Owners helpful information - VillaDirect marketing for your vacation rental

Our most successful website is www.villadirect.com and the majority of our reservations come from that source. However, we also have over 35 other marketing web sites that display and promote your property to potential guests. They're all owned and operated by VillaDirect - so you don't have to compete with thousands of other vacation homes in the Orlando area like you do on the "By Owner" portal sites - but you get the same benefits of additional occupancy and income.

Unlike almost all of our competitors, VillaDirect only markets to retail customers. Almost every one of our local and national competitors still rely heavily on their occupancy from tour operator bookings sourced from Europe. These tour operators add an additional middle-man layer to the transaction and take a LARGE slice of revenue from both the owner and the management company. So why do companies take tour operator bookings? ... because it's easy for the management company to accept 30 weeks for 50 homes at a low net nightly rate. There's no marketing cost to them. The management company isn't suffering - only the owner.

VillaDirect is different. When we started in 1998 we chose not to deal with the tour operators, but to build up our guest clientèle directly with guests form the US, Canada, South America and Europe instead. This means that our owner clients benefit - because the rates on our website are the basis for our calculation of your income - not some artificial "net nightly rate" that the tour operator dictates! Owners in the VillaDirect program receive a much higher net income from our retail bookings ... and that means more money to you.

This website is our 5th generation and reflects our understanding of how to capture the interest of potential guests and give them simple, easy-to-use tools to help them choose and book a vacation home, condo or town home in the Orlando area. We continuously develop and refine the processes and design of our web site to make it simpler and faster to give guests the confidence that they're safe to book on-line or over the telephone with our reservations center here in Kissimmee.

VillaDirect designs and develops all of its' marketing material in-house. Unlike other companies in this local vacation rental business, we don't use template website utilities, because we want www.villadirect.com to be unique ... not some "me-too" website that looks almost identical to all of its competitors.

In 2011, VillaDirect Vacation Homes was the first vacation rental company in Orlando to be recognized and accredited by Walt Disney World® Resorts. This award recognizes our quality of care to guests, the homes we manage and to our owner clients. For more information, please visit our Vacation Rental Home Connection page.

VillaDirect has a strong presence in the social media sphere. Guests who are looking to book nowadays are far more likely to believe someone "just like them" rather than a company spokesperson or web site. VillaDirect has developed a strong presence in the main social media spheres with over 60,000 followers, and has personnel that are dedicated to providing answers to questions from guests on the forums, blogs and social media sites about vacation rentals in Orlando. We also have team members who respond to every review posted by guests on TripAdvisor. You'll often see responses to questions on those sites which are provided by one of our team - you just won't know it!

As this marketing channel is developing, we are adding dedicated personnel to handle and respond to requests through social media outlets to ensure that VillaDirect stays at the forefront of the vacation rental market as it develops.