Taking Vacation Homes Mainstream - Vacation Home Expo launches in April ‘08
October 9th, 2007 by TJ Mahony tj@flipkey.comThe FlipKey Blog’s tagline is, “Expanding the vacation rental market through insight and community.” We have received a lot of great support and compliments for the Blog; however, our efforts are out-shined by Rick Fisher’s new venture. We’re happy to announce that Rick is expanding the vacation rental market through direct consumer marketing with the launch of the Vacation Home Expo.
The Vacation Home Expo is a dedicated consumer show focused on educating consumers on the benefits and availability of vacation home rentals. The first of its kind Expo will be held in Atlanta, GA April 11th-13th. For more information visit the Expo’s home page (click here).
To help bring some additional insight into how to effectively market vacation home rentals as a mainstream lodging option, FlipKey conducted a recent study of over 100 consumers who considered renting a vacation home, but choose to stay at more traditional lodging accommodations (e.g. hotels/B&B).
We are finding that the industry would be well served in emphasizing its commitment to ‘eventless’ lodging experiences. “On-the-fence” vacationers are most likely to convert to vacation rentals if they are confident someone will assist them in the event something goes wrong with the house. In fact, this level of security rated significantly more important compared to price.
Side note: We continue to contend that these types of qualitative guarantees and services are more valuable to the industry than refund guarantees offered by a handful of listing services.
We will dive deep into our survey results in our next Vacation Rental Research Report - due for release in November.
In the interim, Rick Fisher has agreed to a guest interview to explain more about the motives and goals of the Vacation Home Expo. Rick’s interview will be published next week on the FlipKey Blog.
October 10th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Very nice write up. I’m curious how you’re going about selecting your focus groups for all of your research. Are you buying research that is already completed? If not, I’d like to participate in the studies. I own a vacation rental in the Outer Banks, NC and think my input would be helpful.
October 11th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Thomas:
We use Compete, Inc to field our research. Compete maintains a panel of 2M consumers who have agreed to share their web browsing behavior and take surveys for market research purposes. We leverage Compete to identify consumers who have visited vacation rental sites and then contact them, via email, to field our surveys.
We’d love to include you and others in our efforts. The easiest way is to sign up as a member of FlipKey after we launch and then you’ll automatically be included in future studies.
Thank you for the kind words. We will continue to conduct additional research, so stay tuned!