Booking Solution For Dorset Caravan

Contents 

1. The Accidental Landlord 

2. The Holiday Park Owner 

3. Dad and Daughter 

4. Bookalet Who? 

5. Travelnest 

6. Finally Solo 

7. About OTA’s 

8. Not Forgetting Google 

I unexpectedly invested in a holiday caravan in Dorset in 2023. I visit friends regularly in the Bournemouth and Poole area and it seemed much more convenient to be able to stay nearby and not have to drive back home the same day. Plus it would be a pleasant change of scenery since I work online from anywhere as a digital media agency running Google Ads for clients since 2005. 

But little did I know I would become an Accidental Landlord. Or the weird difficulties I would experience! 

Once I had spent a few weeks using the caravan, I began to think “why not let it out when I’m not here?” I had never really intended to do that, but it began to seem like a good idea. After all, I’d bought my apartment back in 2008 as a Buy To Let property and successfully let it out as Serviced Accommodation for 10 years before moving in myself, so I knew the basics of what I needed. A property. A housekeeper. And then of course guests. 

My wife Rose is also a landlord to two properties in Nairobi, Kenya, and knows her way around social media. So I figured between us we knew enough to give it a try and learn whatever else we needed on the way. 

1.0. The Holiday Park Owner 

The holiday park comprises properties let out to holiday makers, and owners like us who just visit as they please along with their family and friends. The park is also willing to let out owner properties as well, so this was my first idea. It sounded good in principle, but I then I realised that I would be competing with their own rooms. If they weren’t full, they’d never be sending guests my way. I could be waiting forever, so that was too unreliable and quickly out. 

2.0. Dad and Daughter local “marketing” and cleaning. 

These came quite well recommended and promoted several holiday caravans on our park. I invited Dad over and he took some pictures on his iPhone and agreed to market us on their website, and Facebook. Once our listing was up, we waited for bookings. And waited. Then waited some more. Nothing seemed to be happening. Looking at our listing with them, there were no prices, it was impossible to book online, and only enquiries were accepted, with no mention of response times. They were using a very crude website plugin called Booking Mood, presumably because it was cheap. 

Now, I’ve stayed in over 30 AirBnB’s all over the world, and I don’t have time to waste in making my travel plans. I know what I want when I’m looking for accommodation. Instant pricing, availability, pictures, reviews, and booking. Even if the host wants to confirm. But with Dad and Daughter, we didn’t even know the availability or pricing of our own property! What were we thinking?! 

I created our own Facebook page and my wife Rose started to post for us in holiday accommodation groups. She did a better job and got more results than they did. We made up our own pricing, and got a couple of bookings, but when Dad the local “marketing” company found out, he was furious because we were under-cutting him! And we didn’t even know because he would not tell us our own pricing! Neither could we put our new bookings into his so-called calendar system. This was a complete bust and having broken their business model, we quickly fired them as unfit for purpose. 

3.0. Bookalet Who? 

I found a bigger cleaning company in Bournemouth. Much more professional, doing domestic and commercial cleaning as well as holiday lets. They would stage the property for better photos, give us a proper webpage, online pricing and booking calendar, end even some social media marketing and an Airbnb listing. I was pleased with the webpage they created and noticed their calendar was provided by Bookalet, who I confess I had not heard of before. I have worked with clients for years who sell their services like airport transfers and treatments using online booking systems like Acuity Scheduling, so this was actually familiar territory. 

We finally started getting bookings and making some money! But their cleaning was very expensive, and when we visited, Rose who is from a hospitality background with high quality hotels in Dubai and the Middle East, was not impressed. This company also refused to tell us where these bookings came from, or any contact information about the guests. We were unable to communicate with them, or encourage return visits. 

After pointing out our issues, we got a lengthy and defensive email justifying their position and basically dismissing our concerns. And we’re paying them to make money from our guests, not theirs. We quickly found another local cleaner from a friends recommendation and had to fire these guys too. 

4.0. Travelnest. 

I still wanted to be pretty hands off with all this, so I found yet another provider who give you an Airbnb and Booking.com listing, and a centralised dashboard to see all booking sources in one 

place. This seemed much better, and we started to get bookings from both these OTAs. And, unlike the previous company, we could finally see all the guest’s booking info to build up a repeat visitor list. 

But the Travelnest listing still had issues and the problems hadn’t finished. Their pricing both for us and guests wasn’t clear, which was worrying. Their support even told us they “rounded up” some charges. Huh? Their dashboard was full of limitations and only provided a subset of what the OTAs provide, including the ability to charge for extra guests. This limitation to make extra money for us (and hence for their commission) seemed bizarre and not properly thought out. They are a friendly and supportive company but their platform was not as good as it could be, which to me is inefficient and wasteful. Time to bite the bullet and do our own thing … 

5.0. Finally solo. 

I’ve been building rudimentary WordPress websites for myself and clients for 20 years or so, along with selling their products and services with Google advertising. I’m no programmer or graphic designer, so I didn’t really want the hassle if someone else could do a better job than me. But after a year it had finally become time to go it alone. And since I had discovered Bookalet I knew I had a good online booking and payments system to hand, which crucially synchronises automatically with the OTA’s. To my surprise (but not really) I found some popular holiday caravan directories like UKCaravans4hire do not offer this critical feature. 

Having built our new website and installed Bookalet, I wanted to also list on Airbnb and Booking.com since they had been a major source of bookings. We had some good reviews from these OTA’s via Travelnest, but I was prepared to walk away from them and start over if I had to. It turns out (contrary to what I was being told) that you definitively CANNOT transfer an Airbnb listing or its reviews from a previous channel manager. Once created, it’s unique to your own Airbnb account. Booking.com on the other hand, DO allow listing transfers including reviews although it takes a little time. There’s also the synchronisation of all your calendars needed to prevent double and even multiple bookings. 

Colin from Bookalet was very generous and patient with his time and support. With his help we made our Bookalet calendar the single “source of truth” of all our bookings that the OTAs then synchronise with. Anyone can book, from anywhere in the world, on any OTA channel, with no risk of double booking. Even our Google calendar is synchronised.