Ask FlipKey

One of the most important components of creating a successful property listing on FlipKey is collecting guest reviews from past guests. Not only do reviews help describe your property to new guests, but they also influence FlipKey and TripAdvisor property rankings, so when you sign up with FlipKey we strongly encourage you to actively seek out reviews. Even just one review can move your vacation rental towards the top of the list of properties located in your area. Most importantly, travelers really like to hear what other guests have to say about the places they are interested in staying.

We place so much importance on reviews, in fact, that if you collect just ONE review in the month following the activation of your account, you will receive an additional 30 days of the free trial. Sounds easy, right? We make it easy for both you and your guests to leave a review on your listing, and the extra bit of effort can make all the difference in how much success you experience with FlipKey.com.

Since we do place so much emphasis on reviews, we take extra precautions to be sure that the content published by guests on our site is truthful and accurate. Before a review can be published, both the property owner or manager and FlipKey must confirm that the guest submitting a review actually stayed in that rental. Our review process results in a highly reputable, honest, guest-submitted review base – one of the best in the industry – that is exceedingly helpful for travelers.

One of the most important points regarding our review system is the fact that owners cannot submit their own reviews to their new listings.We find ourselves explaining over and over why a property owner can’t copy the 10 years worth of positive reviews sitting in their personal guestbook, and why we can’t just transfer preexisting reviews from one property listing site to another. Trust us, we see where you’re coming from. We can understand the frustration associated with “starting from scratch” when you build a FlipKey property listing, but we still stand behind our process 100%. We believe that if guests are free to say the best and the worst of every property they’ve visited personally, that honesty will be evident to fellow travelers, and will help rental properties get booked. At the end of the day, the bottom line is that trustworthy reviews lead to more bookings.

To break it down to the bare bones, here are the most important things to remember:

• Content is 100% guest-submitted – only those who have stayed at a particular property themselves are able to review it
• Guest reviews can be left by anyone who’s stayed at your property in the past – not just those who’ve found you through FlipKey or TripAdvisor
• Collecting ONE review in the first 30 days guarantees an extra 30 days free – it’s a win-win for you: one review improves your ranking, and buys you more free time – how can you say no?!

Now get out there and collect some reviews! As always, I’m happy to answer any questions about guest reviews or any other aspect of FlipKey service.

Taryn Collins is a FlipKey owner services specialist and vacation rental marketing expert. Her bi-weekly blog, Ask FlipKey, aims to answer the difficult questions that vacation rental owners and managers ask every day. Submit your questions in the comments!

There’s more to vacation rentals than single family rent-by-owner houses, cabins and cottages. Over the past couple years, FlipKey has been growing rapidly and we have adapted our listing specifications to accept a larger variety of properties, simply because there are so many great vacation rental experiences to choose from. Given the range of listing applications we receive, from intimate B&Bs to properties with many cottages for rent, we sometimes have to step back and ask, “what actually counts as a vacation rental?” In recent months we have begun accepting some more diverse properties. Not only has our inventory grown, but we have also opened up the opportunities for these properties to get high quality bookings from FlipKey and TripAdvisor travelers. Overall, expanding the range of options on FlipKey has been a great success.

But opening the door to new property types has also brought us many questions from homeowners regarding whether their rentals are suitable for listing on FlipKey. If someone comes to us with a 20-room hotel, or a one-week timeshare unit, we still have to turn them away because those types of properties cannot fairly be described as vacation rentals.

Since we get these types of questions so often, I wanted to address the specific guidelines we have in place, and explain the reasoning behind these limitations. This information will help future owners when considering FlipKey as an advertising medium for their property.

Timeshares

Timeshares must be available for at least 6 weeks in one calendar year to qualify as a vacation rental, though consecutive weeks are not mandatory. This policy is a regulation put in place to make it worthwhile for you, the homeowner, to take advantage of FlipKey. If you only advertise a property for one week out of the entire year, then listing on FlipKey would probably not be beneficial for you. If you are listing instead for 6 weeks of the year, then that’s 6 opportunities we have to secure a booking for you and 6 times the amount of money that you can earn from placing your listing. While this policy is sometimes a frustration for timeshare owners who can’t get to their unit at the appointed time, we promise, we do it for you.

Hotels and Resorts

We do not list hotels or resorts on our website because there are plenty of hotel-focused websites out there already. TripAdvisor excels at hotel listings, so we leave hotels to the experts there and list only properties that we at FlipKey know best – vacation rentals. Listing hotels requires attention to an entirely different set of details than vacation rentals because the experiences are worlds apart. Vacation rentals offer all the comforts of home, and as such a much more intimate experience for the traveler. We like to focus on that experience, and provide travelers with access to the best vacation rental accommodations possible.

Bed and Breakfasts

Bed and Breakfasts are a new feature on our website, and one we’re really excited about. We now accept B&B’s that have 8 rooms or less because these establishments maintain the intimate experience that our travelers value. In an 8-room B&B, your stay feels more like home and less like a hotel with hundreds of guests. The B&B experience features the comfort of home, along with other amenities like home-cooked breakfast or afternoon tea, which you can’t get with all vacation rentals. Adding B&B’s gives travelers more options when choosing a place to stay.

Still have a question about suitable accommodations? Please don’t hesitate to let us know.

So you’ve decided to take advantage of our free trial. You’ve set-up a new account, but now what?! Here’s a little tutorial for owners who are new to FlipKey, or perhaps for owners who are not yet members of the site, but would be interested in joining. Take a peek below for all of the areas available for customization of your individual property listing, and start rolling in those inquiries!

