Flipkey News

300x250BannerFinal_Dan November 15th, 2011

FlipKey’s Flippin’ Awesome Vacation Giveaway!

Posted by: Dan Weisman|7 comments

FlipKey is proud to announce our first ever sweepstakes, the Flippin’ Awesome Vacation Giveaway! From now until January 10, 2012, you can enter to win a seven-night stay in one of three amazing luxury vacation rentals. The grand prize winner will be able to enjoy their selected property with up to 10 guests! Enter now by checking out our Facebook page!

The Grand Prize

  • One week (7 night) vacation in your choice of one of three luxury vacation rentals
  • $3000 for airfare and expenses
  • Invite up to 10 friends to your vacation!
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September 12th, 2011

Deals of The Week: New Homepage Feature!

Posted by: CalebDarsch|0 comments

The Flipkey.com homepage has been quietly under renovation and the newly revamped, user-friendly interface has just been unveiled with exciting new features. Some of these new features include a world map for destination browsing; a gallery page for special rentals,  including castles and golf destinations; and a new rental deals section, which currently features premium rentals in the Florida Panhandle, Paris, Maui, and Barcelona.

Island Hopping in the Florida Panhandle!

Panhandle

Feng Shui in Paris!

Carolina
An ideal spring break destination for college students, the “Island Hopper” on St. George’s Island has presented an incredible offer: Book before September 30 and get 40% off for any 7 day stay from March 9 to April 15th! Take advantage of this deal today and forgot about midterms and finals. Paris is beautiful during the autumn months, so the 10 % off during October and November at this luxuriously furnished loft in Montmarte is just an added bonus.  Montmarte is minutes from the famous  Basilique Sacré-Cœur which boasts a majestic panoramic view of Paris by night.

Kalana Kai Ohana in Maui!

Kalana Kai

 Penthouse Flat in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter!

Barcelona
From now until October 10th take $100 off for every night you stay in this incredible rental home in the luscious town of Paia on the island of Maui. The large second story lanai is perfect for enjoying sunsets over the West Maui Mountains! Located in Barcelona’s storied Gothic Neighborhood, this penthouse loft has a historic feel with a modern flare.  Steps from the Picasso museum and Barceloneta beach, this rental is ideal for exploring the city. Get $60 off each night you stay, and enjoy!
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July 01st, 2011

Code Yourself a Vacation

Posted by: flipkey|0 comments

Beach Coding image via Balsamiq Blog

Do you love writing code and going on vacations? How about developing a website that makes it easy to go on vacation?

FlipKey is looking for new software engineering and web development talent, and we want you to apply. Working at FlipKey is pretty sweet, but we’ll be the first to admit that traveling is sweeter. We will provide a no-strings-attached weeklong stay in the vacation home of choice listed on FlipKey.com to all new junior and senior engineers.

FlipKey features a near endless selection of over 100,000 vacation homes around the world including Obama’s Hawaii Winter Whitehouse, MTV’s Key West Real World House, a Modern Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse in Costa Rica, and Frodo’s Hobbit Hut.

To apply, forget everything you know about traditional job applications. Simply send us an email with the following information:

  • Your resume
  • The house you would like to stay in
  • Explanation of why you chose it
  • One thing about the site that you’d recommend improving or building

Those hired will get to stay in their vacation rental of choice for a week. Free. No restrictions.

“We come to work every day seeking ways to make it easier for travelers to find and book the perfect vacation rental,” said FlipKey co-Founder and CEO TJ Mahony. “We hope people have fun hunting down the perfect vacation home and we look forward to sending them there after they are hired.”

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June 22nd, 2011

Exciting New FlipKey- Site Updates and More!

Posted by: Taryn|1 comment

Maps are better than ever!In the past couple of months, our Development Team here at FlipKey has launched a number of new site features, and we are so excited to share them with you! These updates and new features have impacted nearly every aspect of the website, and provide a much improved user experience for the entire vacation rental community – owners, property managers, and travelers.

The most noticeable changes involve site-wide aesthetics and structure. The look and feel of the site has been completely overhauled to make the properties shine. We reorganized property listing pages, removing the tabs that used to hide pertinent information and making it easier to navigate the important information in each listing. The new page layout makes it easier for travelers to evaluate the important property details at first glance.

Less visibly, the team has been working hard to improve search speed and accuracy, and anyone who has searched for a property recently will have noticed that results come back faster than ever.

