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How do I advertise my holiday let property?

I have 2 apartments in the Azores Portugal for holiday lets, I have put them on websites, but have not received any offers yet. Any serious suggestions on how to attract customers please, names of websites etc
Here’s one advert: http://www.villarenters.com/advert_summary.asp?ref=51891

You advert is noticeably the most expensive on Faial, charging more for sleeping 4 and some places sleeping 6 cost.

I realise that your place is high-specification, with wireless internet, air-con, and DVD, but marketing a “high-end” product is a bit different to marketing a “cheap” product, and the downside of those sorts of listings is that people can easily compare your rates to those of your competitors.

I have a marketing client who owns several UK holiday rental places – for her, we set up a blog and a mailing list so that anyone who had expressed an interest in her properties got a monthly email newsletter about her area.

With her, we set up a competition for people to register for the newsletter – with one subscriber winning a free weekend each year (no strings attached.)

Clearly, a free weekend rental may be less attractive in the Azores than in the UK, but some initiative to get people to sign up to receive regular information from you is definitely recommended.

That may be overkill, or too much work for a couple of apartments, but a blog (hosted free on somewhere like WordPress.com) could be good. Regular information about the kind of things happening in the area, could lead you to a higher Google ranking for searches for things like “Faial holiday let”.

The idea is that, once a week, you’d add a post about something related to the area, or new features (DVD library now available) etc…

You may, offline, also like to consider things like club magazines. There are regular classifieds in the Morgan Sports Car Club magazine for holiday lets, and its noticeable that some are advertising as classified there, year-in, year-out, so it must be working for them! The Morgan Club may be the wrong market (the holiday properties that are advertised there tend to be ones people can drive to on a “European Car Tour”), but other clubs may be of interest.

Your local Church may produce a magazine that has low advertising rates.

Never underestimate the power of postcards in newsagent windows.

The bottom line though, to any succesful property marketing campaign is that there is no single “magic bullet” – you need to be concentrating on multiple avenues.

What you MUST do, at the very least, is keep in touch with past clients – send them a monthly/quarterly newsletter through the post… offer them a “return stay” discount of 10%, or offer them a £50 “thank you” if they recommend a friend who ends up staying.

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