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• Managing the bookings
• Getting it right
• Understanding your market
• Costing
• Marketing
• Seasons
• Cleaning and maintenance

Buying a holiday home and letting will help cover the cost of ownership, and all the time your property will be appreciating in value.  We hope the advice on this page, based on our own experience, will help in some little way.  We are extremely grateful to www.holidaylettings.co.uk for allowing us to provide you with a link to their brilliant guide book (as a downloadable pdf file) on letting your property.  By clicking this link you can save it and view it on your computer.  Please think about the enviroment before deciding to print it.

We recommend that all bookings are handled by you, the property owners, or completely passed on to a reputable agent, to avoid double bookings or delays.  If you do it yourself, keep a special diary by the phone so that tentative enquiries can be entered in pencil and overwritten in biro once confirmed.  Make it clear how much and when deposits and balances have to be paid.

Getting it right

We thoroughly recommend a welcome basket is provided for guests on their arrival.  This should include a variety of local produce such as a bottle of olive oil, bag of pasta, jar of passata and a bottle of wine to get them started.

 

Provide a very clear map, photos, and directions on how to get to your property.  Nothing is worse than having trouble finding the house after a long flight and a long drive.

 

Don't skimp on the furniture or furnishings.  Buy fewer good quality items rather than flimsy ones.  Think about cleaning and choose fabrics that wash easily and are practical colours.

 

Create a folder with useful information on the accommodation, the area, facilities, local restaurants, leaflets, guide books, maps, etc. 

 

Stay in your own accommodation from time to time.  It's surprising how blunt that kitchen knife can get, how lumpy the bed has got, how difficult that window is to open.

In our view the ideal house for letting has two bedrooms and two bathrooms.  It would benefit from having a garden or terrace but for people wanting to explore Umbria this is not absolutely essential.  They will want to go out first thing in the morning to visit places such as Todi, Assisi, Perugia, Spoleto, Gubbio, Lake Trasimeno, etc. then come back to get ready to go out to enjoy one of the many restaurants in the area.  People who do this usually have grown up children and have done the beach thing and now want to enjoy a bit of culture.  They tend to be in their 50s or 60s and either travel as a couple or pair up with friends.  Therefore two double bedrooms is the ideal.  A couple on their own won't mind having one room empty but if two are empty they will feel they are paying for too much space.  Three couples don't normally travel together.  There is more likelihood of friction and it will normally mean two cars, and car hire is quite expensive here.

 

Big villas sleeping 10 or 12 do have their place but require a completely different approach.  Bear in mind that a group of this size will need to hire a small bus or several cars so you may need to help them with that.  They may also be looking for an activity to follow, such as painting or horse-riding.  You will need to capitalise on that by providing links from your website to local facilities.  A live-in maid will be useful to deal with cooking, cleaning, and dealing with on-going small problems.

We recommend that you budget for the income from your holiday home to at least cover the running costs and have enough left over for free holidays for yourself.  Any more than that and it's a bonus. To find typical prices the best way is to look at other properties on the Internet, and we recommend looking on the two websites mentioned below to get an idea of how much you can charge.

This is the most difficult aspect of any business, and letting a property is a business.  How many bookings you get is all down to your own marketing.  Your success will entirely depend on how you do your marketing.

 

There are several websites where you can advertise your property but we especially recommend Holiday Lettings who provide an excellent solution.  If you quote user ID 201 you will get an extra 3 months free!  You don't need your own website and can create your own webpage on the site complete with photos very easily for less than £100 per year!  They have an easy to use booking calendar so visitors can see which weeks are available prior to booking.  They also provide a lot of useful information and advice about marketing your holiday home.

 

Creating your own website is a good idea too.  You can either do it yourself with a programme such as Microsoft Frontpage which is fairly easy to use if you're a bit computer literate, or you can employ someone to do it for you.  You can even link from your website to your calendar in the Holiday Lettings website if you have a page there too, then you only have to update the one calendar.  The 'website' for our own B&B is simply a page within the La Porta Verde website.  We have a URL (Unique Resource Locator or web address) called www.villarosainumbria.com which deep links directly to that page, and we use the calendar in our Holiday Lettings page.

 

If you have bought a house through La Porta Verde we offer you free advertising of your holiday home.  We place a picture and a paragraph of text with a link to your website in the appropriate section; B&B, self-catering, hotels, etc.  If you didn't buy through us you can still advertise but there is a small charge.  Please contact us for more details.

 

We give some half-a-dozen simple A5 flyers to each of our guests, printed from our computer (two to a page), to pass on to friends and relatives (see below).  This way we can print smaller quantities and easily keep it up to date.  Use good quality paper in a pastel colour to match your image.  We use a programme called MS Publisher to produce ours, but there are many others.  Ask people to put them up in local pubs, school notice boards, etc.

 

              

 

This is, and always has been, the very best way of generating business but it needs time to build up.  Consider offering a free night for every week of booking achieved so that when someone has got seven weeks of bookings for you they get a free week themselves.

 

Not an obvious marketing tool but if you ask your guests to fill out your guest book they will be putting into writing how they feel and this reinforces the possibility of recommending you to others.  Other guests will like to read through the book over breakfast (don't forget a pen!).  It is also interesting to read their comments after they have left.

 

This is a novel idea.  Get some postcards printed with a picture of the house so that they can send them home.  Naturally your contact details will be in small print on the back!  You may want to give some to your guests on arrival and let them buy more if they want to.  You can produce these on your own computer if you buy double-sided photographic paper (Epson do one) and are a bit computer literate.  However, most printing companies will produce them for you.

 

Offer to take a nice photo with their camera, with your property in the background, to take home and show their friends.

 

If you have the opportunity then try to give your guests a small gift to thank them for staying with you.  A bottle of wine from a local vineyard, a jar of home-made jam, or a small piece of local pottery.  If you can produce the label too then it will go down even better.  You can either give it to them when they arrive to say 'Welcome, we hope you enjoy your holiday' or when they leave to say 'Thank you, please come again'.  We always offer a free glass of wine on the terrace as a means of welcoming our guests after a long drive.

 

This is a fairly expensive way of advertising but can be very productive.  If you have only one room for B&B it may not be a cost-effective way of marketing.

 

This can be a good idea.  The cost is low and if you advertise in the paper local to where you live then people will relate to that.

 

This may seem totally impractical at first, but a one line advert in the Sunday Telegraph, for example, can be quite reasonable and get a surprising number of bookings.

 

Naturally the summer is going to be the high season, but with careful marketing it is possible to open up the other seasons too.  For example there is the Winter Jazz Festival in Umbria and advertising this to jazz clubs by contacting them directly over the Internet can be very successful for virtually no cost.  You can discover other out-of-season events by visiting websites about Umbria and provide links to them too.

One of the big problems is organising the cleaning, preparation, handing over keys, and dealing with any problems that arise such as a broken door handle.  Finding someone to manage the property locally needs a little leg-work and building up friendships and trust.  We recommend introducing yourself to your new neighbours by taking a small present to establish a relationship so that even if they can't do it themselves they may know someone else who can.  Someone from our After Sales Team may be able to find a reliable local person to do the routine tasks and sort out any minor jobs.