Another big improvement is the new photo browsing experience, complete with a lightning-quick photo viewer; larger, high-quality images; and support for video. The photo viewer displays thumbnails of all of the available photos, and allows users to click on any photo and see it enlarged up to twice its former size in high quality. The upgrades to the photo section really help to make each listing “pop,” and significantly enhance the look and feel of the listings. If you uploaded smaller images to your listing before, then now is the time to add your most recent, high-res shots to your listing!

New Review Summary on FlipKey

We also added a new review summary. Due to the substantial number of reviews collected on individual properties, we saw a need to aggregate review data in a way that would be really helpful to travelers. The new review summary provides visitors with high level breakdowns of feedback left by verified guests to help paint the big picture of guest sentiment. We also added the ability for travelers to mark reviews as “helpful” so that future travelers will be able to see what feedback was most helpful to travelers in the past.

Two of the most recent upgrades to the site included the new and improved mapping function as well as the option to add a video of your property. The new maps show much more detail than before and feature nearby attractions and restaurants local to each property. The map thumbnails can be clicked to show an enlarged map, offering travelers a better feel of the area they might be visiting. The option to add video is just another way for owners to showcase their properties, and really offers travelers the closest experience with the property that they can get without actually coming to visit!

We are always looking to make improvements and additions to our website, so expect that as the months go by, we’ll have more exciting updates to share with you! In the meantime, if you have suggestions, we’d love to hear those as well.

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!

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June 03rd, 2011

FlipKey Runs for Charity (Photo Friday)

Posted by: Dan Weisman|1 comment

Congratulations to all the FlipKeyers who ran in the J.P. Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge last night!

Team FlipKey

This year, the 3.5 mile road race through Downtown Boston had a sellout crowd of 12,000 participants. The event raised funds for local charities, including The Emerald Necklace Conservancy and Horizons for Homeless Children. FlipKey and the TripAdvisor Media Group sent a team of 94 runners, and everyone had a great time. You can read more about the event here.

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May 06th, 2011

Great Views (Pic of the Week)

Posted by: Dan Weisman|0 comments

Stylish new features on FlipKey!

Recent visitors to FlipKey.com may have noticed that change is in the air. On Wednesday evening, our product team unveiled their latest feat of brilliance with a makeover of the property pages. One of the most exciting new features is the lightning-fast photo viewer. Not only have all of the photos moved right to the top of the page, but you can also easily view the entire selection of shots in a nifty slideshow. Check it out:

You can browse photos by clicking on the “forward” and “back” arrows, or you can click directly on the view you want to see.

Best of all, the new photo viewer will display photos up to twice as large as our old viewer – so travelers will be able to fully appreciate the high quality images of their future getaways.

Owners and property managers note that captions now appear right on the images, so be descriptive if you want guests to know what they’re looking at!

But that’s not all…

The new photo viewer is pretty cool, but we didn’t stop there. We’ve implemented other new changes to make it easier for travelers to search FlipKey listings and find the perfect vacation home. The new features include:

  • No More Tabs We found that tabs were keeping valuable information hidden from our visitors, so we tore down the wall and put all the details up front.
  • New Review Section The new review section features a helpful summary right at the top. Travelers now also have the ability to mark individual reviews as helpful while they’re browsing.
  • Browsing History We’ve added a list of recently viewed rentals to help keep track of the homes you’ve looked at and loved. When it comes time to place an inquiry, you won’t have to hit the “back” button a million times to remember your favorites!

We’re always working on developing great new features on FlipKey to make it even easier to find the vacation rental of your dreams. We’re excited about these new features, and we hope you love them as much as we do.

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April 28th, 2011

Why FlipKey?

Posted by: Taryn|0 comments

Photobucket

Often times at FlipKey when we speak with new owners, the first thing they’ll ask is Why FlipKey? Owners come to us through various channels, but all of them share the common curiosity about what we do, and why we think we do it the best. So I’m here to tell you!

First and foremost, renting your vacation property can be extremely lucrative – in fact, studies have shown that owners of vacation rental properties can gross $20,000-$30,000 or more each year. The minimal cost of listing with a company like FlipKey can help you earn huge returns. And that’s just the beginning of the benefits you’ll receive.

