Marketing Your Gulf Vacation Rental in Tough Times

This may be an interesting summer if you have vacation rental property in the Gulf of Mexico. We all know that there is a huge oil spill in the Gulf, but what can you do to promote your property as still open? Marketing your Gulf vacation rental in tough times just became your top priority. You need to start a marketing campaign that is accurate, rapidly responsive to the conditions, and helpful to the consumer. So, don’t lose heart. You can fight back.

Fortunately, most of the Gulf is unaffected at this time by the oil spill. However, there is a great nervousness among families about spending their hard earned cash on a beach vacation that may be ruined. Accurate information given in a timely manner is the answer for both the vacationer and the property manager. Make sure the information stays up to date.

BP has just released $25 million to Florida and $15 million to Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi as tourism grants. These monies are to be used to promote the current state of the beaches in marketing ads. Now is the time to contact your local Chamber of Commerce to see how you can connect your property to local ads, see if any of the money will be available on a private basis, and basically see what your Chamber can do for your business. 

You may need to do a little “calming of the waters” on your own web site. If there is a good link in your area about the current condition of the beach, now is a good time to link to that site. Blogging about the condition of your beach every day or two so that current and future patrons know that your beach is fine is an easy way to put vacationers minds at rest.  

If you have never made a video blog for your web site now is the time to start. A picture is worth a thousand words, a nice pristine beach as opposed to the terrible devastation that we see on the nightly news casts. As the saying goes “Talk is cheap”. If your vacationers can see that the beach is fine, the sand is still clean and the water is blue they will be more likely to keep their reservations. If you have a webcam link in your area, be sure to post that to your site. 

An information blitz of accurate, up to the minute information will involve more of your time this year, but the payoff will be worth it in the long run. At this time, occupancy rates are up about 10% industry wide over last year. Lets keep that trend going. Marketing your Gulf vacation rental in tough times will not be as hard as you  think.

Posted by on May 29th, 2010 and filed under Advertising & Networking, Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response by filling following comment form or trackback to this entry from your site

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