Why Free Is Not What It’s Cracked Up To Be

The Price of Free

It’s hard not to be attracted to a free listing or a free template to build a vacation rental website.  You won’t have to look hard to find blog posts and articles suggesting you use them – after all there is no cost to doing so and why wouldn’t you?  It’s free.

When I started out in this business nearly 20 years ago there were no big sites like Home Away

or VRBO

; we relied on classified ads in local newspapers and word of mouth to attract guests to rent our vacation home.  Then, in the mid-90’s listing sites began to pop up enabling owners to use the internet to advertise and promote, and we were off to the races.  In the the first edition of Renting for Profit (2003) I included examples of the types of emails I was receiving daily offering free listings, claiming they would boost occupancy and bring hundreds of inquiries.  Of course they didn’t  deliver on the promises, and within a year or so or sometimes after a couple of months, became a bunch of dead links.

With the quality and sheer size of listing sites today with such huge clout in search engine marketing, the volume of free stuff has lessened a little, but there’s still the odd one or two offering the next best thing that will ‘revolutionise’ the vacation rental industry.

I’m not against using a free option but before you sign up, think about this:

Free Listings

The reason site owners offer free listings is to build their portfolio of properties, because once they show a decent number they can move to a paid model.  The time you spend building a listing, posting your photographs, updating the calendar, and remembering to go back and change them every time you add a new amenity or facility works more to their advantage than yours.  Once they have built the site to get any decent traffic (if it ever gets that far), your free ad will often move to the bottom of the list to make way for the premium, paid listings.  Look at it this way – tiny fish are called ‘fry’ and fish keepers will feed them special foods to help them grow faster.  When they move to the next level those special foods are no longer required as the fish have absorbed all the nutrients necessary to boost their growth.  I just consider free listings as the foods that ‘feed the fry’.

Free Web Sites

It’s not hard to pick out the vacation rental web sites that have been built on free templates.  They tend to be clunky, generally unattractive, have poor navigation, lack  flexibility and can take a huge amount of time to set up and get right.  If this sounds harsh, I have no apologies…I have yet to see a site built on a free template that looks really good and appealing.  I just have a hard time understanding why an owner would not invest a small amount in a site that people will really enjoy visiting and one they can actually find because there is a decent amount of time spent on optimising it for search engines.

Free Blog Platforms

There are a number of free blog platforms  you may have heard of such as Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress. WordPress is by far the best platform for blogs and sites for people  who want control over just about every aspect of the site, from the look and feel to the set up of the navigation.  There are two ways of using WordPress – one is a free model that is hosted by WP at wordpress.com and it’s great for many simple blogs where the author just wants to post the occasional blog for friends to read and doesn’t need their own domain name or advanced functionality.  The drawback of using this is the limited amount of space and customization options available.

So, what’s the alternative?

Well, folks, it’s called investment.

Investing in building a web site or blog that people will visit, like the look of, and feel confident with booking a vacation from, will pay off in increased bookings and repeat customers.

The lowest cost option would be for a hosted WordPress site with a premium theme for which you’ll pay around $130 for the theme + a year of hosting. Check out our Resources page for some recommendations.  If you have the time to learn how to use WordPress ( I have done it and given my limited level of technological expertise, I found it relatively simple to learn) this would be a great option.

Paying a little more – around $500 – could get you a WP site set up and running to your specifications with some expert help.  You could outsource using sites such as Odesk or Elance – topic of an upcoming post – which is an inexpensive way of getting a site off the ground while you learn the ins and outs of the WordPress dashboard.

Listing on well-known international sites such as Home Away

, Flipkey and Vacation Home Rentals

can increase overall costs but the payback is in increased interest and a far greater potential for occupancy.

We all love ‘free’ but we’ve been spoilt over the years with the wealth of free content  available on the web.  Let’s stop objecting to being asked to pay for services and information that is of such value that they are worth paying for.