I’ve been doing a quick study on how to effectively market Lodgix.com to vacation rental owners on Facebook.

In my first ad, I ran a simple test campaign and failed miserably. Here are my stats:

108,613 impressions 0.0% CTR 4 clicks $3.94/ click $15.74 – total ad spend

That is horrible. I did a little research and found that the title of my ad was not compelling neither was the body of my offer. I also had chosen a CPM model as I somehow missed the CPC model.

This time around, I asked a simple question in my title: “Want more guests?”

I kept my image the same, as I felt it was compelling. And I changed my text from something rather boring – “Vacation rental management software. Free 30 day trial. No credit card required. Spend less time managing your rentals.”

to:

“58% of all guest inquiries have already found another rental by the time you respond. Free 30 day trial, no credit card req’d”

Here is the new ad:

I also switched to a CPC model. Ideally I would like to get an additional 50 visitors per day at around $1.00 per visitor, so I can run some tests on conversions, etc.

Update 11/12/2010:

I switched to CPC at a $1.00 per click and FB doesn’t deliver any impressions. I have two choices, I can either try to tweak my campaign to deliver more clicks on the CPM model thereby lowering my effective CPC or I can raise my CPC bid. I chose to raise my bid to $2.00 for the moment just to see at what level FB starts delivering ads.

CabinWisconsin.com features six vacation rentals on the shores of Lake Mary in the Twin Lakes area of Wisconsin.

Cabin Wisconsin is a relaxing retreat for any couple, family or group looking to escape from everyday life and rejuvenate. Nestled in the woods on the shores of beautiful Lake Mary, the 1920′s era cabins are situated one hour between Chicago and Milwaukee. You will be welcomed by large oaks and pines that create a magical feel found only in nature.

Water recreation abounds at Cabin Wisconsin. Fish, swim or cruise the lake with our pontoon boat and personal watercraft rentals. Our private sandy beach is yours to enjoy. Your group can have fun waterskiing, tubing or docking and dining at the lakeside restaurant. Each cabin has rustic charm with modern day conveniences including air conditioning, heat, TV/VCR/DVD, stove, microwave, bathrooms with clean linens and towels, board games and more. Outside there is a patio set, fire-pit, gas grill, and yard for games. All cabins share access to; 120-foot sandy beach, lakefront yard area, picnic table, (1) rowboat, (1) paddle boat, fishing pier, bocce, croquet, volleyball set, bean bag game, basketball hoop, water rafts and more. Cabin Wisconsin also offers mountain bikes, and for the winter months, ice skates and sleds.

It’s a nice clean implementation. Just drag and drop your images in the desired sort order within the gallery tab of each of your properties. The revised sort order will syndicate to all third party marketing sites, the online booking pages as well as any pages built using our vacation rental WordPress plugin. Thanks!

I’ve spent hours trying different programs and systems and I “think” I am finally on my way to a winning, low cost marketing video for Lodgix.com.  I’ve got a long ways to go, but here’s the first iteration.

Located adjacent to Cook Forest State Park and seven miles from Allegheny National Forest, TopHillCabins.com has  eight cabin rentals situated on 15 plus private and secluded acres.  If privacy, seclusion, wooded areas, amenities, cleanliness and being close to fun and attractions are your objective than TopHillCabins.com are for you!

For more Cook Forest Vacation Rentals please visit VacationRentalDirect.com.

We’ve just developed an amazing WordPress plugin for vacation rental websites.    One of the most onerous and time consuming tasks is building and maintaining a vacation rental website.   Rates change,  properties get updated,  new pictures are taken, etc.   This is especially true if you are a vacation rental property manager with large numbers of properties and inventory that changes quite frequently as owners commit or leave your management program.

The net of it it all is that your website should update as your inventory updates.   The vacation rental management software that is used to power your business should be the sole source of all your updates.  Thus if you add, edit, delete or disable a property within your management software, that change should then reflect on both your website and any thrid party marketing sites where your property is listed.   Oh we can dream!!!

Lodgix.com has taken the first step towards real time updating of both your website and any third party marketing site by developing a wordpress plugin that also is Thesis framework compatible!

THIS PLUGIN REQUIRES AN INNFIRST.COM SUBSCRIPTION

To view the plugin live, go to the top of this page and click on the “Vacation Rentals” menu item.  This menu item is generated by the plugin.  The plug-in output requires a minimum of 700px width.

