Category Archives: Holiday Hints and Tips

Taking your dog to your holiday cottage

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We have hundreds of holiday cottages here on holidaycottages.net. Many of them are pet-friendly and will welcome your dog as warmly as they welcome you.

Taking pets on holiday is something that is become more popular by the year. We have always wanted to holiday with our furry friends, but have rarely had the opportunity. As holiday accommodation has woken up to this new requirement, a new market has sprung up for pet-friendly holiday cottages.

If you’re travelling with your dog for the first time, here are some useful tips for you.

Travelling with your dog

Some dogs are more than happy to travel by car. Some not so much. If you have to drive to your holiday cottage, plan on stopping to let your dog go to the toilet and have water on hand for them to drink. Dogs that are anxious get dehydrated very quickly, which compounds the problem.

Where practical, have a window open to provide fresh air. Air conditioning works well too if open windows won’t work. Keep the temperature in the car as cool as you find comfortable to prevent your dog overheating and further dehydrating.

Dogs and trains

If you’re travelling by train, you are legally entitled to take your dog with you as long as it is well behaved, under control and on a lead. It forms part of the National Rail Conditions of Carriage and all railway companies have to comply.

Check with yours before travelling though in case there are any restrictions.

What to pack

Most holiday cottages cater for human visitors only, as that’s what they are geared up for. That means you have to pack for your dog just as you would your children. Items to pack include:

  • Food and water bowl
  • Bedding
  • Toys
  • Lead
  • Poo bags
  • Dog towels
  • Chews

You might also want to add a ground anchor to secure the lead, shampoo and brush if your dog likes to explore and cleaning products to ensure your holiday cottage is left in the same condition you found it.

Routine and dog behaviour

Dogs are like humans in that they are essentially creatures of habit. They can adapt to change, but need a little time and a little reassurance in order to do it. When travelling with your dog, ensure you’re always close by and that they can see you at all times. Keep them company until they are used to the holiday cottage and bring as many of the dog’s things are you can manage.

Bringing the dog’s bedding doesn’t just ensure you don’t dirty the cottage, it also provides a link to the dog’s routine and comfort in something they recognise. Plan on providing more stimulation than usual in the first couple of days to help take their mind off the differences in routine.

Cleaning up behind your dog

A well behaved dog isn’t just a joy to be around, they also prove to the owner of the holiday cottage that allowing pets is a good idea. Cleaning up after your dog is an essential part of that. Not only to continue the goodwill from property owners, but also to prevent any big cleaning bills.

Holiday cottages are businesses after all. If that business has to pay for cleaning after you stay, it’s only right that they pass that charge on to you. Cleaning up after your dog means everyone goes away happy!

Top tips for turning holiday cottage queries into bookings

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When you’re marketing a holiday cottage, getting noticed is only the first step in an important chain of events. What you do next will influence the rest of that process so it’s vital that you get it right.

If you’re new to the holiday cottage industry, you have an opportunity to hit the ground running with these tips. They have been learned through experience and are guaranteed to work. It isn’t often we can make such a statement!

So, without further ado, here are our top tips for turning holiday cottage queries into bookings.

Offer multiple ways to contact

In this digital age of instant everything, you need to provide a range of mediums for your potential guests to contact you. Not everyone is going to be comfortable calling, Tweeting or emailing you, so give guests a choice.

Provide a landline number if you can, a mobile number, an email address and/or a contact form on your own website. Add Facebook and Twitter is you’re going to be using them too.

Be responsive

If you offer multiple ways to contact you for holiday cottage bookings, you then have to monitor all those channels. The easiest way to do that is with a smart phone or tablet. While requiring an investment to buy, you can simultaneously monitor all your digital channels at one and can be alerted as soon as someone contacts you.

You can forward landlines to your mobile and use that if you want to cover all bases with one device.

Owning a smart phone or tablet is one thing. Keeping it with you at all times is another. Once you publish your contact details, you then have to make sure you respond to each and every contact.

Be fast

Time is everything in hospitality. When the competition is only ever a click away, you have to be on the ball. Technology can help by funnelling all communication channels to a single device, but you have to be aware and have the will to respond fast.

Speed is everything. You may not think so, but your audience does. You may think a couple of days isn’t a long time to wait for you to get back to them, but it is. Response times are now measured in minutes and hours, not days.

Write a canned response

You will find as you develop your holiday cottage business that most guests ask the same kinds of questions. If you want to make light work of them, spend a little time writing standard responses to these questions and save them as templates.

You can then send the templates in response to those questions. Just remember to address any additional questions not covered in the template and be sure to add their name and personalise where practical. While useful on the business side of the transaction, nobody wants to receive an obviously canned response!

