Owner Holidays listing site

Services offered by owners that are relevant to the business of rentals.
Nigel Goodwin
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Post by Nigel Goodwin »

Cymraes wrote:I added mine yesterday and just got the email to say it's gone live :)
There are over 10 properties which are pending, simply because there are no photos yet. I will send individual reminders, and am perfectly happy to help them transfer any photos from their website to ownerholidays, at least so that they can be published.

There was a bit of a glitch last week because my security was too tight and didn't allow some people to load photos, in case they were loading malicious software. The modern world.....

[p.s. my next venture will be to personally inspect all these properties, it will take at least a week at each to fully evaluate].
Tivoli
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Post by Tivoli »

Nigel Goodwin wrote:[p.s. my next venture will be to personally inspect all these properties, it will take at least a week at each to fully evaluate].
C'mon over! Wouldn't it be great to have a 'truthfully vetted by a real person' stamp :idea:
FelicityA
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Post by FelicityA »

Tivoli wrote:
Nigel Goodwin wrote:[p.s. my next venture will be to personally inspect all these properties, it will take at least a week at each to fully evaluate].
C'mon over! Wouldn't it be great to have a 'truthfully vetted by a real person' stamp :idea:
And you can have 'Nigel's bear stayed here' banner on your listing!
Nigel Goodwin
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Post by Nigel Goodwin »

FelicityA wrote:
Tivoli wrote:
Nigel Goodwin wrote:[p.s. my next venture will be to personally inspect all these properties, it will take at least a week at each to fully evaluate].
C'mon over! Wouldn't it be great to have a 'truthfully vetted by a real person' stamp :idea:
And you can have 'Nigel's bear stayed here' banner on your listing!
Hmmm....

Seriously, maybe there could be a good scheme amongst owners who advertise.

I can offer a week in mid-February in Newquay for only £800. Electric blankets are extra.

I hate Four in a Bed, they are so defensive and hate criticism, to me all criticism is good. But a review system of properties by property owners might be interesting.

My reviews would be based on quality of wine, food, and company, I don't care about the odd spiders web, it all adds to the charm.
Last edited by Nigel Goodwin on Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Tivoli
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Post by Tivoli »

Goodness! Never heard of that one before! Had to Google it!
If there is one thing the Greeks are crap at it's marketing, they just seem to assume that everybody knows what's good and what isn't. So for anyone who doesn't know, Greek olive oil is just as good as Italian, Greek wine is just as good as French, Greek food is excellent it's just furniture and music that is better elsewhere :wink:
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oasiscouple
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Post by oasiscouple »

I added my property some time ago (a naturist beach apartment at Port Leucate) complete with photos but how will anyone find it? Nothing comes up using the search for Port Leucate yet it is shown as being featured and published.
Honi soit qui peu y boit
Nigel Goodwin
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Post by Nigel Goodwin »

oasiscouple, I remember that one, I had to get out my magnifying glass to check for any indecency in the photos :lol:

I can find it on map-based searches. How were you searching?

I am looking for legal advice whether any photos with (fully clothed) children should be disallowed.

I do insist on at least one good quality photo. Several owners have entered a property but have not provided a photo, so they are not published yet.

It is early days, so there may be glitches in availability or pricing based searches. I am gradually working my way through a list of suggested improvements communicated to me by property owners. The issue of location/town/area/country is not trivial, there may be more than one level of 'area' (e.g. in USA you have county and state).
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oasiscouple
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Post by oasiscouple »

Nigel Goodwin wrote: I can find it on map-based searches. How were you searching?
I see what you mean, now I can find it using the map. I was trying by typing Port Leucate in the box "Where do you want to go".
Honi soit qui peu y boit
Nigel Goodwin
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Post by Nigel Goodwin »

oasiscouple wrote:
Nigel Goodwin wrote: I can find it on map-based searches. How were you searching?
I see what you mean, now I can find it using the map. I was trying by typing Port Leucate in the box "Where do you want to go".
Yes, that might take a bit longer to implement a fuzzy search, but it is something I should be working on. Even the big boys have troubles with these kinds of searches, as you will see from comments on LMH. For example, are my own properties in Newquay, or Fistral Beach Newquay? Some sites have two distinct and mutually exclusive choices, if you search for 'Newquay' you won't find properties in 'Fistral Beach Newquay' and vice versa.

