How To Make A Good Return On Your Holiday Rental

Whether your holiday home is bought for business or pleasure, it can add to your overall sense of well-being and can be a shrewd investment. More holidaymakers than ever are now using private self-catering homes as their choice of accommodation when they go on holiday to ensure versatility, ease, space, and a home from home environment. Holiday rentals are particularly popular with families who do not want to feel limited by set meal times and menus, and who do not want to be cooped up in a hotel room for a week or two with young children. They want space to relax and come and go as they please.

If you are considering investing in a holiday rental, it would seem like now is a good time to dive in and do it. Owning a holiday let can be rewarding and satisfying, but it will only be profitable if you treat it like any other successful business. Here we are going to assume that you have taken out your Holiday Cottage Mortgages and bought your property, and we are going to look at how to make sure that you get a good return on your investment.  

Think about your target audience

Your holiday cottage is a business, and like every business, a clearly defined target audience is essential. After all, how will you know where to focus your advertising efforts or even know how to decorate if you do not have a particular demographic in mind. For some, it is easy – a big cottage by the sea with parking is going to attract the attention of a family. However, a tiny cottage perched on the edge of a cliff next to a golf course is probably going to be rented by those without young children.  

Advertise your holiday home

There are various ways that you can do this. Many owners decide to go through an agency who take on that side of things for you – they will advertise it and organise bookings and payments, and take a percentage of your takings or charge you a monthly fee. Others may decide to take on the responsibility of doing this themselves to save a bit of money. We advise you to set up a website to really showcase your holiday rental, with high-quality photos and plenty of information about the cottage and the surrounding area. To try and get your website ranking highly on search engines, you may want to think about hiring a professional to design your website for you to make sure that it is optimized for mobile, works perfectly, and get someone to focus on the search engine optimization (SEO) for you. The more people that see your website, the more bookings you will get. 

Take quality photos

Decent photos are one of the best marketing investments for your holiday home. It can be the thing that sways someone to book with you. Good quality images will catch a potential visitor’s eye, giving them the chance to imagine themselves in your holiday cottage, perhaps watching the sun setting over the sea from the terrace, or enjoying a glass of fizz in the hot tub or reading a book by your roaring log fire. It is worth, if you are not one yourself, investing in a professional photographer to come and take photos of your property for your website and social media. You might even want to think about a video tour of the property to really bring it to life.

Exceed expectations

Whatever you think your guests want from your home, exceed them. The aim is to have people returning to your holiday cottage over and over again and recommending it to their family and friends as the perfect place to stay. First of all, make sure it is immaculate. Self-catering guests do not expect to go into a property and find dust or washing up left from previous occupants. If necessary, hire a professional cleaner to go in and turn the property around in between bookings. Then, add in extras that they may not necessarily expect but will enjoy. For example, their journey may have been long, so a welcome basket with a few essentials such as a loaf of bread, tea, coffee, and milk might be nice so they do not immediately have to go shopping. 

A holiday home can be a superb investment. Not only does it give you and your family somewhere to go to escape everyday life, but it can make you a tidy little profit for very little input.