I recently had to visit London to see a client. As my meeting was on a Friday, I decided to take my partner (and my Dad) and make a long weekend of it.

In the past, when in London, I have always stayed in hotels, the self catering option is not one that readily springs to mind. I don’t know why but I always associate self catering with quaint isolated country cottages. But there is growing pool of quality self catering in the centre of London and this time, I decided to give it a go.

I got a really good deal at Odessa Wharf, a fantastic riverside apartment. It was only £240 for 3 nights which is less than the three of us would have spent on hotel rooms. 

We got lucky, Odessa Wharf is unbelievable, situated on the riverfront with a balcony that actually extends over the Thames, no really! It is centrally located, yet out of town enough to be very quit and private. Odessa is literally 100 metres from the London river bus – a great way to travel! It was so refreshing to be able to escape the hustle and bustle of central London in the evening, hop on the river bus and escape to the luxury of the flat where we could sit out on the balcony, sip on a glass of wine and listen to the Thames lapping on the shingles below.

Self catering accommodation, in general, can offer excellent value for money. It can work out extremely cheap, especially if you are staying in a large group. Self catering accommodation also provides more control over your finances, with the option of preparing packed lunches, picnics and cooking your own meals. Meal times will also be of your own choosing; there is no need to set the alarm and rush down for an early breakfast, or adhere to the often bland full-board menu options.

Self catering properties provide guests with all the facilities of a genuine home-from-home experience.  Odessa wharf had a fully equipped kitchen, dinning area, lounge space and a private waterside roof terrace with unparalleled views of the London skyline ;-) Self catering is private. Guests do not have to mingle in the lobby as in a hotel. There is usually a living room where everyone can relax in a private, comfortable atmosphere. This is especially welcome when funds are tight, the weather is dreadful and you want to spend a quiet night in. There are no other intrusions or forced interactions. No one will knock on the door and ask to clean your room, or ask you to leave your key when you leave.

When I used to think of self catering, I thought of Aviemore or the Lake District, but fully quipped self catering flats, apartments and houses in London are increasing. There is something out there for everyone and every budget, however, I do recommend a place with a private balcony over the river Thames with uninterrupted views of Canary Wharf :-)

There are a few useful tricks we regularly use to market new holiday home sites. Invosoft recently blogged about holiday home SEO and the importance of having your own web presence. However, there are a few specific tricks I have learnt since then that I’d like to bring to your attention.

Get your past guests to write reviews

These could be on your website but are far more effective on popular travel sites like travelpod.com and ivebeenthere.co.uk. Both sites are really popular, ranked heavily in the search engines and let the reviewer leave live links in back to your site.

Sign up for Flipkey.com 

Not only do they have a great review service which allows you to send out review reminders to all your past guests, you get a listing on both FlipKey and TripAdvisor! (the FlipKey page has a link back but the TripAdvisor page doesn’t). There are also a host of cool widgets you can use to promote your listing and reviews (like the one on the right).  The only drawback is it’s a paid for service. However, at a current $1.99/month until December, it’s worth a shot – you never know, you may get a few extra enquiries!

Thanks to Tom Henry of YouPR - journalist-inspired public relations for contributing to this article. 

Invosoft have just completed construction of a new e-commerce website for national carbon-neutral fuel supplier, Logs Direct. The North Lancashire based company supply ethical fuel products to the likes of B&Q and the National Trust. They stock a range of softwood and hardwood fuel logs as well as kindling, firelighters and wood pellet fuels. They are also the main distributors for Blazers, an ethical and effective alternative to wood logs.

Not having a wood burner or multi-fuel stove myself (yet!), it was an area on which I knew little. One thing I do know is that wood burners perform best when burning very dry, seasoned wood. After chatting to Andrew Foulds, Managing Director of Logs Direct, it seems the best wood in terms of performance (heat output, efficiency and value for money) is kiln dried wood. Kiln-dried logs have a 10% to 15% moisture level which ensures they burn hotter for longer. We spent an afternoon in Andrew’s purpose-built production facility getting to know the products and the one thing that stands out from that day is aroma from the kiln dried stuff – nothing beats the fragrance of a real log fire!

The website is based on the 'dashcommerce' codebase –  kudos to the team there for all thier hard work! We found the platform very easy to customise, in both design and functionality terms.  We, however, added lots of custom features not present in the standard platform, such as our video guides section and delivery calculator based on postcode. The system is feature packed, user-friendly and easy to manage and maintain. You can view the results for yourselves at:

http://www.logsdirect.co.uk

and here are a few tips on using wood burning stoves and selecting the the right firewood.