Google will return a hierarchy of locations if you give it lat/long. But I think even Google does not recognise the existence of Scotland and Wales.

By temperament I do like to get things right, but getting things right can take considerable effort and time. My opinion is that there should be a hierarchy of locations, and any search includes all locations within that branch of the hierarchy.

So 'Fistral Beach' is a sub location of 'Newquay', Newquay itself is a sublocation of North Cornwall, and North Cornwall is a sub location of Cornwall, so we then have:

Europe
--UK
----England
------South West England
---------Cornwall
------------North Cornwall
--------------Newquay
----------------Fistral Beach

You can then have a data driven user interface so people can do the searches they want with the flexibility they want.

Note that the number of levels in the hierarchy is not static, and will be country dependent. In USA it will be:

North America
--USA
----Trumpland
------Texas
--------Harris County (which is where I am currently)

I was sitting having breakfast in my hotel this morning, the news was on, I muttered loudly that Trump was a perverted narcisist, the guy next to me said he is voting Trump not because he likes him, but because he hates Clinton.

My guess is that no current listing sites do it correctly. I don't know where they get their staff from. :lol:
Nigel Goodwin
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Post by Nigel Goodwin »

ps. my first foray into web development was a tree menu system I developed in the 1990's called 'Folder-Tree'. It seems it is still way ahead of its time. May have to resurrect it.

Amazing - it is still out there, this seems to be a copy of my original 1999 website. Even the examples still work.

http://www1.rgzm.de/samian/home/
Tivoli
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Post by Tivoli »

Nigel you are a genius! the trouble with Google is that it is staffed mainly by 'Merkins who don't really understand what 'rest-of-the-world' is. Houses have to have numbers and street names and zip-codes and they get school kids to draw lines on Google maps that only loosely follow what can be seen on satelite images. They believe that Thessaly is part of Sterea Ellada when in fact that is the neighbouring region and they don't understand that islands are distinct, separated by water, reachable only by boat. Malakas! :roll:
Codliveroil
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Post by Codliveroil »

Nigel Goodwin wrote:
These 29 year old idiots, what do they know?
Yup that's me! (I'll grab 31 years younger at the expense of being called an idiot any day) :lol:

Keep up the good work, I'm listed already, is there a prize for who gets the first booking! :?: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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Ben McNevis
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Post by Ben McNevis »

Nigel, I'm not sure whether it's a bug or a feature, but when I refine a search by moving the map, say expand to all of western Europe: I see a (4) and a (2) and 4 individual house icons, indicating that there are only 10 properties found, but on the other side of the screen it shows (correctly) "56 properties found".

So as a holidaymaker, a quick glance at the map tells me there's not much there and I would quickly move on to a more densely populated site.
Cheers, Ben
www . scotland-cottage.com www . scottish-cottage.com


Visiting Glenrothes? It's one of your Fife-a-day
Nigel Goodwin
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Post by Nigel Goodwin »

Ben, I will look at that in the next week or two. Fixes are currently on hold until I finish some previous commitments in my previous job. I will be back on OH full time in ten days time.
AndrewH
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Post by AndrewH »

Ben McNevis wrote:So as a holidaymaker, a quick glance at the map tells me there's not much there and I would quickly move on to a more densely populated site.
To me big is not always beautiful. I suppose there must be a critical mass of properties for a given listing site for it to work well in producing enquiries and bookings, but IMO having tens of thousands of properties on the listing site is counter-productive.

In a short space of time Owners Direct have raised their property numbers to 125 thousand and they proudly announce this on their home page. But giving the holidaymaker too much choice means hard work in ploughing through hundreds of listings for the chosen area (or in OD's case all sorts of irrelevant areas as well). It's not a pleasant task leading to indecision and not wanting to book at all.

I presume OD's increase in their number of properties is the result of flooding with duplicated listings from HA(UK) and also agency properties, where they offer a cheap deal.
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