Once your account has been activated and listed up on FlipKey and TripAdvisor, owners have a multitude of resources available 24/7 to help maximize your listings:

• Edit your listing
• Add new photos
• Update your calendar
• Invite guests to leave reviews

All of this functionality is available to you anytime during your free trial and beyond.

Hello all, and welcome to Ask FlipKey! This is a new bi-monthly column designed to answer commonly asked questions and offer helpful tips and tricks to maximize your FlipKey property listing. My name is Taryn, and here at FlipKey I am an Owner Services Specialist, so who better to advise you on the ins and outs of successfully navigating the world of online vacation rentals?!

On a daily basis we field a lot of the same questions from owners, asking about everything from Marketing statistics, and Why FlipKey?, to more technical questions like What are some ways to make my listing really pop? With that in mind, this column was born to help answer all of those questions in one central place, and hopefully help you find some useful information about your own listing.

Most importantly, if you don’t see your own questions answered, please ask! I’d love to get feedback and input about the column and your experience with the website in general, as we’re always looking for ways to improve the user experience. This column is all for property owners, and what we here at FlipKey can do to make your experience most fruitful and pleasant.

So what can you expect to see in the upcoming posts? Take a peek at the list below – it’s just a sampling of the information we’ve got to share with you! Feel free to add your suggestions in a comment at the bottom of this page.

• FlipKey Free Trial – Why Not?
• What’s up with Timeshares? Acceptable Properties on FlipKey and How We Make the Distinction
• How to Navigate Your FlipKey Property Listing
• Basic Marketing tips to increase property exposure
• The Importance of Saying ‘Thank You’ to Your Guests
• FlipKey vs. the Competition

There you have it – my preliminary game plan for Ask FlipKey. I am so excited to get this column going, and I’m eager to hear your feedback! If you have a question that seems like it would be of common interest for owners, let me know and I’ll add it to the list. If you have any more specific questions, feel free to send those along as well. This will be a bi-weekly column published on Thursdays, so mark your calendars and be sure not to miss it!

Until next time, happy renting, and happy travels! All the best from the FlipKey crew.

A few weeks ago, I posed a few quick questions to a group of friends. The responses were telling. (feel free to play along at home):

Q: Where do you go when you want to book a flight?
A: Responses were plentiful and immediate – travelocity.com, kayak.com, orbitz.com, etc.

Q: Where do you go when you want to rent a car?
A: Responses were plentiful and immediate – budget.com, avis.com, travelocity.com, etc.

Q: Where do you go when you want to rent a vacation home?
A: A few seconds of silence… “Can you do that on expedia?”, “umm, craigslist I guess?”, “google?”

A Tale of Two Studies

Case Study #1: Finding a Flight

I need to go from Boston to DC for a business trip on Wednesday July 18^th. I want to fly out the evening of the 17^th, and return first thing in the morning on the 19^th.

I search on Orbitz and find this perfect flight:

I then search on Travelocity and find the exact same flight (for a $1 difference in price):

I could show you all the other travel sites, but I think you get the point. I’m going to find the same thing everywhere, so there isn’t much value in hopping around from site to site. Once I’ve picked my flight, I just click a few buttons, enter a bit of info, and my flight is confirmed. That was easy.

Travel sites aren’t fighting over inventory. They are fighting over features and usability. When that happens, the consumer wins.

Case Study #2: Finding a Vacation Home

Last year I set about to book a lakeside vacation home in Maine for a week in August.

I started at Google with a search for “Maine vacation home”, yielding results that were all over the place.

Now, I’m a picky shopper – I like to see and compare my options, read reviews on the product I’m about to purchase (rent), and generally feel like I got a good deal on something.

Take 1

I finally picked the “perfect” house and e-mailed the owner. The owner responded a few hours later saying “I’m sorry we are booked for that week.” Booked? But the calendar showed the property as open, both before I sent the e-mail and after I received the owner’s response.

Take 2

I found another nice property, and sent my second inquiry. Two days go by and no response. Who knows if my inquiry even made it to the recipient via the form I filled out. I resubmitted. Still nothing. I guess that’s a no.

Take 3

I find a third place that I didn’t like nearly as much as the first two, but I was tiring of the process. It’s available, the owner responds, great. I fill out the agreement and send them a check. Fast forward to my stay there – I’ll share the details another time, but suffice to say, I would not stay there again.

To recap, all I wanted to do was book a vacation home for some much needed R&R. Instead, I spent the better part of a week dealing with three different people amidst calendar and responsiveness issues, only to end up at a falsely advertised property.

Vacation Homes Need a GDS

Compare the two experiences. The airline industry is a well-oiled machine. The vacation home industry isn’t.

Most sectors of the travel booking industry have been commoditized. The reason for this is the airline industry, as well as most of the travel industry, is all interwoven via Global Distribution Systems (GDS). GDS’s (such as Sabre, Amadeus, et al) maintain large data stores of information about airline flight information, schedules, prices, reservations, etc. So when you search for a flight on Orbitz or Travelocity, what is happening is the site is tapping into one of the Big GDS systems, and you basically end up with the same search results at every site. I know in real-time what my best options are, how much they will cost, and whether the option is truly available or not.

The existing GDS system will not work for vacation homes due to the fragmentation of the marketplace, but the industry needs to begin pursuing a workable global integration system/solution. Currently, listing sites and industry software solutions all work in a bubble creating firewalls of inefficiency. The internet has liberated several verticals from self imposed growth limitation and it’s time we begin discussing the next generation of the vacation rental experience.

We have said this before and we will keep saying it “the vacation market is not a zero sum game”. There are tremendous opportunities for growth but we need to begin opening up solutions and working together to realize the marketplace’s potential.