Holiday Lettings vs Owners Direct

[CarolineH]

I loaded 20 photos and then got an error message saying that 17 were the wrong size - so I gave up and there are only 3 on there

It really bugged me that it took over an hour to put in my entry and at each stage it said "It only takes a few minutes to input your advert ..."

[la vache!]

Yes, they are a nightmare and it is best to only load photos max 800x600 or else they get rejected. It would be helpful it they made this clear before wasting our time.

[Windy]

Tried to upload a video tonight. No error message but a black rectangle saying "Task Queue failed at step 5. Playlist could not be loaded: HTTP status 404; Not Found" on my listing which is rather worse than no video at all I would say.

I'm trying very hard to like a site that is giving me a cheap trial offer (great idea) but why is everything so difficult? I haven't had this sort of problem with sites like theholidaylet or getawayearth and they are free. Maybe a bit less excitement about linking to Tripadvisor and more concentration on making the basics work would result in more owners signing up? To be honest I couldn't give a flying **** about Trip Advisor but if my listing looks broken I do care greatly.

EDIT - oops I tell a lie

It seems the video upload failed because "This could happen if the video file is too large for the speed of your internet connection."

Knowing nothing about the web I think that sounds like a perfectly reasonable explanation, don't you?

[la vache!]

i had problems uploading a video recently. The file size was 77MB, so under their 100MB limit. It worked eventually - the only thing I can put it down to is that at the weekend things don't work as in the week it uploaded fine.

[Windy]

Finally got mine loaded - I've had to remove the soundtrack though I have a nice bit of Stan Getz on the version on youtube. (That wasn't why it didn't load btw - that's just what they insist on in their Ts & Cs)

I think maybe HL are working on the basis that if you have to invest a whole day creating the listing you may be less likely to give it up after 2 months.

Now to see what happens when the booking season starts in a couple of days! It will be very interesting.

As some of you know I managed last year with no websites except my own and I did pretty well, but I have a nagging suspicion that maybe I could still have taken a couple more bookings that would have paid for a listing if I'd spread the net a bit further.

The key for me will be whether this listing drives any bookings for March when our park reopens after the winter break. After December this is our hardest month to shift, so every booking then is jam for us. This trial is perfectly timed to show whether HL can make a difference for me. (Well almost perfectly 3 months would have been better!)

[la vache!]

That's funny, they didn't mind my Michel Delpech soundtrack
but as someone pointed out to me, the video window is so small that my captions are now virtually unreadable

[Windy]

I'm sure I'd have got away with it, but I didn't want them chucking my ad because of it LV.

so small that my captions are now virtually unreadable

If you click on the X icon bottom right you can make it play full screen you know.

[la vache!]

Ah yes, I hadn't checked that. Only thing is that the photos are quite blurred with the full screen version.

[Teckidecki]

Having just read about the problems people were having uploading photos I decided to just upload 5 at a time and see how that went. Now these photos are a resolution of 4000x3000 approx and all worked fine...eventually, just took ages...