VRBO Non English Sites

OTA = Online Travel Agency, which means those sites that sell the booking and take the payment for you.
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Casscat
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VRBO Non English Sites

Post by Casscat »

I'm having a bit of a mare, and I'm sure there must be an easy fix even if the guy on the VRBO helpline doesn't seem to know what to do. I have recently listed my Spanish village house on VRBO via their 'transfer' service which lifted the majority of the info from my Booking.com listing. Even so I have spent some hours fine tuning it and getting all the VRBO ducks in a row. Since I started renting out my village house the majority of my guests have been Spanish, so I thought I'd nip over to VRBO España and see how it looked. OMG :shock: It's utter garbage. None of my carefully thought out narrative is there, and instead there is one clumsy statement in Spanish which is full of incorrect information. In English it translates back to:

"In this non-smoking vacation home you can enjoy ecological routes, climbing and much more within a short distance. If you get in the car, you will be 75 minutes from the Port of Malaga and 70 minutes from Malaga Cathedral. In addition, the accommodation has on-site parking where you can leave your vehicle. Relax on the porch or patio and enjoy amenities like outdoor furniture at this vacation home. For a change, come in and enjoy the free Wi-Fi and stereo player. Prepare a home-cooked meal in the kitchen, which is equipped with an oven, stovetop, and refrigerator, along with coffee/tea makers, an electric kettle, and a microwave. The bathroom includes a hair dryer, towels and toilet paper. And since you can take advantage of the washer and dryer, you won't need to carry a lot of luggage. Other amenities include a grill, linens, an ironing board, and heating."

I bet you cannot WAIT to book such an attractive holiday home. I am NOT 75 mins from central Malaga, I am 45 mins away, I do NOT have on site parking (the village house is on a tiny street built when mule was the only form of transport and there is no vehicular access at all). The word they use for 'grill' is 'parrilla', which is usually a charcoal or wood cooking thing like a BBQ. I do NOT have a BBQ. But apparently I DO have toilet paper, so that makes up for it. I have checked other non English sites for my listing and the same rubbish is on there too. How do I go about totally disabling translation so that my listing appears everywhere in the language in which it was written?
Sunbeam
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Re: VRBO Non English Sites

Post by Sunbeam »

In VRBO can put in your own spanish translation under the property section - "add another manual translation" ... but as your listing is migrated from booking.com perhaps no option - but worth looking ...
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Casscat
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Re: VRBO Non English Sites

Post by Casscat »

Sunbeam wrote: Mon Jun 06, 2022 9:12 am In VRBO can put in your own spanish translation under the property section - "add another manual translation" ... but as your listing is migrated from booking.com perhaps no option - but worth looking ...
The problem is that I'd have to do a manual translation for every language! I checked the German and Dutch sites and they had the same utter rubbish on them - none of my narrative at all, no important information, no words about the property, its location, the village, what makes this a special place to visit, nothing at all except drivel about toilet paper! What I'd like to do is remove all translation and just have my original listing reproduced in English. If the reader does not read English they can do what I would do and Google Translate the content themselves. Casting my mind back to the old HomeAway site there were listings in languages other than English. I have escalated this to their tech team, but I wonder if anyone else has a view on this issue?
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Casscat
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Re: VRBO Non English Sites

Post by Casscat »

Just to update, the only way I have been able to get around this issue is to go into Property > Description > Add Manual Translation. For Spanish I basically wrote my English narrative into Spanish and I have checked that this has appeared as I wrote it with the focus on the provision of toilet paper missing entirely. For all the other languages I selected each one, one by one, and cut and pasted my English language heading and description into the fields. I'm not about to manually translate my listing into Japanese! So I have achieved more or less what I wanted, but imperfectly. Outside of English speaking countries and Spain the listing will be in English requiring potential guests to Google Translate what is stated. I have no idea why it is beyond the wit of VRBO to do a proper auto-translate. Airbnb seem to have this off pat.

If you have not checked the country specific VRBO sites for your listing where you have not written your narrative in the language of that country I urge you to take a look at what VRBO considers to be the most compelling features of your rental.
FelicityA
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Re: VRBO Non English Sites

Post by FelicityA »

Thank you for letting us know about this Casscat. We used to be able to easily access the listing on all the other sites to check how they looked (and they used to be OKish for translation) but now I can't find out how to do this as I am keen to check my listing translations too. Where do you locate this, please as I don't know all the various country addresses?
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Casscat
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Re: VRBO Non English Sites

Post by Casscat »

FelicityA wrote: Tue Jun 07, 2022 2:17 pm Thank you for letting us know about this Casscat. We used to be able to easily access the listing on all the other sites to check how they looked (and they used to be OKish for translation) but now I can't find out how to do this as I am keen to check my listing translations too. Where do you locate this, please as I don't know all the various country addresses?
I just Googled 'VRBO España', 'VRBO Deutschland' etc. to get a link to the relevant sites then searched for my location. As yours is possibly a legacy listing maybe the old translations carried forward to the VRBO sites after they acquired Owners Direct, HomeAway etc. but I would check if I were you.
FelicityA
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Re: VRBO Non English Sites

Post by FelicityA »

Thank you, Casscat. I discovered that if you go into their main site as a visitor you can click on the Union Jack (if you are in the UK) and change the language into pretty well anything by going to a country's site. It is slightly strange (only looked at the Italian so far) and way out of date as I think my description (which I change quite regularly to reflect space I have available) dates from last summer which is a bit annoying as I talk about availability which does not exist for this summer. They obviously don't press their 'refresh'/update button very often.
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Casscat
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Re: VRBO Non English Sites

Post by Casscat »

I think you may be benefiting from the carry over of your previous listing info Felicity. For me all that was stated on the non-UK VRBO site was that hideous statement about loo rolls and non-existent on site parking.
FelicityA
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Re: VRBO Non English Sites

Post by FelicityA »

Maybe, Casscat. You are probably right as I have been with VRBO since 2012 or thereabouts and all sections have been translated, albeit some bits a trifle odd.
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