Sample inquiry emails for property owners

Subject: You received an inquiry on Riobeachrentals.com

Howdy!

You received an inquiry about your property: #200A – 2 Bedroom Duplex Penthouse with Pool

Message Details

Name: Chad Hutchins
Email: cjutchins@gmail.com
Phone: 888 888 8888

Arrival: 11/17/2011
Departure: 11/24/2011

Number of Guests: 1

Click here to log in to view your Admin Panel.

Cheers,
The WebChalet Team

Visit us at http://www.webchalet.com/
Follow us at http://twitter.com/webchalet
Email us at support@webchalet.com
Check out our online help desk

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Key elements:
Subject: include the website the inquiry is coming from as owners list their properties on a variety of websites.
Content:
-Name and link to the property that has been inquired on
-Users name, email, phone number to contact them back.
-Dates interested
-Number of guest are good to show too.

Other important things:
Owners like to be able to hi “reply” to inquiry emails, so the system should be set up to make the “from” email the entered email in the inquire box.

Vrconnection directory payment page

Each week every company seems to be changing their payment pages. I’m going to start keeping track of the different options out there to determine best model…
Here’s vrconnection.com directory payment page: view page

Support software options for your site

For Webchalet we are working to figure out the best way to handle customer support and what service model we are going to set up for our company. Are we 100% self service like weebly, are we a mix or totally service oriented where we help at every step of setting up a vacation rental website or directory.
To scale out we have decided the most important thing is to have everything documented on the site so a client or potential client has access to the information at any time, saving a phone call and also helping to answer our clients questions…it’s a no brainer, it just takes resources to document this stuff, but it’s defiantly our new priority. So, whats the best way to go about this?
Step 1: just start writing out all our content.
Step 2: we are currently using zendesk for our vacation rental support forum.
3) We are researching who’s doing it right: (right= ability to scale out and still provide service/support to clients without adding a bunch of customer service agents)
–Pagelines.com
Software we are looking at:
–Jive
-vbulletin is a no go
-zendesk
-wordpress mu
-in house, just put up support pages…

More to come. (right now: layover in miami headed to rio)

Hoteltonight.com – enjoying a cocktail at my south beach, miami hotel.

Thanks to hoteltonight.com I’m having a cocktail on the bar terrace at my hotel on south beach strip vs staying at the airport hotel. This was the easiest thing ever, I literally booked my room while going to the bathroom at the airport about to board my flight.
Hotel was $69 discounted. Plus an additonal $25 hotel tonight sign up bonus. Promo code: new25. Scored a decent boutique hotel on the strip for $51 after fees..

I was going to do an airbnb room, but I just didn’t feel like dealing with anyone else or have an unknown experience tonight. Just wanted something easy. There weren’t any airport hotels under $100, so after cab fares it all evens out, except for the experiences…

Cool vacation rental site

Just keeping this one for inspiration/design ideas:
http://oasiscollections.com/

Beta local vacation rental directories

We’re experimenting with a local cape cod vacation rentals directory to test the waters in local markets. It’s been amazing the interest around individuals wanting to set up directories of their own. Last month after 7 call in’s we decided to add a third product to Webchalet’s offering where a client could set up a directory of their own, sell the service in their local market and charge people to list their property. After a long weekend of coding, Andy, Sterling and Chad have version one up and we’ll be making tweaks this week for launch. Here’s a sneak peak at a local directory where members can list their property on their own. (This a new feature as with the Cape Cod rental site only the directory owner can upload properties).
Beta directory: http://localerik.webchalet.com/home
-We’ll be tweaking this all week, but the heavy lifting is done.
-Next is payment & booking integration. Anyone suggest Braintree over Yapstone?

Vacation rental payment options

We’ve got our payment solution narrowed down to two potentials:
Yapstone – homeaway is using
Braintree: – Airbnb.com is using

The descision will probably come down to:
1) International Payments:
Yapstone: questionable
Braintree: yes

2) Use the same platform as potential acquirer…

SEO notes: vacation rental website design

Vacation rental seo notes for webchalet.com:
-Term: vacation rental website design
-Position: 38 page four
-Even sitting on page four this was our number one seo lead gen term last week with 16 visitors.
-Page four DOES still get you traffic=it’s not just about the top 3
-I need to update our page title wording
-Only two videos showed on first four pages. I need to update the tags, description and titles of our videos to target this term further.

Maps on vacation rental sites

We’re almost done getting through clean up from launching our new frameworks, which means we get to start doing the fun stuff. Maps are going to be a major part of what we are doing. Going to keep running notes here for me to reference back to.

Two I like so far:
http://www.rioonlineapartments.com/map.php

http://www.flipkey.com/hanalei-cottage-rentals/p236639/

People also like the “not specific” location like airbnb is doing. Just a large circle vs dot.
http://www.airbnb.com/rooms/24965#maps

SEO: #3 for term “rio beach rentals”

Special congratulations to David and Rio Beach Rentals for moving into #3 slot in google for his term.

Vacation rental SEO Tips:
-Related Domain name: It’s amazing how many great domains are still available: Riobeachrentals.com
-Content: Look at his “Guide to Rio” section. He is building out an entire content area with local information.
-Homepage content: this theme we specifically added a text section in the big main banner. See the “Welcome to Rio Beach Rentals”? Then below it three more terms we are going after:
Search term 2: Apartments in Rio de Janeiro
Search term 3: Copacabana Vacation Rentals
Search term 4 :Ipanema Vacation Rentals
-The basics: you still want to cover the basics no matter what any seo person tells you: page title, meta words, meta description
-Featured properties: we alternate the featured properties to keep fresh content on the homepage. We’re also pulling in first 75 characters of the property description. Note: it’s smart to put keywords in the beginning of descriptions for this purpose.

That’s the basics so far. Some love/link exchange from our own website like here: Vacation rental templates also helps our clients causes.