June 2008 will see the launch of Ovester, a new service dedicated to people looking for or providing alternatives to conventional package holidays, which can range from privately owned villas to small family run hotels.
The service has been designed to make the booking and managing of holiday rental accommodation fun and easy, whomever the customer, Ovester offers a wide range of services and benefits. Some of the many benefits include: -
Most holiday home owners are looking for ways to increase their rental income by attracting new customers and retaining existing ones. At Ovester, we understand this and have created a solution that not only helps you market your property to increase bookings, but that also makes the process of booking a holiday home simple andstraightforward.
The Ovester service has been designed to be more than just an advertising website, but a service that provides you with greater flexibility and control around managing your rental home. With many holiday home owners advertising with a number of services and managing their bookings independently, ensuring that the information is always up to date can be time consuming. With Ovester you can easily synchronise data with other services and manage advertisements and bookings all via the easy-to-use Ovester control panel.
Why not discover the benefits for yourself at www.ovester.com
I look forward to the launch of your website. Can you explain in more details how a vacation home owner will be able to synchronize data with other services? Do you mean that they could use their own calendar, guest book, etc... on their Ovester property listing? Also, I have noticed that you mention that there are 10 steps to create a listing.... don't you think that may take too much time and discourage some property owners?
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Thanks for your response John and great site by the way..
Can you explain in more details how a vacation home owner will be able to synchronize data with other services?
As I am sure you know, there are literally thousands of vacation rental services out there in various languages and disguises. Most offer an availability calendar for customers to use with their services. The information in its raw form is either text or csv (exported from the database structure). With the Ovester service, customers are able to easily download txt or csv files, with regards to other services, I am not in a position to comment on all of them, however if they provide an upload facility, customers would be able to upload their Ovester file on that service (subject to the structure of the database on the other service).
In addition, we also have a “block–out” facility which allows customers to enter date ranges rather than individual dates, meaning that they could quickly and easily block out dates from their diary. For the block-out facility we have a fail safe that ensures that bookings are not overwritten within the system.
Do you mean that they could use their own calendar, guest book, etc...
Though the service has been designed to have a lot of flexibility, it really depends on how they wish to use the service. If they want to receive the full benefits, we would encourage customers to use their default Ovester calendar and customer review facility mainly due to the booking system structure. As you can image, with date formats, currency structures etc., it can get somewhat complicated and messy
Also, I have noticed that you mention that there are 10 steps to create a listing.... don't you think that may take too much time and discourage some property owners?
The service holds a lot of information about each customer’s property and also links to other facilities within the service, as the service is not just about advertising properties, we do need slightly more information about each property. The more information that is entered by the customer, the more opportunities they receive in terms of bookings. Services such as inspire me and the golf/ski searches are designed to attract holiday makers that may have previously not considered alternative vacations (meaning alternatives to conventional package vacations) and as we do not charge a fee for customers to be included in such services, the prospects for their property being seen will greatly increase.
Though it is a 10 stage process, each stage does not take much more than 5 minutes and on the upside they only have to do it once. For those customers that are not comfortable with technology we have created a service where we will create the advertisement on their behalf from the information they have provided about their property.
The service has taken a long time to develop and we spent a lot of time speaking to both home owners and holiday makers to ascertain their needs from a rental service. The service is still under development and upon launch in June we will constantly monitor feedback from customers and further development both the service and solutions we offer. In June we will be running a high level marketing campaign to raise awareness of the service (in-flight magazines, publications, online resources etc), so we hope that the service will only grow in popularity with both home owners and holiday makers alike.
I hope that answers your questions, if you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.