All rentals are listed and sortable by bedroom, bathrooms, price, etc.    All data, rates and images are pulled from your Lodgix.com account.   When you click on the title of a property, you are brought to the individual property page which displays the full listing data for each property including a google map and the individal booking calendar for that unit.

The individual property page can be styled according to your own settings using CSS.

The property pages use standard thickboxeffect for image display, but we will be bundling instructions for using Highslide and other effects if you wish.

When a property is edited, deleted or added to Lodgix.com, the application notifies your website and the website pages are regenerated and will immediately reflect the changes.

The same is true for your listings on third party marketing websites.   For example, each property on Lodgix.com, gets a free listing on VacationRentalDirect.com.   Like your website, your property listing on VacationRentalDirect.com will get updated if any edits, additions or deletions are made to Lodgix.com.

The WordPress plug-in is not yet available for public download.   However, if you email me at sales@innfirst.com, I will provide you with a zipped copy.   We offer  a free, no credit card required, 30 day trial of Lodgix.com.  So sign up for the free trial, add a few properties, install the plugin to your WordPress site and see for yourself how easy it is to create a great looking vacation rental website in less than an hour!!

Vacation Rental Website Design

If you are considering building out a new website for your vacation rental business, look no further than the Lodgix.com team of talented vacation rental website designers / developers.

We recently designed and launched:

and are working on a relaunch for  Sanford Realty in Cape Coral, FL as well as Harbour Island Realty in the Bahamas.

Call me (Brent) at 612-501-2548 directly to discuss your vacation rental website needs!

At some point in the next 2-3 weeks the Lodgix.com application will be rebranded as Lodgix.com.   This has been in the works for over a year now, but we’ve just been too busy.   Lodgix.com is nice name, but the name infers that our products are targeted at Inns and B&Bs.   The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

While we do actively court B&Bs, Inns and small boutique hotels and have many using the software, our bread and butter clients  are really vacation rental property owners and managers.   As the platform grows and our service and product offers expand,  Lodgix.com can grow with it.

The Lodgix.com website will remain with some notes about the name change, etc.   All existing buttons, calendars, etc.  will continue to work as normal.  Nothing will change except the logos and text within the application and we’ll be launching a rocking new website at Lodgix.com.

Southwest Florida vacation rental management company focusing on homes and vacation rentals in Fort Myers, Fort Myers Beach & Estoro.

[screenshot url="www.cascadeluxurycondo.com"]

3 bedroom, 3 bathroom luxury condominium located 2 miles North of Durango Mountain Resort in Colorado!

We are in the midst of testing a major framework upgrade that will occur late this week. This is the first framework upgrade we’ve done for Lodgix.com and probably the last we’ll do for a couple of years. The upgrade will bring us to the current release of Django and enable us to utilize and deploy the latest development tools. We are also hoping that it will allow us to scale the application more efficiently and decrease the page load time on the availability calendar page for property owners with >10 properties and many reservations.

We ask for your patience during the period. While we have a team of testers reviewing the application, small glitches may still be present for a few days. Please report them to us immediately, we will have staff working additional hours to test and resolve any bugs very quickly.

Thanks so much for your understanding!

Brent

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.

We finally reached the minimum number of fans required to get a custom URL for my Lodgix.com fan page on Facebook.

Please visit our Facebook fan page and “like” us!

UpperMichiganLakeRentals.com looks like an amazing place to get away from it all in the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. Featuring incredible fishing and seclusion, the lodge and accompanying cabin offer an amazing combination of tranquility and seclusion.

UpperMichiganLakeRentals.com has chosen Lodgix.com to power their online booking and guest management requirements. They’ve also signed up for the CDGCommerce / Quantum Payment Gateway to integrate payment processing within the Lodgix.com application.

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:

Let me just say that I have no idea how relative novices create a Facebook fan page.  I spent hours on this over the past few days.   It finally is starting to make sense, but I almost gave up several times.

1) Connecting your blog to a Facebook Fan Page is not easy

2) Differentiating between a Facebook profile and a Facebook page is confusing to say the least

3) Understanding and implementing a Facebook application (eg a HTML Box) is crazy confusing

4) Understand “Facebook Connect” and choosing the correct plugin so that your blog posts can appear on your Facebook PAGE wall is nuts and then troubleshooting the various settings to get it to work requires tedious reading of support forums.