One of the biggest advantages of listing with FlipKey is our association with TripAdvisor. When FlipKey and TripAdvisor combine our resources, we create the world’s largest online travel community. FlipKey is one of the fastest growing travel websites around today, and TripAdvisor currently stands as the most popular travel website in the world. Together, we bring you 25 million unique visitors a month! That’s 25 million different sets of eyes visiting our websites each month. Think about how huge that impact is – we’re pretty proud of that statistic! We also boast an average of 75 inquiries per listing per year, and that number is only growing.

When you create a property listing on FlipKey, you are automatically listed on eight websites. These include FlipKey and TripAdvisor of course, and then some of TripAdvisor’s international websites listed below:

The variety of international websites where your property will be listed offer the most diverse international exposure available.

In addition to that impressive reach, we’re lucky to have a fantastic staff of motivated and enthusiastic individuals. Since we love what we do, it shows in everything we touch. Our Customer Care team is friendly, knowledgeable and accessible, and can offer a wide variety of tips and tricks to owners on how to maximize their listings and get the most out of their FlipKey account. We have dedicated account representatives who can walk you through each individual listing, and offer feedback on ways to make it a complete success.

As if our far reach and outstanding customer service weren’t enough, we also offer a 60-day free trial to all new owners. After the trial, you’ll find our pricing to be extremely competitive when stacked up against the competition. We offer monthly and yearly billing options, as well as impressive discounts for owners with multiple properties. And we’ll never charge you for the “extras” – you pay one low fee, and get everything we’ve got to give! Photos are unlimited, and paying customers can feature Specials on their properties for no extra charge.

The moral of the story is, Why Not Flipkey? We offer all of the best at a competitive price, and continue to get better and better every single day.

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!

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March 04th, 2011

Where You Want to Go

Posted by: Dan Weisman|2 comments

Since we started, FlipKey has received over 2 million reservation requests for vacation rental properties around the world. When I looked at that number, I started wondering where everyone is going, so I put together this look at the top vacation destinations based on the total number of traveler inquiries (click to enlarge):

Where Are You Going?

It has been a particularly sunny week here, so I started wondering if the weather influences vacation choices. I added in the average annual temperature in each destination to look at travelers’ climatic preference. I was surprised to discover that the most sought-after destinations are not the warmest. In fact, 3 of the top 5 vacation spots have average annual highs below 70°F.

What do these numbers mean for your next vacation? Basically, that there are great travel spots around the world. Spring break is just around the corner… where do you want to go?

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February 17th, 2011

Say What?

Posted by: Dan Weisman|0 comments

Traveler Reviews on FlipKey

I decided to take a look at ALL the guest reviews in our database yesterday to find out what travelers have to say about FlipKey vacation rentals. Not surprisingly, the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. I couldn’t help but start close to home with reviews of properties in Boston, where highlights include “great apartment,” “everything,” “comfortable,” and “neighborhood” (also “turtle,” which I’m still curious about).

I went on to look at the UK (displayed as the UK), Paris (the FlipKey Key-House), and Mexico (a speech bubble). For those readers who are unfamiliar with tag clouds, the larger a word appears, the more frequently it shows up; in Paris, “apartment” is the most common word used in reviews, whereas in Mexico, it appears to be “beach.”

You can create your own tag clouds by clicking here. All you have to do is enter the URL of your listing page, your twitter ID, or any text you want to turn into a nifty image!

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January 05th, 2011

FlipKey Presents: Special Offers

Posted by: Dan Weisman|1 comment

FlipKey introduces special offersHappy New Year! Here at FlipKey we’re gearing up for a big year in 2011. Get ready for lots of great improvements that will make renting a vacation home easier and more convenient than ever. If you’ve already started searching for your next vacation destination, then you may have noticed a new product feature that debuted recently: special offers. Vacation rental owners and managers can now easily promote limited-time deals and offers right on their property listings.

What’s a special offer?

A special offer is any limited-time promotion including discounts and special rates, freebies and giveaways, and limited time incentives. We’ve already seen a full range of offers from free nights to free Flip cameras.
A Special Offer in Boston

How do special offers work?

Owners and managers can easily set up specials directly in their account dashboard – it’s free! While specials don’t influence a property’s place in the rankings, they do help listings stand out. Travelers who are interested in a special should remember to mention the offer when inquiring about a property.

… so what are some great offers?

New offers appear all the time, so it’s impossible to generate a list of all the great specials on FlipKey. Here are a few deals that stood out this week:

In 2011 FlipKey aims to deliver the best and easiest vacation rental search experience available anywhere. Your dream vacation home is out there, and we’re doing everything we can to help you find it.

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