España Breaks
URL: www.espanabreaks.com
Our flagship site advertises holiday rentals across Spain, the Balearics and Canary Islands. The site attracted over 505,000 visits last year and offers a low cost advertising model to holiday home owners and agents.
Revenue model
The primary source of income from España Breaks is listing fees from holiday home owners and agents who wish to advertise their property on the website.
Since 2009 secondary revenues are also being generated from third party advertising (including AdSense - it works!) and affiliate schemes.
España Breaks is completely free to holiday makers looking for self-catering accommodation in Spain.
Notable successes
AdScore system
We've been very aware (and frustrated by!) the huge disparity in conversion rates between adverts. This is most often simply down to the quality of information provided by the property owner and how easy they make it to book.
Unlike other rental websites (who devise all kinds of ways to rotate their search results) we took the decision that the best adverts should be rewarded with more exposure.
Thus AdScore was born: A points system (scored 0-100) that rewards advertisers for displaying the information we know renters like. This includes showing an availability calendar, ability to take card payments, inclusion of a welcome pack and more.
Launched in the middle of 2009, AdScore has been a major success.
The best adverts are now getting even higher lead rates and overall ad quality and conversions have climbed. Visitors are more likely to stick around now that they are more consistently presented with great information.
Best of all, the resulting climb in conversions means we now guarantee enquiry levels for advertisers with a score of 80 or more. That means they don't pay until we deliver - a compelling (and fairer!) model all round.
Google mashups
Using the Google maps API to create custom holiday maps seems unremarkable these days but we were using these on España Breaks as early as 2007.
The majority of advertisers now pinpoint the exact location of their properties and this transparency has improved things for visitors who understand exactly where they will be staying before they book.
Holiday reviews
While reviews are an established part of online travel websites, we approached their introduction with some trepidation given the risks that paying advertisers could have their reputations damaged by adverse comments.
Despite this we took the plunge in July 2009 and carefully designed the system to ensure only real guests were able to contribute, whilst ensuring advertisers had a right of reply.
The results far surpassed our original expectations and we have now published 3,755 holiday reviews on the website. Curiously the number of poor reviews is minimal - it seems a happy holiday maker is more likely to want to contribute!
the not so good...
As part a big site update in 2009 we introduced a fremium model allowing owners to create very simple adverts for nothing. There were two motivators for doing this: the first was to attract new advertisers by offering a free entry point. The second advantage was the large volume of content these people were creating, which helps our long tail search engine traffic.
The scheme was successful on both counts but we encountered a couple of big downsides:
First off the non-payers were difficult to service. Free seems to attract some strange characters and we found they were taking up more time than paying advertisers. Not good.
The second issue was failure to upsell; free adverts either attracted very little interest (awful adverts don't excite!) or when they did generate enquiries the advertisers saw no reason to move to a paid package.
In 2010 we began feeding property data from selected partners, alleviating the need for long tail content. That left us with no good reason to continue offering a free package and it was swiftly withdrawn.
Future developments
We are currently concentrating on expanding our property portfolio across Spain and increasing the choice available to our audience.
This means diversifying our accommodation sources including experimenting with XML feeds to import property listings from a wider range of providers.
Increased use of social networking and mobile technologies are also potentially exciting new angles.
Ultimately this means more choice for our audience and strengthening España Breaks as the specialist holiday rentals portal for Spain.
