Make sure that your apartment appears prominently in HouseTrip search results. Guests use different filters and sorting mechanisms to organise their search results. You need to make sure that your apartment appears to as many guests as possible.
1. Feature highly in the default “Best Value” category.
This is the way that HouseTrip search results always appear first to guests. The calculation of the “Best Value” rating of your property is quite complex, but you can easily improve your position by creating a quality listing, updating your availability regularly and responding to enquiries quickly.
2. Is your apartment really priced competitively?
Price is the most common way guests choose to reorder their search results, so you need to make sure that your apartment is competitive. Benchmark your pricing against similar local holiday apartments. Check their minimum length of stay as well as their price per night. You can also take a tip from local hotels, which normally have a far more sophisticated pricing structure than holiday apartments. You can use that to your advantage. Do local hotels charge more at weekends, or during the week? Do they adjust their prices over the year, according to seasonal demand? If your apartment is new in a competitive market, price it slightly below the competition until you have built up a good reputation. This will help to attract more guests.
Ensure that guests click on your apartment in HouseTrip search results. Your apartment has to stand out from the crowd. You may have a brilliant property profile page, but if guests never click on your listing, they’ll never see it.
3. Write a great headline.
Include proximity to local attractions and amenities. Accurate descriptions (“converted loft in historic building”) are normally more helpful than effusive adjectives (“incredible beautiful apartment”), but if you want to unleash some epithets, try to make your apartment sound a bit different. “Quaint central apartment with river view Paris” is the type of headline that gets guests interested.
4. Choose a eye-catching thumbnail photo
It really needs to make your apartment stand out. Try taking a photo from an unusual angle, so it looks a bit different. Or simply choose the best of your photos. The best bet is normally an outside view or the view of the living room/lounge. Don’t pick the one of the bathroom or kitchen.
Reel guests in on your property profile page. This is your chance to really sell your apartment. Make sure that your property profile is so good that guests don’t want to even look at another one.
5. Write an interesting, informative description.
Describe everything that is great about your property and the location. What are the interesting or unique features? How close are transport links? What is nearby? Guests are interested! Make sure you proofread your text carefully (even better, get someone else to do it as well) as typos can ruin the professional appearance of a listing.
6. Showcase your listing!
Include plenty of high quality, high resolution photos. Photos should include lots of natural light, something of interest and look inviting. Try to include as much of the room as possible by standing well back when you take the shot. Try putting a bowl of fruit and some magazines in the living room, or make sure the kitchen is spotless.
7. Generate reviews.
Reviews are a crucial part of the modern guest’s arsenal for choosing accommodation. A guest choosing between two relatively similar properties will normally opt for the one with complimentary reviews, even if they originally preferred the other one. Little touches can help to generate reviews. Put yourself in the guest’s position. What would you want if you were staying in a holiday apartment? Complimentary soap and shampoo for the bathroom. A carton of milk in the fridge and some tea, coffee and sugar in the kitchen. Towels in the bedrooms. Gestures like these require minimal effort, but make all the difference for guests. And don’t forget the obvious! Leave a guestbook open in a visible place, with a pen. If you collect keys from guests at the end of their stay, ask them if they’ve enjoyed their stay and whether they would mind writing a review on HouseTrip.
When guests decide that your apartment is the one they want, make sure they can book it!
8. Regularly update your availability.
For one thing, guests cannot book on HouseTrip if the apartment does not appear available in the calendar. For another, it’s frustrating for them to make enquiries about an apartment that looks available, only to find that it’s not. Updating your availability regularly will also help to keep your apartments featuring highly in our search results, which means that more guests will see them.
9. Be flexible with your minimum length of stay and adjust it according to demand and availability.
Minimum lengths of stay of one week might work during peak periods and in prime locations, but it’s not guaranteed to work in low season. Added to that, there is an untapped market of countless thousands of guests who would rather stay in a holiday apartment than a hotel, but only want to stay for a couple of nights. We know, because we speak to them every day. If you want to experiment, try this. Every time you have an imminent period of availability that has not been filled, edit that availability on HouseTrip, changing the minimum length of stay to only one night. By doing this, you can massively widen your market. Several of our hosts have experienced remarkable results using this system.
10. Respond quickly to enquiries.
Potential guests are often interested in various properties. If they want to check availability, they will often send multiple enquiries. The quickest host to respond will regularly get the booking, as it increases the guest’s confidence that the property is well managed. That means it really pays to respond quickly. Responding quickly to enquiries will also help your listing to appear more prominently in HouseTrip search results.
11. Offer alternatives to guests.
HouseTrip is launching a new feature soon that will allow hosts to make a special offer to guests, offering a different stay, a different price or a different property that is available.
- A guest wants to stay for six days but you only have five available? Offer the five days you have available! If you make a special offer, you’re likely to exactly fill your available period.
- You don’t normally accept bookings for less than five days, because of fixed costs, but a guest wants to stay for three and you don’t have any other bookings? Propose a slightly higher price per night! You’ll fill availability and generate revenue.
- A guest enquires about a property that’s unavailable but you have another property that’s available? Propose it! Your helpfulness to the guest is likely to make them favour staying in one of your properties.
N.B. Keep an eye out for this great new feature. You’ll see it soon.
Use the power of the internet to attract more organic visitors to your listing.
12. Promote your apartment using social media.
It’s easy to create a Facebook or Twitter account, or even a blog. You can show your property to friends and acquaintances. Linking to your property on HouseTrip will gain more exposure, and letting HouseTrip deal with the booking and payment takes the potential awkwardness away from a transaction with someone you know.
13. Include keywords in your property description.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts increasingly believe that the vast majority of internet traffic comes from what is known as the “long tail”: unique search terms that are used extremely rarely or even just once. Your property description is the perfect way to take advantage of this. You are unlikely to appear in Google results for “appartement vacances Paris”, with many websites competing for the same keyword. You’ll notice that all the results on the first page of this search are websites rather than individual listings. But your actual listing might very well appear if someone types in something more specific. Try Googling “appartement vacances paris ile st louis”. Go on, try it. Just click the link. See?
Couldn’t be bothered?
and I noticed something quite interesting. Around half our bookings are currently coming from groups of at least four people. If you compare that to hotels, you’re looking at totally different demographics.
