Dealing with inquiries

When you speak to the holidaymaker first introduce yourself to that person you speak. Offer compliments and encouraging feedback to others. Accept compliments with a positive statement such as “Thank you for noticing...customer satisfaction is really important to me” rather than “Oh, it was nothing”.

Make it easy by creating or ordering holiday cards or gifts that include your contact information. You can express appreciation for booking support and introduce a new offer all with the same item. Letters that include a few ideas about the holiday make have a great deal in your success.

You can set on your e-mail auto-responder. It is a function of your email program which automatically emails a prewritten message to any incoming email.

Why do you need it? You know how all portal sites work - inquiry is created right on your listing and submitted through portal's email system to your email address. Up to this point, your potential guest does not know about your vacation home, other then what he reads on the listing.

Auto-responder will email your potential guest information you want them to see if they would come to your site.

What actually you can include in the auto-responder email. This is your chance to market your property and you don't want to miss it.

Studies show that if your email visually has not more then 20 sentences, it will be read. People usually want to see photos of your property, they are interested in prices and only then they are looking for availability.

If you have a website, then you want to place links to appropriate pages. The big question is on strategy for disclosing the price to your potential clients. Depending on how you feel about it you can be firm about the price. You need to be open and to negotiate and ready to lower the price. This way you will be able to create information on pricing in your e-mail.

There are usually questions attached to email inquiries. When you answer these questions, try placing the enquirer in the property. If they ask about the size of the bed, tell them what a lovely view there is from the bed in the morning. If they ask about the garden, say how lovely it is to be cooking at the barbecue as the sun is setting.

Respond as quickly as possible. Don't wait too long to respond or people will forget about your property. Everyone likes personal attention and if you want your property to be booked, you need to show it quickly.

In order to keep the interest for your future bookings you need to respond even on e-mails that want to book your holiday when it is busy. This way you will be able to talk with the holidaymakers and allow them to change the dates of their staying if possible. To summarize, here is your points for auto-responder to the inquiry from portal sites:

• Thank you for your interest
• Why our property is the best choice for you and your family
• See pictures of the property here: mysite.com/pictures
• Rates are here, but we are flexible: mysite.com/rates
• You can check on availability, we keep it current: mysite.com/calendar
• Thank you again and we will contact you shortly.

The auto-responder is an excellent tool to make a first step to a renter and show him you care.

Next point of caution is the spam issue. Spam on the Internet is one of the widespread problems. If you have had your vacation rental for some time, and especially if you have a functioning website, there is a strong possibility you will find many spam emails in your inbox.

The problem is that sometimes is it hard to separate your actual e-mail from the spam. Rental inquiries have sometimes very similar subject, so do not rely only on reading the titles of the e-mails in order not to miss inquiries. You will have to open the e-mail and read carefully.

Sometimes the e-mailing from the holiday directories can be used from spammers, so you can’t rely on the sender’s information too. In any case open the e-mail and read it.

Sometimes the solution is to change your email account. But that's not always possible, especially if you have used an email address for a long time, and many people already have your email in their address books.

You can use the following tips: Check the email address on your domain registration. Never, ever use your working address when you register a domain name for your vacation rental website. Your registration is available to the public, and almost every large site offers a service like WHOIS where your email can be gathered. It is advisable to set your domain information to "private" if you have to use your working email address.

Additionally the forms on your site, including those that allow your visitors to inquire about your vacation rental, can be a big problem. There is a technique called "code injection" that sends your visitors spam email that can harm your credibility. Talk to your webmaster to secure any form you migh have on your site.

Read carefully even you detect it is a spam. You will be surprised that many spam emails offer an option to "unsubscribe" or "opt-out". It may sound like nonsense to you to use this option, because you never subscribed to any spam emails in the first place, but it is strongly recommended that you "unsubscribe." As a matter of fact, if you will diligently do this for some time, you will see a decrease in the spam in your inbox.

An email address that is generic, such as contact@mysite.com or webmaster@mysite.com, will most likely bring a lot of spam. Try to avoid it as much as possible.

Check with your hosting email provider to see if your working email is set to the "Catch all" option. "Catch all" ensures that every email that comes to @mysite.com will go to your inbox. Once you remove "Catch all" from your account, you will see spam reduction. It is possible also you to loose many inquiries this way so it is not recommended.