Help for you setting up your property advert - questions on booking holiday accommodation

Frequently Asked Questions / Help

• Why do people advertise on the Holiday Lettings website?
• What service do you provide to advertisers?
• How much do you charge and how can I pay?
• How do I join?

• What if I don't have my photos on my computer?
• How should my photos be configured for the best results?
• Can I change the photos on my page at a later stage and/or add more?
• Do you have any tips on what photos to display and how to present them?

• Can I make changes to my advert once it has been published?
• Can you make changes for me if I have problems or do not have easy access to a computer?
• Are payments I make secure and do you store my payment card details?
• Do you offer any premium advertising on your site to increase my property's exposure?
• How can I improve the performance of my adverts?

• Why can't I login?
• When I try to upload photos to the site it always seems to time-out. What can I do?
• Who can I speak to for help?

1. Advertising With Holiday Lettings

We provide holiday homeowners and agents with a means to increase their holiday rental income through effective advertising online at a very reasonable price. Most of the advertisers on our site are private owners who let out their property for either some or all of the year. They receive booking enquiries from our site either directly to themselves or to their representative/agent who is managing their property. There are no commissions to worry about - just the small annual advertising fee.

Each advertiser gets a full colour page advertisement for their property, together with slots for up to 16 colour photos and a contact form so that booking enquiries can be forwarded to them directly by email. Advertisers can also display other contact information such as telephone/mobile/fax and a link to their own website. All properties are added to our website search facilities, holidaymakers can then browse and find homes to rent. We also obtain significant holidaymaker traffic to each property advert page. This comes directly from the major search engines with whom we have priority registration. Advertisers are also provided with a user account and can choose their own password so they can make changes to their advert page whenever they want and as often as they want.

Advertisers pay just £149 per annum for their full-page advertisement and account features. This includes 12 photos, 4 panoramic photos and use of the Availability Calendar. There are no extra fees or commissions payable - aside from the renewal payment to continue your advertisement for another year after 12 months. We pride ourselves on offering a friendly, efficient and extremely good value service to our customers. Take a look at our testimonial page for details of some of the feedback we have received in the last 12 months.

Joining is simple. Just following the steps below:

1. Select 'Click here to register' on the Log In page.
2. Fill in your contact details and then press 'continue', making a note of the owner id and password so that you can logon to your account at a later stage
3. Select 'add a new property' to begin entering your property location details. Press the 'save changes' button at the bottom of the page when you have completed this.
4. Fill in each of the remaining sections to complete: Property details, Area and Tariff information by pressing each of these buttons on the Home Management Page. (Don't forget to press the 'save changes' button once you have completed each of these).
5. You can then add photos online by pressing the 'photos' stage on the Home Management Page.
6. Finally, you need to select 'Make a payment' to pay online using credit card prior to your advertisement being activated.
7. Alternatively you can use the 'Make a Payment' page to calculate what is due, then send a cheque payable to 'Holiday Lettings Ltd.' to: 2nd Floor, Barclay House, 242-254 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 7BY, United Kingdom.

We then aim to review and activate completed adverts within 24 hours - usually adverts are activated within two working hours (9.00am-6pm , Monday-Friday). If you need any assistance during the process we are more than happy to help. You can ask us for assistance at any time using the Contact Us page on the website.

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2. Adding Photos

You can post photos to us at: Holiday Lettings Ltd., 2nd Floor, Barclay House, 242-254 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 7BY, United Kingdom. We can then scan these digitally for you and add them to your page. Please enclose a stamped and addressed envelope if you would like these returned. We do not charge for this service which includes up to 12 photos and 4 panoramic photos.

Photos should be landscape in format otherwise they will be stretched horizontally to fit the spaces provided. They also must be jpeg files (.jpg ending to the image file). If you are able to set or resize the images we recommend setting them to roughly 500 pixels wide. The file size should be no greater than 50K otherwise they will take too long to appear for visitors to your page. You can normally edit your images on your computer using image software such as Paint, Paint Shop Pro or PhotoShop. If you struggle to sort your photos into this format you can email them to us at: pics@holidaylettings.co.uk

You can logon to your account at any point to add more photos or replace previous photos for your page. To replace a picture, just add a new picture to where the old picture was previously and this will over-write the previous image.