One thing that becomes obvious very quickly once you have done a little bit of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is that choosing the right domain name is very important. What is not so clear – to me at least – is how important subtle differences in domain names are and how should one offset a keyword rich name with other factors such as succinctness and brevity?

I have been working recently on a new holiday property website project for a site based in Brixham, Devon. I was unfamiliar with Brixham. It’s a lovely historic resort nestled between the ports of Dartmouth and Paignton on the south coast. We secured 2 great website names for the site. www.brixhamholidayhome.com has more keywords packed into the domain name but www.brixhamhome.co.uk has the advantage of being shorter (and therefore easier to remember and less susceptible to typos) and being a .co.uk, which I personally think for an English holiday home is an advantage.

Brixham harbour at Sunset

In the end, I opted for more keyword-packed www.brixhamholidayhome.com with Brixhamhome.co.uk using a 301 re-direct back to it. Overall, I think having a short name isn’t too important these days as people tend to use search engines exclusively when finding websites, even when they know the domain name. When you are clicking on a link from search results, having a long name isn’t such an issue.

A further point in this particular case is, there is also a very highly ranked popular site www.brixhamholidayhomes.com, and there is a chance we can garner some of their traffic due to a phenomena called ”traffic leakage”. Traffic leakage is where a popular site will loose traffic to a site with a similar name due to people miss-typing it or simply mistaking it for the original site.

To summarise, here are my personal recommendations when choosing a domain name for your holiday let:

• 1. Generic is best: Convention says that you should choose a name based on your company or brand name. For holiday homes, this is not necessarily the case. Nobody really cares that your property is called “rose cottage” or that you trade under the name “Exclusive Lets ltd.”, what they care about is that you are located in the lake district (or wherever) and that you are a self-catering/holidaylet/holidayhome/vacation rental… In other words, stay generic and try and get your place name in and your property type, it will give you a great head-start in the search engines.
  
  
• 2. Get your location name in: this may be stating the obvious, but when choosing a property, a holiday maker will have already chosen their location so it’s a case of getting noticed amongst your local competition.  And getting your location in the domain name will weight you more favourably in the search engines.
  
  
• 3. Avoid hyphens: Again, this is more of a personal thing, but I believe non-hyphenated names are easier to remember, they are definitely shorter and no modern search engine will have difficulty picking out the relevant words. Just look at our main site www.propertyrentalsoftware.com as a case in point, we actually do very little active SEO on our own site and it has always been near the top for “property rental software” since its creation.
  
  
• 4. Go for a .co.uk: I know I did not do this in the above example but brixhamholidayhome.co.uk was already taken. Where possible, try and get all the TLD’s (top level domains) available for your chosen domain. This will avoid others picking up the alternatives and loosing traffic to name leakage (see the begining of this article). For example, invosoft.co.uk, invosoft.com, invosoft.net…but if you are a based in the UK, make the .co.uk your main domain and use 301 re-directs on the others to point back to the .co.uk. As well as identifying yourself as a UK based company/property you will be weighted more highly in the UK specific search engines google.co.uk, yahoo.co.uk, etc. If your holiday lets are not in the UK, I would use the .com as it’s pretty much ubiquitous.
  
  

This week’s budget has left holiday home owners worst off than most.

In a week in which most people were left hurting financially, the government dealt holiday home owners an extra blow.

Currently, you can offset running expenses on your holiday property, but more importantly, if the property makes a paper loss, you can offset this against your overall income thus reducing your tax bill. From April 2010 onward, Rental Owners will no longer be able to offset loses from their holiday home against their general tax bill.

Cartoon by Dave Brown of the Independant

Capital gains tax relief has also been removed.  Currently, if you invest in a holiday home after selling assets, you can defer paying any capital gains tax on those assets, it is what’s know as 'business asset roll-over relief'.

Luckily, the changes to capital gains tax will not be retrospective, so anyone who deferred paying capital gains tax buy buying a holiday property will still be able to defer payment until the holiday home is sold.

There is also some consolation for those owning holiday properties outside the UK but within the EU. They will enjoy the tax-breaks enjoyed by those owning properties in the UK, but only but only until the end of the current tax year when, as described above, it will be abolished for everyone.

