By Roshan L. D’Silva · Guide to Marketing Your Holiday Home
Portals are the fastest way to fill a calendar and the worst way to build an asset. They rent you a guest, take a percentage, and keep the relationship. If the platform changes its ranking, its commission or its rules, your business changes with it and you are not consulted.
A direct channel does not replace the portals — for most owners it never will. It changes what happens when a portal changes its mind, and it turns one-off guests into people who come back.
Start with a name
“Two-bedroom villa with pool near Faro” is a description. Casa das Oliveiras is something a guest can remember, recommend and search for.
Name the house. Keep it short, easy to spell in the languages your guests speak, and connected to the place. Then use it everywhere — the portals, the sign, the guest guide, the email address — so that all the goodwill accumulates in one place. Register the matching domain even if you do not build a site for a year; it costs very little and someone else may want it.
The site itself can be small
It does not need to be ambitious. It needs to exist, look credible, and answer the questions a guest has after they have found you.
- Your best fifteen photographs
- What the house is, who it suits, how many it sleeps
- The location, honestly — distances to the beach, the shops, the airport
- Rates, or at least a clear range, and how to enquire
- Your licence or registration number, where one is required
- Availability, ideally a live calendar
- A way to take an enquiry, and a way to collect an email address
One good page beats five thin ones. The most common failure is not an ugly site — it is a site last updated three seasons ago, with rates that are no longer true and a calendar nobody maintains. If you cannot keep it current, keep it smaller.
The mailing list is the valuable part
More valuable than the website, and almost always neglected.
Every guest who has stayed and enjoyed it is someone who might come back or recommend you. Ask permission, keep a simple list, and write to it twice a year — once when you open next season's calendar, once with something genuinely interesting about the place. Not marketing every month.
Returning guests are the best business in letting. They know the house, they treat it well, they book the weeks you struggle to fill, and they cost no commission.
Social media: one channel, done properly
Pick the single platform where your guests actually are and ignore the rest. Three accounts updated occasionally look worse than one updated consistently.
Post the place more than the property. The market on Saturday, the almond blossom, the storm that came through, the restaurant that reopened. People follow somewhere they want to be; they do not follow a rental listing. Reply to everyone, and answer questions publicly rather than asking people to send a message.
Running it without it running you
The reason most owners stay wholly on portals is not marketing. It is admin: enquiries, quotes, contracts, deposits, payment, the calendar across several channels, and the changeover schedule. Doing that in email and a spreadsheet works for one property and one channel, and stops working shortly afterwards.
A property-management system handles it — a single calendar synchronised across the portals and your own site, so a booking anywhere blocks everywhere; quotes and confirmations from templates; payment links; and the cleaner's schedule generated from the bookings rather than maintained by hand. Direct PMS is built for exactly this: owners running their own property and taking direct bookings alongside the platforms, rather than agencies managing hundreds of units.
Whatever you use, the test is the same: does it remove the double-booking risk, and does it save you more time than it costs to keep updated? A system nobody maintains is worse than a spreadsheet.
Do this in order
Name, then a small site, then the mailing list, then one social channel, then the systems — and only once the bookings justify them. Owners who begin with the software and no guests have bought a tool for a problem they do not yet have.
And keep the portals. The point is not to leave them; it is to stop being wholly dependent on them.