The Challenge
A husband-wife team have two beautiful properties that they rent to friends, family and acquaintances only. They do not want their properties on VRBO or AirBNB and unlike most of our clients, they absolutely did not want their rentals or website to come up on Google. But for people who know them and are given the website address, they wanted to escape from the time-suck of managing bookings – email hell, continual phone tag and a big paper book of dates:
- Show photos of the properties
- Show prices
- Show amenities
- Show an availability calendar
- Put the booking process online.
See the website we built:
Our Approach
There are some great Apps out there for booking vacation properties. We used an App that can be integrated with VRBO and AirBNB. This gives site visitors a familiar interface. But as we did not want the publicity or ransom bookings, we did not activate the integration. My clients were happy to take checks in the mail, so we avoided booking fees and credit card fees. We built the website in Wix, which gave us the ability to ‘get it done!’. My clients pulled together their 15 best images and some description text for each property. I went and spent an afternoon with them, and we built the site.
Project Steps
Initial Project:
- Sales Cycle. A couple of phone calls where we discussed the website goals and needs. Agreed to Proceed
- Prep Call. 30 minute call to finalize domain name, hosting plan, where the text and photos were coming from.
- 5-Hour Collaborative build. We spent 5 hours at the clients office. In that time we
- Selected a design for the site,
- Selected the best 15 photos for each property,
- Cropped and Edited the photos
- Built the website
- Put the text, photos, prices, maps, cleaning fees and amenities list for each property into the App
- Set weekday and weekend rental prices, different for each property
- Customized the text and booking emails to tell people how to mail their checks in to finalize the booking.
- Follow up phone call to make small text and image changes
Post Launch:
We have changed out some photos.
The Website
The website is all about the properties. The home page shows immediately that there are two properties – one on the coast, one in Tahoe. Each property has its own photos, description, pricing and calendar. The owners remain semi-anonymous until completion of the booking.