Those are just some ways you can convert holiday cottage booking queries into real bookings. There are lots more ways to increase occupancy, which we will be covering in the coming weeks. Good luck with them!

Embrace spring with a weekend break!

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After what seems like an eternity of wind, rain and perpetual greyness, spring has finally sprung. The sun is out, the puddles are gone, floods are receding and the world is righting itself once more.

We had four months of rain, storms, flooding and low pressure. We had a wet Christmas, a damp New Year and a somewhat soggy beginning to 2014. Now all that is over and it’s time to move on. What better time to move on to Spring than taking a break from work?

Holidaycottages.net has a huge selection of high quality holiday cottages across the UK and Ireland that would fit the bill perfectly!

Spring breaks

While spring is a traditionally busy time of year for holiday rentals, there are some vacancies left if you’re in the mood for a change of scenery.

We have a wide range of holiday cottages available, in all areas of the country. Whether it’s a quaint historical cottage, a romantic getaway for two or somewhere for all the family, we’re bound to have something here!

We have cottages by the beach, cottages in the country, pet-friendly cottages, cottages with sea views, cottages near cities and even cottages with their own tennis courts. Whatever kind of property you’re looking for, we’re bound to have it here!

Book ahead for Easter

Once spring is well underway, Easter is only round the corner. If that isn’t a great excuse for a break from everything, we don’t know what is!

Why queue for hours at the airport if you can simply drive to a lovely holiday cottage? Why travel across the world when you can travel a couple of hours for the same effect? Why pay the expense of a foreign holiday when you can holiday at home for less?

With the rules on taking kids out of school during term time, booking your holiday cottage early is more important than ever. More and more people are choosing to holiday at home, meaning more people wanting quality accommodation for a well-deserved break.

So, if you see something on Holidaycottages.net that you like and it’s available, book it! You never know when someone else will have the same idea. Feel free to browse our huge collection of holiday cottages. All offer fantastic value, great accommodation and everything you need to kick off spring in style!

Top tips for advertising a holiday cottage

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Here on Holidaycottages.net, we want everyone to find exactly what they are looking for. We want guests to find that perfect holiday cottage and our advertisers to find a simple, cost-effective medium for advertising their properties.

Formatting the advert is an art form that every business could benefit from learning. It is a fundamental part of running a business in any industry. With that in mind, let’s discuss the anatomy of a good holiday cottage advert.

The headline

The headline of any piece of work is vital. It’s probably the most important few words you will write. It needs to describe what you’re offering in an attractive way and intrigue the reader enough to draw them in.

For example: “Holiday cottage in Cornwall for rent” isn’t going to do much for your occupancy rate is it?

However, “Fantastic seaside getaway with ocean view minutes from Fistral Beach” would do much better.

The first paragraph

The first paragraph of your holiday cottage advert has to continue the good work you began with the headline. Here you will need to highlight the main features of your holiday let and make them as compelling and as exciting as possible.

It might help to make a list of the main selling points of your holiday property from a guest perspective and list them in this first paragraph. That way, your strongest pitch is within a couple of seconds reading time where it will have the most impact.

Images

A picture paints a thousand words. A well-used quotation, but for good reason. Even the best headline and description in the world doesn’t come close to making a sale as good images.

Take some great quality pictures of your holiday cottage to really make an impact. Look at your cottage at different times of the day, assess when the light shows it at its best and take the pictures then. Use your list of selling points from your initial paragraph and take an image of each of them to include in your advert.

Take and use as many as your advertising medium will allow. They really are that powerful!

The remainder

The rest of your holiday cottage advert should be used to offer supplementary information and important details. You can expand on your selling features and move on to less important elements of your cottage.

It’s also here that you will add details like availability, seasonal information, local amenities, highlights and anything else you need your guest to know before making a booking.

Writing your holiday cottage advert will take time and effort, but it’s an investment not a cost. The better you make it, the more likely it is to convert readers into guests. Which is what we’re all here for, right?

Why choose a holiday cottage?

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In an ever-shrinking world where air travel is faster and cheaper than ever before, why rent a holiday cottage? Why forgo sunny beaches and foreign climates for England? Why holiday here when there is an entire world to explore?

The short answer to those questions is fairly simple. Because we want to. The longer answer is well, longer. There are several reasons why holiday cottages are so popular.

They include:

  • Cost
  • Convenience
  • Location
  • Flexibility

Let’s take a look at each in turn.

Cost of holiday cottages

Let’s not underestimate the impact of cost on our everyday lives. It influences just about every decision we make and is one of the main reasons holiday cottages are so popular.

There is no need to pay overinflated airline prices with a holiday cottage. No need to pay extortionate costs for parking, or manage the expense of kids running around an airport looking for things to buy.