The first of the photos (top left) is also displayed on the search results page as a small thumbnail image representing your property so we recommend picking the best photo for this position. External shots work especially well here. Also take a look at the photos that you are using. Are they selling your property to its best ability? Do you have a good mix of internal and external photographs are they attractive and well-lit? Holidaymakers like to see what the interior looks like before even thinking of committing to a booking. They will also be keen to see any attractive scenic shots from the property or nearby if you are able to as this will help sell the area to the holidaymaker too.

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3. Managing your Holiday Lettings adverts

When you register with Holidaylettings.co.uk you are given an owner id number and can select your own password. You can then use these at any point to logon to your account to add properties, change details, add/replace photos, pay or request activation of a new property.

We unfortunately cannot offer an advert maintenance service to advertisers due to the nature of our site. We have invested a lot in building a site where advertisers can manage their own adverts and are keen to maintain our site's position as one of the best value and effective holiday home advertising sites on the web. It is therefore important for us to keep our overheads as low as possible. If you have any difficulties with the site however, we are more than happy to help explain how it works or sort out any problems - simply contact us using the form provided.

Protx, a division of Sage (UK) Ltd, provides our payment system. This means we are able to accept payment online by debit/credit card for most of the world's best-known cards. We do not store your payment details on our website.

We do offer SPOTLIGHT slots on our web pages. If you are interested in adding one of your properties to these contact us for more details.

There are many things you may be able to do to increase the effectiveness:

• How much information have you provided on your page?
  We recommend including as much information about your property and the area as possible. If you mention windsurfing or golf, people looking for these activities are more likely to be given a link to your page from the search engines it is registered with. The more words on your page the more content that gets registered with the search engines for your page. Be sure to include all the words and phrases that you think potential visitors to your property may search for on the web.
• How well are you selling the best features of your property?
  Remember the objective of your page is to sell your property - don't miss off any important attractions or features of your home.
• Make good use of the 'Short description' field when completing your property details page.
  This field is shown to holidaymakers on the search results pages when they are deciding which properties to look at in more detail.
• Is your property appropriately priced?
  Take a look at other similar properties on this and other sites to see that your are not overcharging.
• Do you provide sufficient information to your visitors?
  Specifically pricing, availability notes, facilities, directions of how to get there. If there is an easy way to get to your area such as a cheap airline provider then tell people who they are and any useful information. Often if you don't answer visitors' questions they don't bother writing to ask, they just move on to another property that does.
• It is important that you have listed the correct town and region spellings on your property page, as these will affect what traffic your advert attracts from the search engines we register your pages with. Take a look at the 'Search by destination' page to see how other advertisers in a similar location have listed their property. If most holidaymakers don't know the name of your town but you are on the outskirts of a far more renowned town perhaps it would be best to list it under this location.

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4. Troubleshooter

It may just be that you need to press the 'back' button and try again. If you have experienced consistent problems logging onto your account it could be that you have set your browser not to accept cookies. On your browser click on Tools, Internet Options, then click on the Privacy tab. Now click on the "Edit" button and where it says "Address of website" type in www.holidaylettings.co.uk and click the "Allow" button. This will let your browser accept cookies from our site only. Please note that you need to then close your browser completely and open a new one for these changes to come into effect.

If this happens you are probably trying to add photos that are too big for the speed of your internet connection. You ideally need to use an image editor to resize you images to just 640 pixels across and 480 pixels high. Failing this you may need to try to email it to us at: pics@holidaylettings.co.uk

If you ever have any problems with our site, please do use the contact us form, send an email to support@holidaylettings.co.uk or call +44 (0)1865 312000 (9am-6pm, Monday-Friday)

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