One problem with starting a new listing website is where do you get your initial listings from?
With the best will in the world it is going to take some time to build up the websites visitor numbers to make an advert worthwhile for holiday home owners.
If you have a listing website with no properties then it's not going to look very attractive to web visitors looking for a place to stay.
It's the classic chicken and egg problem, you need property listings to attract holidaymakers, and you need lots of interested holidaymakers to make it attractive to holiday home owners.
Listings Are Important For Listing Websites
That probably sounds obvious but here's why its perhaps even more important than you may have first considered.
Search engines like Google and Bing read websites and their search rankings are determined by what content they find.
A listing website which has pages essentially saying that we have no listings in that area is not really providing Google or it's users any real value, so there is no incentive for it to rank it highly, or at all.
Alongside this there is no value here for our web visitors either, a listing site with no properties is not one you'd remember or ever come back to.
This is why it was crucial for us to have some initial listings to work with.
With listings we'd have content to work with on the website and have something to offer our web visitors.
The Solution
To solve this initial listings problem we struck what is called an affiliate deal with another villa holiday company.
We gained access to their property listings which we could list on our website, in return they get more views on their properties and more bookings for their customers.
The company we initially used had a different business model to our commission free one, their properties were all instantly bookable online and they charged home owners a percentage of the booking value.
For any bookings made by a visitor from our website we received a percentage of their commission.
To be honest we never earned a significant amount of income from this deal, it usually covered the costs to run and manage the websites with maybe a little bit left over, however what it did give us was a clear picture of exactly how many bookings our websites created for home owners.
We had a real measure of how effective our listing websites were at driving bookings.
A Bit of a Hiccup
This arrangement worked well right up until early 2023 when out of the blue the other company decided to end the affiliate program with virtually no warning.
Reading between the lines it seemed to me like they were struggling a bit. Their commission charges were pretty much the same as what Airbnb and VRBO charged but they were getting nowhere near their traffic levels.
In fact I'm pretty sure we were out-ranking them for a lot of search terms and had been for a while.
They are still operating but have slashed their commission level, most likely in an effort to attract new home owners and keep some of their existing ones. Their reduced commission payments from home owners meant they could not afford to share any of that with affiliate partners like us.
We were left with a bit of a problem as we suddenly needed to find a new source of properties to list.
After a bit of research we decided to sign up as an affiliate of Booking.com, this allowed us access to their villa and apartment properties on a similar kind of commission deal.
This new affiliate partnership works well for us, probably better than the previous arrangement to be honest, and hopefully it's something that will stay in place for as long as we need it.
The Long Term View
The medium to long term goal is to only use our own customers properties on our listing sites.
As we build up our own listings, i.e. holiday home owners who list directly with us and take advantage of our commission free business model, we will reduce our use of affiliate properties from the likes of Booking.com.
We have also developed the websites so that any listings from our own customers will always be displayed before 3rd party properties supplied by other companies.
It's much more important to us that our own advertisers get the best positioning and the most opportunity to be seen rather than these 3rd party affiliate properties.
Hopefully that helps you understand where we got our initial traction from and why there are some properties on our listing websites that end up linking back to Booking.com.
If you decide to list with us directly you get a full property details page which displays all aspects of your property along with your contact details to get you those enquiries and bookings.