A holiday cottage is a very cost-effective way of getting away from it all for a while. You don’t need to pay for flights, you don’t need to pay for transfers, tips or anything else. You can select a size and location to suit your tastes and your budget and truly tailor your holiday to fit you.

Plus, everything you spend stays within the local economy. Not only are you saving money yourselves, you’re also helping to support local businesses.

Convenience of holiday cottages

How long were you waiting at the airport the last time you went abroad? How much was airport parking? How much did you spend in the airport? None of that is necessary with a holiday cottage.

By the time you have driven to the airport, found a parking space and checked in, you could be sitting in your holiday cottage with a glass of something cool watching the world go by.

Location of holiday cottages

The self-catering industry is now well established and is mature enough to have properties just about anywhere in the U.K. and Ireland. If you want something somewhere, we can usually find it for you.

Our lovely country is full of places to explore and new towns and villages to venture into. It’s too easy to take it all for granted or think it’s all the same. It really isn’t. A holiday in the U.K can be just as invigorating, if not more so, than a trip abroad.

No more late night flights, no more jet lag, no more bleary-eyed drives from the airport. Those days are past!

Flexibility of holiday cottages

If you have spent any time at all on our site, you will already see that your options are numerous. You can choose property types, price, location, date, features, pet friendly and so much more. You really can have your holiday your way.

Need to move a date? Check with the property owner and it should be no problem as long as the property is vacant at the time. No need to change flights or pay extra “administration fees” for simple things like that!

These are just some of the reasons holiday cottages are so popular. Isn’t it about time you booked yours?

Welcome to the new Holiday Cottages blog!

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Today is the beginning of a new era. An era of blogging that begins right here, right now.

From today onwards, the holidaycottages.net blog will be updated twice a week with news, useful information, tops tens, hints, tips and general information about holiday lettings and boat rentals.

So not only will the main site be the place to go if you’re looking for holiday accommodation anywhere in the UK and Ireland, it will also be the place to go if you want to know more about holiday lettings in general.

It’s all part of our commitment  to provide the very best service to all our customers!

Holiday cottages

Given the website name is holidaycottages.net, our speciality is of course, holiday cottages. Cottages and holiday lets are our main focus as they make up the largest proportion of holiday rentals within the U.K. But, we’re about much more than that.

Our strength is enabling you to tightly focus your search on a specific area or criteria. We cover all of the U.K. and Ireland and feature hundreds of holiday cottages spread across our green and pleasant land.

We also have a powerful search engine that allows you to set criteria such as pet friendly, cottages with a pool, near a pub, near the beach, cottages with tennis courts and much more. It’s a fast, easy way to select the perfect accommodation for your needs.

Boat rentals

We don’t just do holiday cottages, we also feature a number of holiday boat rentals too! Ever wanted to pilot a narrowboat around the Norfolk Broads? Ever thought of taking a cabin cruiser across a loch? Or exploring Britain’s thousands of miles of waterways? If you do, we can help!

The same search engine that powers our cottage searches can also be unleashed on your search for the perfect boat in the perfect area. We have hundreds of boats on our books of all shapes and sizes. No matter where you want to go or what type of craft you want, we’ll have something for you here.

We have designed holidaycottages.net to be lean, clean and simple to use. It isn’t cluttered with unnecessary noise or filled with irrelevant information. We have created it with you in mind and put the information you need front and centre.

If you have any questions about what we do or how we do it, if you have any suggestions on how we can improve the website, or ideas for features, please get in touch.

Advantages of holiday cottages for new parents

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Becoming a parent for the first time is a daunting experience with all that dealing with a baby involves. So when it comes to taking a well earned break away you will need to consider many aspects as it is no longer as straight forward and easy to travel as it was, pre baby.

As you will be aware when travelling even a short distance with a baby it involves planning and taking everything but the kitchen sink with you. Therefore when considering your first break away with your new addition there are a number of points to consider that may persuade you to remain in the United Kingdom.

You will not have to incur the cost of a passport if you stay within the United Kingdom. Which could be an unwelcome additional expense, at an already expensive time.

Other hidden expenses can be involved when holidaying abroad. In particular the cost of getting to and from the airport. Transportation charges when you get to your destination. Or parking charges for when your car is left at the airport.

You will not have to worry about exceeding your baggage allowance bearing in mind a baby does not get its own baggage allowance with many airlines. This could result in the dreaded excess baggage charges.

In addition there is also the worry about baggage getting mislaid or lost on the journey.

Travelling with new babies and young children can be stressful on both you and the child. The hustle and bustle of airports can be daunting and scary for young children. There is the whole issue of the long waits for checking in where they will get bored and restless. Then there is the process of getting through security, where you have to take young children in and out of their pushchairs/prams as you go through the security procedures. The fact that you cannot take through certain amounts of fluids might mean that you may not be ableto take through ready made bottles or foods for the journey.

