There aren’t many small, old school Florida Keys vacation rental resorts left these days. By old school we mean the laid back, bring your own boat, bring your pet, drink with your neighbors type of old school where the focus is relaxation and the primary objective is to slow or stop time completely.

Dream Bay Resort is that place. Comprised of three cottages and a houseboat, the resort offers a small beach, a fishing pier and beautiful sunsets. All units are pet friendly. Snook, snapper, grouper can be caught from shore. There’s a bait shop up the street (within walking distance) and you don’t need a license to fish from shore.

Snorkeling is also available. If you want to snorkel the reef, there are daily snorkel trip. Sea Dwellers is the best dive / snorkel outfit here (www.sea-dwellers.com). Each rental has their own charcoal grill, and there are several communal grills on the beach.

Our task was to create a website that conveyed the uniqueness of the resort and the area and left the potential guest excited about booking at Dream Bay. This was the result:

As with every website we create, we run it through gtmetrix.com to assure that the site is fast loading and well developed. Here is a screenshot of the gtmetrix report for dreambayresort.com:

Congratulations to Dream Bay Resort and their choice of the Lodgix.com online booking & guest management platform. If you are a property owner / manager and are in need of a new vacation rental website that integrates with your online booking platform for a complete solution, please email us at sales@innfirst.com or call us at 877-593-2083 x3.

SummerPlaceResort.com is a collection of eight vacation rentals scattered throughout the north side of Holland Michigan, all within walking distance of Lake Macatawa.   The owner, Bob Johnson, keeps the units well maintained and in excellent condition.   He has been serving the vacation rental needs of Holland, Michigan for over 25 years.

Lodgix.com powers the online booking and guest management components of his website.   We also designed the entire site from scratch using WordPress and the Thesis framework.   We chose WordPress and Thesis because Thesis makes it super easy to optimize the site for the search engines with seo friendly urls, custom tags and many other features which give us full control over how the site is viewed and spidered by the search engines.

Our developers are also developing vacation rental listing and management plug-ins for WordPress which will allow Lodgix.com property owners / managers to display their complete rental inventory within their WordPress site.  WordPress has moved far beyond just being a blogging platform, it is now a fully functional vacation rental content management system (CMS) and we are taking full advantage of all the power it has to offer.

Website Performance Report and Metrics

Every site we develop and design is optimized for speed and performance. We do this for two reasons:

1. Search engines now consider page load times and performance as a ranking factor
2. It’s common sense that faster loading, higher performance sites will yield more bookings and inquiries from potential guests visiting your site.   If your site is slow, if your images are not optimized, then you will lose bookings to competitors with faster loading web pages.

Here is a screenshot of the performance report for summerplaceresort.com:

Hate to break the news my vacation rental friends, but odds are that your vacation rental website needs improvement.    I can hear the cacophony of disagreement already.

“I am full from Memorial Day to Labor Day every year, my website is just fine!”

“My guests love the Beach Boys background music on my website”

“I don’t want guests to view my availability calendar online, I want them to call me, if they call me I always get the business”

“My pictures are not blurry or dark, they work just fine on other vacation rental sites, I get hundreds of inquiries every year”

…and the list goes on and on and on.

Vacation rental owners have to be the most defensive lot of people I have ever encountered.  Maybe you all are defensive because you think someone is trying to sell you something or maybe the truth hurts.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I’d say 90% of all vacation rental owners are leaving money on the table as a result of having a poor website.

10 years ago it was still possible for a vacation rental owner to slap together a simple HTML website using Dreamweaver or FrontPage.   Today – not so much.  Today you are probably more likely to sign up fro a domain and then use a website creation package from your registrar or from your web host.   These sites offer templates and then the site owner uploads photos and / or graphics and the software spits out a website.  The quality of the website is largely dependent on the quality of the software and the time the property owner invests in learning the software.

How do you know if you have a bad vacation rental website?

1. Have you ever tried to display your website with different browsers?  Try it out on Internet Explorer and FireFox and while you are at, try Google Chrome as well.
2. When was your website originally created?  If it’s over five years old, then odds are it’s too old and needs updating.
3. Do you utilize any sort of gallery software to allow potential guests to quickly browse the photos of your unit(s)?
4. Do you offer exterior, interior and grounds photos of your units?
5. Do you offer an updated availability calendar?
6. Do you offer an online booking application?
7. Are you a member of the local chamber of commerce and better business bureau?  do you display their logos on your website?
8. Do you have free google analytics code on your web pages to track the success of your marketing campaigns?
9. Do you have a logical menu system prominently displayed? or do you try and cram all information on to one page?
10. Do you have an actual web form where guests can submit questions? or do you just list your email address?
11. Do you lists your rates?  Do you adequately explain your reservation, deposit and cancellation policies?
12. Do you describe the local area and any activities that are available?
13. Did you stage your unit when the pictures were taken?
14. Are your pictures >3 years old? If yes, they probably need updating.
15. Do you offer online floor plans?
16. Do you offer virtual tours or at least a video or two of the property?
17. Have you checked your website for broken links?  EVER?

Every day, I encounter website after website that needs significant improvement.   A website is the single most important marketing tool you have, yet most vacation rental owners give it only a passing thought at best.

Why not let us give you an assessment of your website?  The only we will try to sell you is the importance of using an online booking and guest management application.  If Lodgix.com is not right for you, we can suggest others.   If your website needs improvement, we can do that as well, and usually we can do it very inexpensively.   But our primary business is vacation rental software, so while we will gladly take your money and fix up your website, we don’t really care where you get the work done, we are just telling you what needs to be done for you to fill up your units at the highest possible rates while spending less time doing it.

Every year our team of vacation rental professionals gets to review thousands of vacation rental websites.   It becomes real apparent, real quick what works and what doesn’t with vacation rentals.   To that extent, our team has decided to leverage our considerable resources to offer vacation rental website design and development services.

We only take on a select number of customers that respect our experience and our understanding of vacation rentals.  We specialize in easy-to-use, easy to maintain, search engine friendly web sites that utilize the latest technologies to deliver large number of inquiries at the lowest possible cost.

Because of our considerable experience and access to very talented, low cost designers and developers, we can generally get most websites out the door for a one-time fee of $3000 to $4000 which would include the design, development and the integration of the Lodgix online vacation rental management application.    There will also be an ongoing monthly maintenance and application fee ranging from $19.99 to $99.99 per month depending on the number of units you own or manage.

If you are interested in learning more about our vacation rental website design services, please fill out the interactive website design questionnaire, save it and email it back to sales@innfirst.com

lodgix_website_questionairre_12_16_2009

Once we receive your completed questionnaire, we’ll probably have a few follow-up questions and then we’ll respond with a full quote and timeline for completion.

We require 50% of the payment upfront before work can begin.