With a multitude of new travelers searching for vacation rentals, vacation rental managers and homeowners are joining forces for one day with a singular message to let travelers know that there are many advantages to bypassing third-party channels to book directly with management companies and homeowners.
On February 7, on this inaugural non-branded Guest Education Day, managers and owners are encouraged to:
- Ask employees to use the hashtag #bookdirect on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to bring attention to the many advantages of booking vacation rentals directly with the manager or homeowner instead of on third party channels.
- Send out an email campaign to their past and prospective guests with a message about the value of booking direct, booking local, and booking smart.
It only take a about 1,200 #bookdirect tweets and retweets to trend, which will draw attention from the media about the value of booking direct and educate consumers about the hundreds of dollars they are unnecessarily paying in fees to third party channels.
Industry influencers will be supplementing the message with national media press releases and story lines.
Related: Vacation Rental Managers Share #BookDirect Messages
Here are some ideas for messaging:
- Book direct and save: Did you know that Airbnb, VRBO, HomeAway and TripAdvisor add hundreds of dollars of fees to your booking total?
- When you book direct, you have direct contact with the manager or owner: When booking a vacation rental, peace of mind is important. Want to know if there is a grill, a kayak, 24/7 service, a grocery store close by? When you book direct, you can find out many of these important questions and more before you commit to booking.
- The best price isn’t on the OTAs: Unlike hotels, OTAs and aggregators (like Airbnb, Expedia, Booking.com, VRBO.com, HomeAway, TripAdvisor, and FlipKey) don’t have the best price for travelers. In fact, you can save hundreds by booking direct and booking local.
- Many of the best vacation rentals aren’t event listed on the major sites: Because of the cost of using the big sites, the best vacation homes with the highest demand cannot be found on the big websites. Along North Carolina’s beaches, alone, only 30 percent of the homes for rent can be found on the big websites. By limiting your search to the aggregating websites, you might be missing out on the best vacation home for your family or group.
- Mangers and owners have intimate knowledge about the destination: They can direct you the best rental for your needs and send you to the best activities, restaurants, and area service providers.
- If you have special needs, a manager or homeowner can help: Looking for help with your family’s special needs or help with pets? A manager or owner can work with you directly to help with any of your individual needs and give you these assurances before you commit to a booking.
- During non-peak travel times, managers and owners have special offers available: From events and activities to special rates to onsite services, with direct communication with managers and owners, you get insider knowledge and the best offers.
While the vacation rental industry often pits managers and owners against each other, the fact is that there are both management companies and owners who strive every single day to provide amazing vacation rental experiences for guests. OTAs and third party sites have made recent changes to their business models that have been detrimental to both guests and vacation rental providers (including managers, owners, and hosts).
Coming together as an industry in this small way on this one day provides the industry with a valuable cooperative effort to push back on OTA changes and provide guests and media with much needed education about the industry.
Join vacation rental providers on February 7th using the hashtag #bookdirect to help educate guests on the advantages of booking directly with you.
Comment below with any suggestions about messaging and ideas.
The Holiday Let Success Podcast is supporting the #BookDirect movement – joins us each week on Twitter @holidayletpod & join our dedicated #TwitterChat – use #BookDirectHour to join in and in a concentrated effort each week, share our message! See you there! Elaine
We are super excited to help spread the word! So many travelers do not even know they have a choice or that a fee exists. At NewYorkRentalRBO.com we are eager to do our part in helping to spread the word by email and social media.
Every monthly e-newsletter to our (15,000+) renter opt-ins includes a reminder on the importance of booking directly with owners or local property managers.
I am so frustrated with VRBO and the like so anything I can do to get away from them is helpful. What exactly is Book Direct? Is it a listing site for homeowners, a hashtag, an information promoter? I don’t have twitter, do I need it to participate?
Hi vrmintel,
Gulf Coat Getaways have participated in the #bookdirect movement. Love the idea of educating guests about our industry. Thank you!
https://m.facebook.com/pensacolagetaways/
I own just one luxury vacation rental home in the Seattle area and it is listed on VRBO and Airbnb. I can’t tell you the frustrations we have had with these platforms and not being able to know who is asking to book our home, no contact, state, etc. is just unbelievably insane. Clients get so irritated when they can’t contact us to ask questions and it goes on and on. I would love to have my own website but I worry that ranking on search will bury us so I feel compelled to use the vacation rental sites. I am all for this!
Why not do both? They’re not mutually exclusive.
&/or sign up with #bookdirect providers who DO publish your contact details!
Thank you!
We support #BookDirect today Wed 7 Feb 2018!
Looking very much forward to this event! At Vacayrx we always provide contact information for owners/managers and allow direct communication between them and their prospective guests, Pre-Booking. Thrilled to see other platforms in agreement that this is the right way for the industry to proceed.
Great initiative. We’re promoting this from @visitexeter and @visitsouthdevon in the UK. Have already tweeted this morning @exeterselfcater
I started a similar movement that we can utilize around the world all the time. BookDirectRewards.com
It is simple, free and benefits the entire industry.
Find Rentals will be in on this.
For the past 16+ years we have educated the Traveler on all the benefits of Booking Direct with the Vacation Rental Manager. We never interfere in the booking process and never have any service or traveler fees or commissions. We always allow the traveler to book directly with the Vacation Rental Managers team and website. With over 400+ VRMs working with Find Rentals they see how we truly support the VRM industry by keeping their Brand in front of the traveler and always allowing them to book direct.