You can view the view the current tax breaks available to holiday let owners on the DirectGov website here.

Click here to view our other guides on letting your your holiday property.

Living in Lancaster, in the North West of England is great. One of the finest aspects is the proximity to the English Lake District; it’s less than half an hour’s drive from the Southern Lakes. The  Lake District is a great place to escape to, and when the weather is clement, I will often head up there on a weekend, sometimes leaving straight after work on a Friday.

I did my first such trip two weeks ago, one that I did many times last year, camping wild near Easdale Tarn above Grasmere. It was the first time there was enough daylight to make the trip viable after a full days work, the clocks only having gone forward the previous week.

I hiked up from Grasmere with everything I needed on my back - at what in previous years had been a tranquil wild camping spot - ready for some solitude, peace and quiet only to find six other people had the same idea as me! Bearing in mind this is the beginning of April and the first time this trip has been possible. I’ve never seen that many tents wild camping in one spot in the Lakes before. And by the time morning came, there were a total of five tents, eight people and two dogs.

The next day, the streets were absolutely flooded with people in Grasmere, Windermere and Ambleside. By all accounts the following Bank Holiday Easter weekend was even busier. It was plain to me, that on Easter weekend, which is traditional one in which we witness all the major international airports bursting at the seams, people were deciding to spend their time and money in the UK. This got me thinking about shifting trends in tourism during a recession and how it’s a good sign for holiday home owners in the UK.

If we combine the recession with a diminishing pound (against both the euro and the dollar) then it comes as no surprise that British families are spending their leisure time closer to home. I did some research and found some official figures to back up my anecdotal assessment:

• Cumbria Tourism confirmed there was a busy Easter period last week with Lake District tourism information centres reporting a 45% increase in footfall over the same period in 2008.
  
  
• Recent history shows that a busy Easter period leads to a bumper summer for the hospitality industry especially hotels, B&B’s and self-catering accommodation.
  
  
• In the previous year, the worst hit retailer s have been the top and bottom end of the Lake District tourism industry, including hotels and B&B’s but a good recovery is expected, along with self-catering and holiday-home accommodation providers benefitting from the forthcoming influx of visitors.
  
  
• Financial injections have also been announced to boost the tourist industry, with Cumbria Tourism benefitting from over £5 million made available from the Northwest Regional Development Agency. Creating “high-quality, high-value visitor experiences” is a main concern, as is capitalising on the “increasing trend to holiday at home”. Some of the regions first areas to benefit from this grant are the refurbishments of the Tourist Information Centres and National Park Centres of Ullswater, Bowness, Hawkshead and Keswick.

All this is great news for the local holiday home industry, especially in Lancashire and Cumbria. Expect a bumper summer in the Lakes and across Britain for 2009!

Check out our listing on FreeIndex below:-

Invosoft do not exclusively build holiday home websites. Recently, we developed Rehab4Life.co.uk, a site dedicated to helping those suffering from traumatic brain injury.

Rehab4life are two Preston solicitors, Andrew Lindsay and David Smith, who have brain injured children themselves. They have launched this pioneering scheme to maximise the recovery chances of brain injured adult and child victims of no fault accidents. Andrew’s daughter Tracy, 26, has quadriplegic cerebral palsy and can only move her right arm. David’s son Peter, 20, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at four months and was later found to have autism.

Cerebral palsy was prominent in the news this week because of the very sad news of the death David Cameron’s son, Ivan.

Andrew and David have won millions for clients over the years, but were concerned that not enough was being done for traumatic brain injury patients between injury and final settlement and so launched this scheme to increase the access to quality rehabilitation.

We are very proud of this site, not only because it’s a great cause but because we have worked hard to include some great functionality. As well as using the Invosoft Content Management System, there is a custom-built document and case management system helping the referral process behind the scenes. Partner law firms who sign-up to the rehab4life scheme can login and submit new cases for review and then manage their cases throughout the rehabilitation process.

You can keep up to date on Rehab4Life by reading Andrew's blog here.

With lots of property owners worried about their being a lack of bookings this year, many have panicked and discounted heavily - was this drastic action really necessary? Invosoft has been doing some research around the world regarding people’s views on holidays and how they will be affected during the credit crunch. It makes interesting reading…….

