society code of practice with regard to SUGGING  (i.e Selling under the guise of...). As a researcher myself I always try to give time to true researchers.

 

So, as a property owner the main things I expect from a portal are that it generates enquiries, a precursor of which is that it generates appropriate traffic to its site. Some portals that once were good fell away last year on that respect. As a portal you are expected to do the advertising/pr/SEO work that is more efficient when spread over many gites. Those who cannot afford it/cannot be bothered are merely providing a technical service not a serious promotional one.

Some specialisms may have merit. I have no problem with a site that only offers gites with private pools. That wouldn't include my place but I can see the logic.

Given that its not hard to build a large catalogue of gites, and get traffic to view that catalogue,  it then is sensible to have some means of indexing the site / directing trafffic within it e.g.

Family friendly, motorbiker friendly, Saga Lout friendly,

Can walk back from a beer, has bakery, secluded

Good Luck

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Coco]

I agree with John - anyone can set up a "database" of gites and B&Bs in France.  the important thing is to make sure that you get plenty of traffic and that your site comes up on the first page when people search for such a site.  I'm sure this takes a lot of ongoing work.  I have been approached by absolutely loads of both French and English sites wanting me to add to their site.  Many are free and of course, I always add myself to those but to be honest, as someone else has said in another thread, you get what you pay for, and so far none of these sites have generated any business for me.  Therefore I have no problem with paying a reasonable sum to advertise on a site that is well maintained and is visited by a large amount of people.  What is a reasonable sum of course?  Well, I'm happy to pay 40-60 euros a year; above this amount I have to see a serious return on my investment, and as a B&B owner I have to get more than one week's gite letting to recoup my outlay.  I do subscribe to a couple of sites that charge me £100 plus VAT per year but they also get me a lot of my business.  What I WILL NOT do is pay upfront for a service until it has proved that it can work for me.  So I never subscribe to a site that hasn't given me an introductory free period of at least 3 months and preferably six.  The two "expensive" ones that I subscribe to both produced at least 3 bookings (maybe only of one night each) and several enquiries during that free period in order to make me feel they were worthwhile subscribing to.  This means that you would need a long lead time before you start to rake in any money on your new site!!

As a B&B owner I like to have a separate section on the website from the gite section, as so often people don't read the ad thoroughly and we get inundated with people wanting to hire our "gite" for a week.  Also, as I've already stated, B&B owners generally need to get more bookings to recoup their costs so in an ideal world I would like to see a lower rate for B&B advertising.  After all, even the £100 sites are cheap for gite owners, it's less than half the cost of one low season week for the average gite but it's 3 nights (which could mean 3 separate bookings) for a B&B.

If I could have my cake and eat it, I would like to be able to advertise for 3 months at a time rather than a whole year on a site without paying too much more than booking a whole year up front.  Some sites offer this kind of option but make it totally unviable by weighting the cost so much against it.  For example, they will offer a year at £100, 6 months at £80 and 3 months at £60.  I would expect to have to pay a bit more for paying quarterling, but perhaps 3 months at £30 and 6 months at £60 would make it more tempting.

You probably have totally different things that you want to know, so feel free to send me one of your questionnaires.

[Cassis]

By all means send us a questionnaire - I too used to be a market researcher!

[Cassis]

I agree that it would be foolish for anyone to sign up to a paying portal site without a free trial period - as B&B owners, we are stunned at the number of 'special offers' we get encouraging us to risk 110 euros or more on a fling with a website with no guaranteed return on investment.

But it is not true that 'you only get what you pay for' - since the end of December we have signed up with every free tourism portal we can (unfortunately this means putting in a load of reciprocal links, but they are shoved on the bottom of our French language Links page where they don't do any harm to the overall look) plus any free directories with a tourism section.  Most of these are probably a waste of time, and some are clearly rubbish, but others have produced enquiries and we have taken a number of bookings as a result. Though I suppose that you could argue that we paid for this in the time and effort it took to search for all these sites and set up the links!

Interestingly, we have also signed up for free trials with a couple of paying portals and have not had anything from either of them yet - needless to say, we won't be paying unless this changes!

[Coco]

Another tip I've found Cassis is to tell these people that you think their site looks very nice but that you have had no enquiries during your free trial period and therefore, as much as you would like to, your restricted budget won't allow you to advertise on their site until you see some return.  One site has had me on trial for over a year like this!  And I have had some bookings from them - just not enough to be prepared to pay!!!!!

[Tay]

Thank you for replying to this post, and for making a number of useful comments.

Following some of the comments made with regard to advertising B&Bs, I need to re-structure the questionnaire a little. I will forward it to all of those who are interested tomorrow.

The intention of the questionnaire wasn't really for market research purposes; it was more orientated towards getting opinions on how a gite portal site should function, especially with regard to the search function within it.  There are a number of portals out there, and they all have different search methods.  In my opinion, none of them have got it right. However, I am not everyone, so I really do need opinions from others to know what they find useful, so that I can struture the site/database accordingly.

Thanks once again, and if anyone has any more comments on this subject, please post back or email me.

[AnotherGiteOwner]

In my experience offering FREE TRIAL is the best way to get clients.

I signed up for all the free trials available, and 90% of my booking came through one company, so they are the one that I am paying for.  I certainly won't pay to advertise with a company without knowing that I am going to get any bookings.

 

http://gitesinfrance.blogspot.com/

[Quillan]

Actually I have started registering with free sites that take a commision on the booking. I won't entertain anyone who wants more than 5%. I work on the basis that I must get 5 emails a week trying to get me to part with my hard earned cash. They all claim to be leaders in the old internet stakes, got so many hits and all that. So put your money where your mouth is is my attitude. If the website is as good as they say then I should be getting bookings and they should have more money rolling in than they know what to do with. It's now getting just a bit too much really, just have a look and see how many of these companies there are now taking your money and giving crap service and no leads.