TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has always been available across the globe, but for residents of Argentina, Germany and France, it’s closer than ever: we are pleased to announce that many properties listed on Gael Holiday Homes website are now included on three new sites through the additional marketing channel of Flipkey. — TripAdvisor.ar, TripAdvisor.de and TripAdvisor.fr. 

Locals of these countries will not only be able to find your properties more easily, they will also be able to access them in their native language.

Your holiday home will be automatically listed on these new points of sale with no additional cost or action required — we simply wanted to share with you that your exposure on the world’s largest travel community just got a little broader.

Gael Holiday Homes TripAdvisor – view website

2012 TripAdvisor Excellence Award

We are very pleased to have heard the news from Flipkey that we retain our 2011 TripAdvisor Excellence award for 2012. With 55 of the properties listed on our website also listed on TripAdvisor, through the Gael account, we have 37 properties that have received guest feedback with 22 being rated as excellent and 15 as very good.

Running in conjunction with our own guest satisfaction programme the published TripAdvisor reviews are mainly through invitation instigated by us off the back of our programme.

A huge thank you to all of our owners as although the services of Gael are recognised by TripAdvisor by far the biggest contribution to this success are the standards of the properties and you, the owners, who work very hard to maintain the quality.

We look forward to building on this success and will keep you updated with any TripAdvisor news.

Live Chat function

The graph below shows that there is a higher volume of booking traffic between the hours of 6pm and 10pm than any other time of day. As this is out-with office hours we want to ensure that guests can still contact us with any queries as this may be the difference between them committing to a booking or not.

From the start of March we will be launching a live chat function on our Gael and Inverness Accommodation websites and aim to provide this in the evenings 7 days a week so we are available to answer any questions guests may have.

Affiliate programme

The recently launched Gael Holiday Homes Affiliate Programme enables us to quickly implement an on-line accommodation availability, price checking and reservation system onto relevant third-party websites, giving the website owners the opportunity to generate income, paid by Gael, whilst increasing the exposure of your properties to a far wider audience.

We aim to roll this out on a number of websites this year and have started by adding selected properties, chosen by the website owner, to the Happygolf.co.uk website – to view an example listing follow the link – Gael on Happygolf.co.uk. Presently we have 26 properties listed on the website and will increase this to 40 over the next few weeks.

Guest review scores

Now that we have been running the guest review system on our website for some time we have added a little more detail onto each property listing to put some added perspective behind the rating score shown. The graphic on the right shows that each score will now be qualified by the number of guest reviews that have made the average score. This allows visitors to the site to judge whether scores are a good average based on many reviews or may be a little more subjective when they are made up from only one of two reviews.

Search engine rankings boost

When it comes to search engine rankings there are a variety of things you can do to boost results. As the saying goes in the www. world ‘content is King’.

Toward the end of the year we have added a number of keyword targeted pages to our website to boost our SEO (search engine optimisation). We will continue with this throughout the year and will also be adding more articles to our blog and social media posts as well.

A great informative addition to our site, adding value for visitors to the site, and a welcome helping hand to boost our Google keyword positions.

Some of the new pages –

Wintertime in the Highlands

Whisky trail

Castles and Historic sites across the Highlands

Outdoor Activities

Lochs, Rivers & Firths

Hillwalking & Munro bagging

Scottish Wildlife

Bird watching in Scotland

Fishing in Scotland

Self Catering in Scotland

Let us know if there are any subjects that you think would be informative and helpful to guests…

Gael guest prize draw winner

Well done and congratulations to Mr Simpson from Paisley who is the winner of the Gael Holiday Homes grand prize draw winning a £250 evoucher. Following a recent stay in Inverness through Gael Mr Simpson returned one of our guest satisfaction surveys and was automatically entered into the draw …. read the full story on our website.