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Making waves in the holiday home market.
In 2008 The Holiday Let identified a significant opportunity to enter the holiday rentals market, doing what others were doing - but doing it much better. Their vision was a website that enabled all users, both holiday home owners and holidaymakers, to easily put their fingers on accurate and up to date information.
The principle was to provide the best possible advertising at an affordable price, without compromising on service. The entire business hinged on the success of the website so it needed to sell the dream, be very strong visually, carefully present the holiday homes and encourage contact and bookings at every opportunity. As well as smaller competitors, the client was going up against big rental companies so the site had to ooze quality and give users an experience that was second to none.
To become the first choice holiday destination.
As a new entrant to such a competitive market, it was crucial that the new website had a strong and immediate impact and encouraged property owners to sign up and add their property details. For the business to be successful it needed to build a large property database before it could begin actively promoting to the public. With these property owners already using other websites to advertise their property, the new site needed to differentiate itself with a strong first impression, by being easier to manage a property and ultimately the best at securing bookings.
The project required the creation of a visual identity for the client including a logo, brand styling and website design. It needed to create the aura of everything a holiday is about with strong imagery and clear navigation enabling browsers to easily find the holiday home that matched their requirements. As a start-up business, budgets were tight as the client knew that the only way the website would be a success was to provide advertising free of charge in the early days. This meant that the project had to be carefully managed and as many functions as possible must be automated to keep the overheads of operating the site low.
A huge success boasting over 3,000 properties.
Even though creating the Holiday Let website made us all want to head to the sun, we managed to keep our minds on the job! The client had a very clear vision for the website and the objectives going forward and the project team worked closely with the client to interpret this vision perfectly.
Not only does the website look great, it includes a host of dynamic functionality to enable property owners to sign up, create high impact individual pages for their property portfolio, set up a slideshow, video, manage availability through an online calendar system, plot their properties on a global map and capture those all important booking enquiries. The website uses a sophisticated API to interface with Google maps so holiday makers can pin point where they would like to go and apply additional filters to see exactly what's available.
The Holiday Let has been a huge success with fantastic Google rankings ensuring they are easily found by holidaymakers. The site now boasts some 3,000+ properties; owners love the easy to use admin tools and the holiday makers just keep on coming back.
