Vacation Rentals Are Not Just For Summer

With commercials for back to school products in full swing, it's time to firm up the plans for fall and winter marketing of your vacation rental. This is the time to be creative and aggressive as the balance turns from low inventory and high demand, to a high number of available properties and a significant dwindling of enquiries.

There's lots of ways to increase traffic if you have your own website. Download the free ebook: 101 Tips to Explode Your Web Site Traffic for some great ideas.

If you just put your property on listing sites, make sure the listing has some seasonal photos to illustrate what your property looks like in the fall and winter.

Create some unique packages to attract a targeted sector of the market. Activity breaks; romantic getaways and fall colour drives are just a couple of ideas that might generate more enquiries.

Work with your rental agency to find out what they are doing to drive more traffic to your property. An active agency should have a robust marketing strategy to generate out of season bookings.

Add value by installing a hot tub. I have put hot tubs into all my vacation rentals and the return on investment is solid. It may not justify much of an increase in rental rates, but you should see a marked rise in out of season occupancy.

I'll be publishing my own free ebook next week. This will have over 25 ideas for marketing your vacation rental in the low and shoulder season. If you already subscribe to our newsletter, you'll be receiving this automatically; if not, sign up, and I'll send the ebook to you as soon as it is published.