TripsIn.com will absolutely be on board February 7th. Great idea Amy & team! Our goal is just this, to help owners/property managers take back their vacation rentals and MANAGE their own leads. We are 100% a lead generation website based on educating the public to #BookDirect (#ScrewBookingFees). We are here to help support guest education and lead management. Looking forward to working together! – TripsIn.com
A matter of time…….travel agents were grossly overpaid, newspaper classified advertising and Yellow Pages never relevant or cost effective, Internet search placement hopelessly unaffordable, Visitor Bureaus corrupt, bloated, brick and mortared useless, OTA’s the premier gougers using unskilled/uncaring low ender pizza box laden cubicle slave labor ….
So much time, money wasted on “others” to determine your economic futures….these parasites were never your friend.
One word – Brilliant!
We understand the importance of transparency between the guests and the professional hosts. Fetch My Guest has been providing this transparency for the past two years, independent of OTA’s or Property Management Systems. We believe the future is bright for our industry and guest education will lead the way. #bookdirect #saynotovrbo
Tripz.com is in full support of this! Travelers need to be aware of the added costs of “Service Fees” that they can easily avoid by booking direct. We focus on helping owners build their brand and make it clear to travelers its not a site they are booking with but a great local provider of vacation rentals. Service Fees and commissions simply drive up the cost of accommodations. We all need to work together to support what makes the vacation rental community so amazing!
Great job Amy!!! We will be sure to spread the word to all of our travelers and support the initiative!
#BookDirect
What I see here that is so exciting to me is the coordination of multiple platforms towards a specific objective.This is key to everything from developing a brand for independent owners and managers to establishing standards of practice in the industry. They always say it is darkest before the dawn, this is a great step towards the daylight.
Great idea. I’m in. In fact, I was planning a press release about StaySavr/Homeaway in early Feb. Do you mind if I jump on your bandwagon and target it for 7 Feb using the #BookDirect hashtag?
Great initiative, I’ve shared this with my confreres in France!
Excellent! We’ll definitely get the message out!
I am DEFINATELY in on this. I am so tired of all the big OTA’s and their rule changes. They keep taking a larger and larger chunk of our hard earned money. When my subscriptions to trip advisor and vacation rentals.com run out in March, I am done. Booking.com I have already shut down availability. I think what angers me the most besides the financials is the fact that they no longer allow the guest and the owner to talk before booking. That has to be the most unfair rule to both sides. Guests want to ask questions and I want to know who is staying in my cottages. I am not a big Twitter user so somebody please educate me on what I need to do. Thank you and thank you for starting this initiative to whomever did it.
SunTiki cottages of Indian rocks Beach Florida
Thank you for the initiative..I have been in business 25 years and manage over 30 quality condos, villas and homes on beautiful Manasota Key in SW Florida. I advertised heavily with VRBO when they first started in business and was one of their strongest supporters….what has happened to this industry is basically a money grab by executives that have found a cash cow. They have no commitment to the travelling public and have turned the industry upside down. Can’t even begin to tell you how many guests have contacted me in desperation when they found out the VRBO property they reserved and paid for, was double booked and they were without a place to stay. The Homeaway guarantee was a joke..3 nights in a local motel and money back weeks down the road. But people are convinced that this is where you need to go to book a vacation rental. It is definitely time for property managers and owners alike to join forces and bring back customer service and some semblance of sanity and ethics to this industry . Any help you an provide is much appreciated!
Marg Johnston
Sunshine Vacation Rentals
Terrific initiative. I just hope more holiday home owners will stand on their own feet and begin the road to listing site independence by building their own website or joining with others in their region and building one together. It’s not hard to be independent.
Alan Egan’s Vacation Soup is offering a free WordPress website template to help people to be become independent and become part of a large independent network.
Of course, the catch is that it takes a bit of effort to be free and an understanding that this is a hospitality business. Relying on third parties and being restricted in the means of communication with our customers by the OTAs is a failure to understand what the business of hospitality really is.
Hospitality implies a direct person to person approach which is being destroyed by the concept of scale.
Thank you so much Amy. That’s a wonderful initiative and great support. We are happy to share it and we will use #bookdirect on 7th of February.
Great idea – we’ll promote #bookdirect in Devon, UK
#exeterselfcatering #exeterservicedapartments
Great initiative. I hope it gains some traction. We use #bookdirect and #bookfeefree in all our outbound socmed communications. The market is slowly turning 🙂
I don’t use twitter. Will my hashtags on Facebook count towards the numbers to trend?
I am very pleased with this initiative and will support you from the Netherlands. Will do my best to inform my network too!
Warm regards, Angelina
xohotels.com
Thanks Amy. This is a great article and very helpful. Our company New England Vacation Rentals just did a Book direct email blast to thousands of guests that have ever booked with us or even inquired. While we advertise on the large OTA websites-We always explain that the guest will pay higher fees on these sites and only our company New England Vacation Rentals can offer offer the lowest rates on the web if the book our professionally managed homes direct. Not only that…vacation homes are so different than booking a hotel room. Vacation Homes are unique and personal and someone sitting in a call center in another county could never assist the guest the way we can. We honestly feel Professional Rental Management companies will actually do very well as we are the ones that can offer the full package for the owner. We carefully market and vet the guest and then oversee and take care of the home before, during and after guest departure. We are the ones who have a full property management/maintenance team to be there 24/7 for our guests and owners. We are the ones who personally know each and every home that we manage and have strong relationships with our homeowners and guests. We also have super high tech reservation software that we can immediately market, book and manage a guest. Our owners love this. We really like like your idea of #bookdirect. We will use!! Thanks again–Joanne Logie Managing Partner of New England Vacation Rentals Inc.
Well great idea with this hashtags easy to track property owners:)
Seaside Vacations on the ESVA is ON it :)!