During take off and landing many young children can encounter problems with pressure in their ears causing considerable discomfort resulting in them becoming distressed and crying which, can also affect you if you are unable to settle them.

If you are holidaying in warmer countries you will have to be careful with young children and exposure to the sun. Under six months of age it is not recommended that you use any sun creams on their delicate skins. The heat can make them uncomfortable as their bodies cannot regulate their temperatures as we can as we get older. This may involve keeping them in the shade or in air conditioned environments.

The water in many foreign countries is not as clean as it is in the United Kingdom and therefore you will have to be very careful when making up feeds and bottles with regard to sterilising and boiling water for drinking purposes.

It is also worth taking extra baby formula in case you should run out or be delayed on your return journey. You may not be able to get your particular brand of baby formula where you are.

The added bonuses of travelling in the United Kingdom are:

  • You can load up the car with everything you might need and not have to worry about carrying it/checking it in. Just go and unload at your destination.
     
  • The children can be comfortably placed in their car seat/carry cot before you travel and they may sleep for most or perhaps the entire journey. Older children can be settled with their handheld entertainment devises, colouring or other activities to keep them occupied.
     
  • You do not have to worry about airport strikes or delays if you are holidaying in the United Kingdom.
     
  • You can choose from a number of holiday options from relaxing seaside breaks, staying on a farm, camping in the woods or in a dedicated site with all amenities. You can then select from staying in hotels or in holiday cottages which, will probably be the better option with young children as it will offer you the convenience of being home from home with all the necessary amenities and room to spread out and make yourself comfortable.
     
  • There are no language barriers to overcome, making your holiday a simpler process.
     
  • There is no time difference for young children to adjust to.

The United Kingdom has so much to offer from stunning scenery, a wealth of activities and attractions many of them free.

It is no wonder more and more families are choosing to staycation, as it is increasingly referred, in the United Kingdom. Perhaps it is time to see for yourself the benefits of a staycation.

3 Simple Reasons You Need To Book Your Autumn And Winter Holiday Cottages Now

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With the school holidays now over and most children having been back at school for at least a week or two, we’re sure there are plenty of you out there who are relieved. Keeping your kids entertained for a weekend can be difficult enough, but for those who have had the full ‘joys’ of the summer holidays with your brood, you deserve a medal!

Most of us at HolidayCottages.net are parents ourselves, so we really do know just how challenging it is to keep the kids entertained during the holidays – and also how expensive.

With the October half term only six weeks away for most (and Christmas less than 100 days away!), if you’re planning on booking one of the many holiday cottages around the country for a family getaway, it’s important you do so now, for three simple reasons.

1. You could save a fortune

Let’s just get straight to the point – if you book any type of holiday as far in advance as you can, you’re almost always going to get the cheapest price possible.

You’ll of course be able to get some cheap last minute deals with most holidays, but there’s a huge risk factor involved. Imagine you waited until the weekend before you wanted to go and it turned out everywhere was fully booked. Then what do you do?

Chances are there’ll be something available somewhere, but nothing that fits in with your budget or suits your needs, which leads us perfectly onto the next two points.

2. You’ll be able to choose exactly where you want to go…

It’s a simple point, but it’s one that a lot of people forget about.

Just like the further in advance you book, the cheaper it will be, if you book at least a month or two before you travel, you’ll be able to choose exactly where you want to go (whether that’s in a rural area away from it all or close to the local attractions) and get your choice of which type of cottage you want to stay in – how about a cottage with a hot tub or swimming pool?

Everyone likes choice. No one wants to put their details and requirements into a website or search engine and find out that there’s only one or two cottages for them to choose from. It’s disheartening having to settle for second best!

We really do try to offer the widest selection of quality holiday cottages we possibly can, but there’s only so many available to offer (and with a particularly small window to book at peak times, the longer you leave it, the more chance there is that everything will have been snapped up).

3. …and when you want to stay

When you’re booking a break with restricted dates – the half term holiday is a perfect example – one of the most frustrating things about booking late is that you can’t often get to stay exactly when you want (or more importantly, need).

Linking back to your choice of cottages and destinations, you might be able to find somewhere that suits your needs, but what if it takes nearly a full day’s worth of driving just to get there? A three night stay could give you just one full day before you have to start thinking about getting ready to drive all the way back home.

Not really a relaxing break with the family, is it?

Sometimes you won’t be able to book holiday cottages in advance, we understand that. You might not know exactly when you can go, for example. You might not even know yet whether it’s a possibility if you do have dates.

But if you have your dates already worked out, the simple fact is, book now and you’ll be able to choose exactly where you stay, when you go and most importantly, all for the cheapest price possible.