New Calendar Lets You Publish Peak Rates!!

We just launched a new calendar that lets you publish peak rates right along side your availability calendar. Over the last couple months renters have expressed frustration over the fact that there was no way to tell whether or not a certain weekend was considered peak or standard without contacting the owners. We have solved this problem and in the process made several other improvements to the calendar that make it much more user friendly for our property owners. Login to your account today and check it out! Please offer any feedback you have about the calendar right here on our blog.

Using Keywords to Drive More Inquiries

A lot of us are missing out on a very effective and simple way to generate more inquiries for our properties. Search engines love user generated content, and since you the property owner are a user on our site you are in a great position to effectively use keywords so that your property will show up in Google search results.

Let me give you an example. When you are entering a title for your property don't just plug in your address or the name of your property. If I am a potential renter, and I am trying to find a place to stay for graduation weekend or the next big football game chances are I am not going to search for "Three Rivers Cottage" , "Condo near Main St", or "Town Home in Cherry Hills". If you use keywords like graduation, football, team mascots, university names, weddings, vineyards, etc ...... then you greatly increase the chances that somebody out there is going to find your property when searching on Google. Below are two examples in our Charlottesville market where property owners have included relevant keywords in their title and in their short description and it has landed them 1st page results on Google.

In this first example the property owner included the keyword phrase "Graduation Weekend" and as you can see they are the third URL in the list when someone searches for "places to stay uva graduation 2010". Click the following link to see this vacation rental.
http://uva.collegeweekends.com/more_details.aspx?prop_id=268&ref=browse

An even better example is this property that shows up #1! for the search "uva football house rental" because she put UVA football in her title. Click the following link to see this game day rental http://uva.collegeweekends.com/more_details.aspx?prop_id=748&ref=browse

You will notice that these people still used a traditional title but just took advantage of the extra space by entering relevant keywords. You can also do this in your short and long descriptions as well as in the user profile that we blogged about last week.

If you have any questions about this or want some help from us for some good keyword suggestions in your market please comment on this blog post.

Property Owner Profiles Drive More Bookings

We are pleased to announce that we have added an exciting new feature to the website. Now property owners have the ability to load a picture of themselves and tell potential owners a little bit about themselves. Here is an example

This is a great opportunity for our vacation rental owners to make potential renters feel welcome and share their knowledge of the town. We are planning on beefing this feature up in the near future but in the meantime feel free to tell potential guests about your favorite restaurants and hang outs in your town.

Don't miss out on this great opportunity to drive more bookings! All you have to do is login to your account and click on the user profile link on the left.

Please be sure to let us know what you think right here on the blog by leaving comments.

Updating Your Availability Calendar

Imagine you are looking for a place to stay and you find this great website (CollegeWeekends.com) :) . You are looking for a place to stay for graduation weekend and you see this great feature that lets you search by availability. So you plug in the dates for graduation weekend and the site shows you that there are 15 beautiful vacation rentals available that weekend. So you do some more sorting and you pick out 5 that are big enough for your group and in your price range. Then you spend the next 15 minutes e-mailing and or calling these 5 properties only to find out that they are all already booked.

Can you imagine how FRUSTRATING that would be? I mean what a huge pump fake and waste of time!!

In an effort to make sure that this does not happen to renters on CollegeWeekends.com we are displaying properties on our site so that the rentals with the most recently updated calendar are displayed at the top of every list. This provides our owners with a strong incentive to keep calendars updated.We hope that this reorganization of our vacation rental properties together with frequent reminders from us via newsletters etc... will keep all of the renters that we work so hard to get to the site happy.

We would love to hear from you guys so please leave a comment below

SEC Road Trip

All I can say is WOW!! People in the SEC really do love their football and everything that it entails. I started my trip off in Athens where we hosted a tailgate for the USC (gamecocks) game. We got there at 11 for a 7'oclock game which I must admit I thought was excessively early but I was in the company of two diehard gamecock fans and a Georgia fan that insisted it was absolutely necessary. Turns out they were right and despite the fact that we were arrived 8 hours before game time there were plenty of people who were already set up. We put out a big spread of grub and refreshments that I regret not getting a picture of before it got decimated. Here are some pictures from the game and of our banner which we were fortunate enough to set up on the dog walk.




I spent the first part of the week in Athens and met with a lot of really great people and got to eat a lot of really fantastic food. I almost overdosed on sweet tea because you can't find it out in Colorado except for in a McDonalds and they should be ashamed of themselves for calling that artificially sweetened crap sweet tea. Here are some cool Athens land marks from downtown and the campus.

The Arches

Statue of "UGA"

Next I hopped in my black PT Cruiser (a.k.a. heinous death trap) and made the journey to Oxford, MS. Unfortunately it rained almost the whole time I was there but it did not seem to dampen the spirits of the Ole Miss faithful. I spent Thursday and Friday meeting with clients and checking out some our rental properties down there, which are truly spectacular by the way. Here is one example. The owner, Mollisia Swaney, has taken great care in furnishing the property and makes sure that everything down to the last detail is taken care of. Click the image below for more information.


On Saturday I headed to the grove to participate in what I had been warned is the most impressive tailgating scene in the SEC. I am certainly no expert, but I was totally blown away. Again it was a night game and people line up at "The Grove"(it is a big park in the middle of campus) the night before and at 7:00 pm security lets all the tailgaters storm the grove and set up their tents for the next day. Apparently space along the "Walk of Champions" which is a brick walk way that all the players walk down on their way to the game, is the most coveted. I showed up around noon on game day to find "The Grove" absolutely covered with tents and people. I was not only shocked by the number of people that showed up in the rain and mud for an out of conference game but also by the fact that several tailgates had satellites, multiple flat screen TV's, carpet, chandeliers, and huge tables covered in food. It was so crowded it was hard to get good pictures but here are a couple.

I met a lot of incredibly friendly and gracious people, who define southern hospitality, that welcomed me to their tailgates and insisted I needed to come back for the Bama game because apparently what I was witnessing was JV compared to the crowd that would show up for an in conference game on a nice day. Honestly though I am not sure how you could have crammed one more person in there.

All in all it was a great trip and I am looking forward to getting the chance to visit some of the other conferences that we are serving as we continue to grow.

The Cavalier Daily Writes about Collegeweekends

A home away from home
University alumnus launches temporary lodging Web site that offers alternatives to Charlottesville hotels

In our first student newspaper! The best recommendation we can get is directly from a university. Does your school want to be next?? http://www.cavalierdaily.com/news/2009/aug/27/a-home-away-from-home/

Look Out Athens! Condo available in the heart of UGA campus

Collegeweekends would like to welcome Condo Near Downtown/UGA Stadium to the family. Located in the middle of the UGA campus, this beautiful property is available for all remaining Bulldogs games this season, so don't wait to book your weekend today! More information available at Theseasonsofathens.com