And now I have 3 fans of my new Facebook Fan Page.   I need at least 25 fans to get a custom URL, so if you are a Facebook user and if you would be so kind as to click on the “like” button to the right under the Facebook banner that would be great and much appreciated!

This feature is only available to property owners who are subscribed to the employees module.

The invoice status alert allows any “employee” (or any individual or group that you have setup with an account) to be alerted when the status of an invoice changes to “paid-in-full”.

Maybe you are a property owner with a condo at a large resort and you want to send the resort an automatic email with guest details, date of arrival, length of stay and any services ordered.  That way the resort can make sure the room is cleaned and ready for the guest.

Currently this feature is limited in it’s functionality.  You cannot set up one property to send an email to one third party and then a separate property to a different third party.

I can foresee a future where property managers have accounts for all of their property owners and can match that property owner to a property and receive alerts only for their properties, etc.  That is the future, but for now baby steps.

Here is a screenshot of where the invoice status alert can be located:

Some additional work needs to be done on the actual email alert that is sent to the “employee”, that will be done shortly.

Also there is an option to “confirm alert before sending”, this option is not available to PayPal users.  This option, if checked, will pop a modal window when they record a payment that results in a particular invoice changing status to “paid-in-full” asking the property owner / manager if they would like to send an invoice status alert.  If left unchecked, the alerts will be sent automatically with no property owner / manager approval.

Enjoy!

Statistics say that 58% of all the inquiries a property owner receives have already found another place to rent by the time you respond.   Even though we make every effort to stay on time of every inquiry, inevitably we have all had times where we heard the dreaded “Thanks for the response, but I’ve already found another rental.”  Or perhaps we just never heard anything back at all.

Online bookings result in a significant uptick in occupancy because it addresses this problem head on.  Potential guests can secure their dates immediately without waiting for a return phone call or email.

Many property owners are hesitant to try online booking because they have some mystical view that they want to talk to every potential guest on the phone.  The reality is that many in this generation do not want to talk on the phone, they don’t even want to communicate via email.   It is felt that if you do your job and provide the potential guest with a great website, then the website should fully answer all their questions.   Many guests today when they encounter a website that is easy to use, easy to navigate, features large, crisp images, clearly explains the terms and conditions, and displays availability and allows for online bookings, these guests will book online and many times they’ll do it during periods when the property owner is in bed!

I can’t tell you how many online bookings I get overnight.  I’ll go to bed at 11pm and wake up and someone will have booked at 1am.  My guess is that many families, like my own, are busy.  So busy that many times it’s late night before they have an opportunity to surf the web looking for a place for the family vacation.    These days few guests want to send out dozens of inquiries to property owners asking if they have availability for certain dates.  Why? It’s a huge, unnecessary waste of time.  For me, no availability on your website = no sale.  No rate information on your website = no sale.   Small, grainy pictures on your website = no sale. No online booking = no sale.

However, if you’ve taken the time and respected me, the guest, by putting up a great website with great pics, easy to use navigation, clearly defined T&C’s, availability and online booking, then I know the odds are that you will go above and beyond to provide me with a great place to stay and a great vacation and I will book with you without ever speaking to you on the phone or conversing with you via email.

Each the year there are larger and larger percentages of people like me.  We are a demand driven society.  Satisfy the demand,  have a great website,  accept online bookings and you are all set, you will reap the rewards.   These last two years have been the best years in the last ten years for vacation rental owners, but only for those that treat their business and their customers with respect.  The old ways of doing business don’t’ work so well anymore, and for those that still adhere to them, the last two years  have yielded many open dates and / or lots of discounting.  Don’t let that happen to you.  Try the Lodgix.com vacation rental management platform free for 30 days and we’ll show you how to make your business thrive again.

First, I have to give a shout out and thank-you to a new Lodgix.com customer, The Blue Horse Inn in Woodstock, Vermont. They’ve built out an amazing new website (still working on it) and had some great suggestions for a couple of small improvements to Lodgix. Those small improvements gave rise to the enhancements outlined in this email. Here is a screenshot and link to the Blue Horse Inn website in Woodstock, VT.

Online Booking Process

The online booking process has had some modifications that both reduce the amount of screen space required for the reservation details and reduce the number of steps in the booking process. Both modifications make the display more simple and the booking process easier.

