What are the most popular websites for advertising a Gite?

[Fumanzoku]

What are the most popular websites for advertising a Gite?

[Claire]

We use French Connections which has proved very successful with the English market.  We do not advertise in France yet

[Lizzie15]

There are so many sites that it's hard to say.What works well for one property doesn't always work for another. Most of the free sites are a complete waste of time in my experience.

 

[MargaretD]

We've been using holiday-rentals.com since last February, and were pleased with the number of weeks we've had booked.  We do have a problem though with messages from people wanting to book, as orange.fr keep thinking they are spam, so...

M

[Artois]

We use holiday-rentals.com and although they generate some bookings for us they also generate a lot of time wasting enquiries and a considerable number of scammers.

Maybe this is true of all internet based advertising?

[mitsi]

We have had most of the last 2 years bookings from Visit France, very good the first year, not so many enquiries the second. Strangely they have a stats counter to track people looking at the ad, there are so many per week, yet not a single enquiry. Anyone else notice the problem?

Currently looking to change advertising,. Has anyone experience with Owners Direct and holiday havens?

I get about 100 spam messages a day at th moment, so it doesn't matter who you advertise with, if it has your e-mail address you are fair game, apparently!

[Sabina]

Only got one enquiry and no bookings with Holiday Havens so could not recommend them.

Apart from 40% return bookings, all my bookings came from Visit France this year.

Sabina

[Loire Cottages]

I would recommend Owners Direct and Homelidays. Both sites have generated lots of enquiries and bookings. Tried Holiday Havens, but it did not generate one enquiry. Have just gone onto Holiday Lets .net on advice from another advertiser.

[JJ]

This is our third year with good old Chez Nous.

They are not cheap at about £500 for an eighth page colour ad in their very large brochure (more like a telephone directory), and an entry on their equally large website.

Love them or hate them, they have provided us with loads of enquiries and bookings, but they do not work for everybody.

Historically their customer service to those who advertise with them has been pretty appalling. So they can only improve, can't they?

I would agree with an earlier poster that the free sites are a waste of time, but if you get smething from them at least it is free.

[suzi05]

We get about half and half of our bookings from holiday-rentals and Chez Nous.

Chez Nous are frustratingly useless when it comes to customer service, but they come up with the goods as far as bookings are concerned, and actually if you just advertise on their website they're not that expensive. Their brochure is too big to search through anyway in my opinion, and every one of our bookings from them last year came from their website - hardly anyone had even seen their book!

Holiday-rentals are great - you can do everything (updates etc) yourself online.

If you're thinking of taking out new advertising, I'd advise doing a mock search on the site of your choice for a property such as your own to see how they sort them. French connections for example have a "private pool or shared pool" option rather than just pool or don't care which. I think this was responsible for our absolute lack of enquiries from them as when forced to choose upfront most people would choose private and ours is shared.

suzi

www.patiras.com/trinite.htm

[JJ]

 Their brochure is too big to search through anyway in my opinion, and every one of our bookings from them last year came from their website - hardly anyone had even seen their book!

I would disagree with the above re the CN Brochure, yes it is too large, but a lot of people who have booked with us have browsed the brochure first, then gone onto the CN website. I have even known people making bookings from ads in the CN brochure of a few years ago.

[mascamps.com]

Don't rule out the free sites.

It is certainly true that, for the most part, an individual free site may well give you very few bookings but there are a fair number of them. See, for example, my list at www.ourinns.org/freesites.htm which highlights a number that we know have produced bookings for us or others.

The other thing I've found is that some free sites give us a small number of very large bookings. The free sites tend to be written and marketed differently and therefore can attract a slightly different profile of guest than you'd normally get. For instance, we picked up a 3000€ booking 18 months ago from one site and another 1500€+ booking from the same site a year later. That's the best single one and it's VERY good when you consider that it was a B&B booking: that 3000€ was something like 15 room nights plus substantial meals. Now, to my mind, that's probably paid for my time spent listing myself with all the free sites put together before you even count maybe five or six that have produced one or two smaller bookings or even what I imagine must be a steady stream of bookings from that 3000€ site given the sheer number of hits that they bring me.

Incidently, don't be too bothered about the look of some of the free sites. Some of them have been around for years and are quite antiquated; this doesn't stop them working very well (our 3000€ site looks quite dreadful: www.chambres-hotes.org, no connection with me).

I'd also be wary of just following the crowd in selecting booking sites. For instance, we figured that Chez Nous was a good place to be so forked out £700 odd receiving 2 or 3 enquiries and no bookings. I know that others find it very useful but the problem is that you need to part with a lot of cash to find out if it will work for you whereas you can use that same money to list with, say, visitfrance and frenchconnections and still have change left over.

 

Arnold

 

[JJ]

Arnold,

I have just checked out your list of free sites, and I was amazed at just how many there are.

I will certainly give them a try, nothing to lose apart from a bit of time.

It would be great if I could survive with just freesites and not have to pay an arm and a leg to chez Nous etc

Cheers.

[mascamps.com]

One aspect about the free sites is that because they don't cost anything, people tend to add themselves and stay on them 'til they pack it in whereas they obviously don't stay on a given paid-for site forever.

That doesn't seem like such a "big thing" but it appears to have the effect that free sites do better for individual properties listed on them than they do for their home domain. Net effect of that is that someone like visitfrance puts a lot of advertising money into advertising visitfrance.co.uk and therefore their domain ranks quite well on searches. Free sites work in reverse so, for example, although ourinns.org doesn't necessarily rank so well on searches, properties on the ourinns database actually do rank quite well on searches.

You can check this out yourself easily enough by picking someone listed on a freebie site and doing a search for them. Going by my own stats, it looks like there isn't a whole lot of difference in how well a freebie listing ranks vs a paid-for one, though there'd be a statistical bias in my stats of course. It's always worth doing a little test like that: if by chance you find that your £150-odd to visitfrance/frenchconnections/etc. is coming up on google at position 1 to 3 and a freebie listing is coming up in position 2 to 4, you have to question that £150 spend. As I say, from my stats, that situation seems to be quite common. Incidently, I've never seen a Chez Nous entry coming up.

I think it's a side-effect of people rarely leaving a free site so the google et al links remain static. If I'm right, then the longer you are on a freebie site, the more hits you'll get from it.

 

Arnold