A national survey in Australia on consumer sentiment reported that a third of Australians have had their holiday plans affected by the global economic crisis but no more than 12% say they had to cancel their holiday because of the credit crunch. For the Aussies in terms of disposable luxury items leading up to last Christmas their summer holiday escape ranked as next highest on the priority list, after paying for the core essentials such as the rent, mortgage, credit cards or shopping.

While here in the UK the financial slowdown has left many people tightening their belts, the obvious solution to save a few pennies would be to not to go on holiday this year, but evidence has shown the opposite, perhaps it is because of the dreary 2008 summer and the long winter months to get through that the thing to lift the doom and gloom would be to book the annual ski or summer holiday. Alongside this the holiday home owners seem to be reducing their prices for the next season, evidence has shown that to book early will result in achieving the best deals.

According to Sean Tipton from ABTA “The ski market is by far the most resilient in the travel sector,” “Even after September 2001 when there was widespread panic in the travel industry, while everybody else went down, the ski market went up. It was the only market that did.” So, it appears that even in a credit crunch, to get the best prices and the chalet you want in the resort of your choice, it does pays to book early.

The shaky economy might seem a good reason to put off your holidays for this season or to wait for last minute deals, but again evidence has shown that many holiday villa owners have been surprised at the number of bookings already received and to bag the best villas, it's actually made it more important than ever to book early.

In these trouble economic times our research conducted in Europe showed that the Europeans were keeping holidays in mind and that they are more important than ever due to the stressful impact of the credit crunch. However, many thought that they would take advantage of the weak pound and holiday in UK. Good news for the Brits.

Our research paints an optimistic picture; there is still the passion for holidays and spending quality time with family and friends.

Having some sort of internet presence for your holiday home rental is a no-brainer! Even by the UK tourist board’s conservative figures, over 60% of people use the internet when booking a holiday. In reality, it is probably far more. The real question, therefore, is whether to create your own website or use a well known portal to drive the internet side of your holiday home business.

There are compelling arguments for both. Certainly, you are never going to get as much traffic on your own property website as the big property listing sites. Finding a suitable holiday home and booking online is huge business and the big players attract tens of thousands of daily users to their sites. However, therein lies the downside. The big property listing sites are just that, big! And your holiday home is hidden amongst the rest, just one property in the midst of an excess of others returned in the search results.

Conversely, if someone is browsing for a holiday rental has found your website, with just your property on then there’s no competition. Providing you be easily contacted, or better still, the user can book your property online and pay a deposit instantly then you’re ten steps ahead of the crowd!

Of course, the difficult part is attracting the surfing public to your holiday home site (and then keeping them interested). All too often, I have clients for whom we build a great property website and they instantly think it is going to start appearing in the search engines. We all know this is unrealistic, unless you’re one of only a handful holiday home website in your location (very unlikely these days unless you rent out your own island - not unheard of). To get anywhere near the top of the searches takes focus (on certain keywords), time and a lot of hard work.

The best strategy, in our opinion, is to use make intelligent use of the listing sites to drive custom to your own website and property booking system. This way you are getting the exposure of the big sites, you have your very own property showcase and online booking system, and you are not losing out on the booking commission that a listing site would take if you booked using them. We have a few guidelines on how you can effectively combine listings with your own site:

• Choose – choose the listing sites you apply for very carefully. Investigate how many properties they have listed. If they boast 50,000+ properties then don’t list. If they will not give you a link back to your site, again, don’t list. If they demand booking exclusivity of your property or if they charge an exorbitant commission, once again, don’t list. Ask for website traffic statistics – you want sites that generate a lot of traffic but have manageable number of properties listed.
  
  
• Location – Try and get listed on sites that serve your area. You are far more likely to get quality referrals on popular sites for your location than on general holiday home booking sites. Alternatively, target your property type; you could be an exclusive villa?
  
  
• Track – install tracking code like Google Analytics and monitor closely the referrals and bookings you get from the property listing sites. If the sites are not generating bookings, do not renew your subscription.
  
  
• Link – make sure you get a link from any sites you list with. Not only will this directly funnel visitors to your property booking site, it will improve your own position in the search engines.
  
  
• Pay – don’t be put off if you have to pay for a listing. A year’s subscription is more than likely only a fraction of a week’s holiday home rental. But remember to follow the above guidelines: don’t go for a big listing site, try to specialise either by area or property type, or both.
  
  
• Bookings – it’s all about bookings! Make sure you invest in quality reliable booking software and that it is fully integrated into your site. Having your own booking system with availability calendar is invaluable, the benefits are too numerous to mention.