The “services” component of the online booking process has been added to step #1 and step #2 removed. The room total box was redesigned and positioned closed to where the number of guests are entered. Also the Show Rate Details area has been changed to a mouseover effect, rather then a drop down effect. The end result is that the interface is cleaner and more intuitive.

Visual Calendar

Using the same mouseover technology that is used in the Show Rates Detail during the online booking process, we were able to incorporate this into the visual calendar as well.

As a property owner myself, it always bothered me that I had to click on the reservation within the calendar to find more information about the reservation such as services ordered, check-in / check-out time, invoice comments, etc. Now it will be possible for you to simply move your mouse over each reservation and a window will appear with additional reservation details. It’s a great time saving people for all of us who value every second of the day! This will launch this week, we are still tweaking the display. Here is a screenshot:

Visual Calendar Rate Quoting

Another feature that I’ve wanted for some time is the ability to quickly quote a rate to a potential guest. There really is no easy way within the current application quote a rate – and that’s a problem!

Later this week (or perhaps next week Monday) we’ll launch the ability to quote rates for individual properties or rooms from within the visual calendar. Multi-unit rate quoting is more complex and will have to wait.

Once it launched you will see a new modal window when making a reservation using the visual calendar. The current modal window looks like this:

The new modal window with Rate Quoting will look like this:

The rate quoting will be general rate quoting it will pull specific rate data, but it won’t allow you to enter services, etc. I am hoping it will allow you to enter number of guests and then refresh the rate quote for those of you that have per person rates enabled. Either way, it’s a big improvement. I’ve been having to load up my online booing calendar to give quotes to potential guests and it gets on my nerves. :-)

Upcoming Enhancements

Reporting. Improved reporting framework that will allow you to create reports that suit your business on the fly.

Amenities Interface. Amenities interface will be replaced with a more dynamic interface that will allow you to enter custom amenities, as well as copy amenities from property to property or room to room.

Automated Communications. Option for property owners to automate confirmations. Currently all property owners must manually send out confirmations or balance due reminders. New options would allow confirmations or documents of your choice to be sent out upon completion of certain trigger events such as payment of reservation deposit or remaining balance due, etc..

Guest surveys. Guest reviews. Automated email surveys that guests can receive at the end of their stay to help track guest satisfaction as well as integration with TripAdvisor to help increase number of positive reviews being posted to TripAdvisor.

Property Management Module. This one will take awhile, but we are well aware that the property managers using the system need some significant new features and reporting before the application will fully meet their needs.

I hope your year is progressing well. If you have any questions or concerns please contact me directly at 877-593-2083 x3 or via email at sales@innfirst.com.

Best regards,

Brent M. Kleinheksel

Owner, Lodgix.com

Online Bookings by Lodgix.com

We’ve done some optimization to the invoices area of the application.   You should notice a dramatic improvement in speed when editing invoices once it is updated to the production server.   Thanks!

Wow, lots of great new features are launching on Friday!   All of these features were suggested by our customers and we listened.   It’s not always that easy, but we’ve designed our application to be extremely flexible.   Unlike many of our competitors with client-based or dated web-based applications, the Lodgix.com application can introduce new features very quickly – provided they make sense and help all of our customers run their business more effectively and efficiently.

We’ve finished up the coding and testing of the following items:

• Document upload.  Property owners can now upload ancillary documents and these documents will then be available for attachment to guest emails.
• Appended Responses. Property owners can now save frequent responses and simply append them to their guest emails.  This functionality will streamline guest communications and further decrease the amount of time spent on each reservation.  It’s a great new feature, one that I am excited to use for my own rentals.
• Guest Names.   Some of you have enabled “per person” rates.  This means that your rates vary by the number of guests in the group.  However, some were having trouble with guests that would book a property claiming to have (for example) three guests and then actually end up having >three  guests in the unit.   To help with that a few users requested that the guest be required to enter their names during the online booking process.  That functionality is now live on the production server and can be enabled within the “rates settings” area of each property.  Likewise, when enabled the property manager can manually enter guest names within the guest control panel.
• Enhancements to Online Booking Process.
  • More Information. On the first page of the online booking process there has always been a link to “more information” under the property description.  This link traditionally opened up a new window to the designated URL for the property.   Now when this link is clicked the additional property information will simply drop down within the page.  It’s a simpler interface that does not detract from the online booking process.
  • Integrated Rental Agreements. On the next to the last page of online booking process,  at the bottom of the page we traditionally displayed the property owner’s cancellation and deposit policy, as well as a box which outlined the reservation deposit required.   The guest could not continue with the reservation unless they checked the box which stated that they read and understood the deposit and cancellation policies.This page has been changed.   The cancellation and deposit policies will still be displayed,  but the box containing the text that outlined the reservation deposit requirements has been removed.  The reservation deposit requirements will now be displayed as the last item of the page under a section entitled “Next Steps”.

    Most importantly, property owners can now display a generic rental agreement embedded within the page that will be available for downloading and printing.   Many property owners have a rental agreement that they have traditionally emailed or mailed to guests for reading and signature.  The guest must then sign the agreement and return it to the property owner.  Property owners retain these agreements to protect themselves in the event of a chargeback and also to make sure the guest understands all the various terms and conditions of the rental.

    Many property owners don’t have a clear answer why they use rental agreements, they simply do it because so many others do.  Personally, in ten years of owning eight vacation rentals, I have never had a chargeback and I do not use a rental agreement.  However, I do make sure that the guest CLEARLY understands the terms and conditions of my rentals and prominently display this information in my website and on all guest correspondence.

    There have been times where a guest has not had their deposit returned as a result of violating my cancellation policy or as a result of damage to the unit.  In a couple of instances the guest got upset.  However, I simply referred them to their confirmation (which Lodgix.com archives) and to the appropriate area of the website where my policies are displayed.  In all instances, the guest dropped their appeals and many times returned as a guest at a later date.

    My point is that by integrating a generic rental agreement within the online booking process and adding an additional checkbox that the guest must click to assure that they’ve “read and understood the rental agreement” before the reservation can proceed, the property owner can remove the entire process of having to obtain a signed rental agreement.

    In the future we will reinforce this process with the addition of digital signatures, which a guest can sign during the online booking process.  The property owner will then have an archived copy of the signed agreement stored with the reservation and available within the guest control panel.   We are not there yet, but this implementation is a great step in that direction.

    A rental agreement will ONLY be displayed during the online booking process if the property owner has uploaded a rental agreement to Lodgix and designated that document as a “rental agreement” within the system.   The document is uploaded to Lodgix and then reuploaded to Scribd, which uses their patent pending iPaper technology to convert the document to flash which allows Lodgix to seamlessly embed the document within the actual webpage.   Guests must have Flash installed on their PC to view the document.  However, they must also have Flash installed to view the online booing calendar.  99% of all PCs now have flash installed on their PCs.

    

]]> http://blog.innfirst.com/scribd-innfirst-com-integration-and-other-updates/feed/ 0 http://blog.innfirst.com/file-uploading-appended-responses-launching-soon/ http://blog.innfirst.com/file-uploading-appended-responses-launching-soon/#comments Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:42:35 +0000 InnFirst http://blog.innfirst.com/?p=265

One of my developers is currently hard at work coding the ability for users to upload files to the system that can then be used as attachments to emails.  For example, let’s say you are traveling and away from your home PC and a guest wants you to email them directions to the property. but you don’t have that particular document with you.   If you plan ahead and store your most important and most used documents within your Lodgix.com account, you can simply choose the file from your repository and attach it in an email to the guest.

Another feature that is more of a “nice to have” type of feature that will streamline guest communications are appended email responses.  For example, for every vacation rental guest that books a reservation I have to manually send them a confirmation email.

Thus I have to manually type out:

“Dear ____, thanks for the recent online reservation.   Please find attached your confirmation in adobe pdf format.  Please read it carefully.  If you have any additional questions or concerns, please call me at _______.   Thanks again for your business!

Best regards,

Brent M. Kleinheksel”

Now, with the “Appended Responses” feature,  I will be able to save this response and simply append it to my email making it a much quicker way of communicating with my guests.

In the future, we will take it the final step and allow property owners and managers the ability to automate their communications with guests.  It’s a not a feature that is in real high demand among smaller property owners and managers, but for my clients with >20 properties they’ve voiced a need for more automation, and it’s something we are definitely planning for as the software adds more features to support clients with greater numbers of properties / rooms.

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.