December 2011
Welcome to the Christmas 2011 Newsletter from My Favourite Holiday Cottages

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Christmas is nearly upon us (as if you didn’t know) inspiring us to create ‘My Favourite Christmas Newsletter (please don’t groan). Over the last year My Favourite Holiday Cottages has continued to see steady growth in the numbers of owners and potential guests using the site book or advertise cottages. So, have a look at what we’re planning to give away, reveal or drive even more people to the website this Christmas and on into 2012.

• Our New Availability Calendar
• Half Price Premium Websites
• Launch of Supersites
• Top Tip: Using QR Codes
• Festival Cottages
• Ongoing Publicity
• Latest Blog Posts

Launching our new Availability Calendar!

We’re very pleased to announce that our new Availability Calendar is available for you to use for your listing. We’ll shortly be sending out an email detailing how the calendar works, but to see the calendar in action, have a look at The Byre. We’re also making the calendar available for you to use directly on your website if you don’t have an availability calendar already, making it an excellent piece of software for you to manage your bookings.

Half Price Premium Websites

As it’s Christmas we’re offering the first four owners who apply before the end of December half price premium websites. Starting 2012 with a modern fresh website is an ideal way to attract even more bookers to your property and our package includes a professional photography session. We’ve already produced a wide range of high quality cottage websites which are proving incredibly popular with owners and bookers alike. They not only look good, but, like a Formula One car, it’s the combination of superb design principles driven by a powerful engine that guarantees their performance. Examples of our work include:

Higher Mullacott Farm Cottages A set of period farmhouse styled countryside cottages.

Oyster Cove, a modern beachside holiday home.

Alexandra House A luxury holiday home catering for those with profound disabilities.

To make the most of this offer, email or phone us on 0845 6805431 for further details.

Launch of our Supersites

Alternatively for those owners who feel their property doesn’t need a premium website, we are now launching our new Supersites. Owners can now use the service to have a new website produced for them, quickly and easily, from a variety of attractive templates. With a whole host of additional features that can be attached to the package, it’s an ideal way to have a customised website that works for you. You provide the content – we upload it for you. Prices for the design start from £198, so for full details have a look at our page here:

In this season of Goodwill, we’re offering to produce a Supersite for just £98 (Save £100) to the first four owners to contact us before the end of December. To make the most of this offer, email or phone us on 0845 6805431 for further details.

Top Tip: Using QR Codes

Many of you have probably seen square barcodes popping up more and more frequently in newspapers and magazines, which look like the one above. These are called QR (Quick Response) Codes and can be used by anyone with a smart phone to easily access a website without having to type in a website address.

The best thing for owners though is that producing a QR code is completely free. To make your QR Code you can use a website such as ‘QR Stuff’. All you do is add the website address you want to turn into a code and it does the rest for you!

We currently use them for some of our offline publicity and for owners it’s a brilliant way of directing people to your website who might be reading your printed materials in the real world. Check out our blog post for further details

Festival Cottages

2012 sees the launch of our new ‘Festival Cottages’ section on My Favourites. This will be an exclusive section which promotes holiday cottages to potential bookers attending local festivals. Visitors to the festival can find accommodation, owners can get more bookings, and festival organisers gain increased ticket sales. As well as providing another search function on My Favourites, you’ll also attract extra traffic from a link placed on the Festival’s own website to the Festival Cottage page.

The venture is still in development so; if you know of any festivals close to you that would like to be involved in this exciting partnership please feel free to pass our details onto them, or tell us!

Ongoing Publicity

We were very pleased to be mentioned in The Times on the 14th December for an article on where to spend New Year. Crooked Lake Cottage was featured and should provide an excellent boost to website traffic in the run up to Christmas.

This coming February also sees the launch of three competitions in national publications carrying the My Favourite Holiday Cottages brand:

Country Living magazine will be offering a short break stay at the fabulous Emmett's Grange in Exmoor National Park. The publication has an impressive total monthly circulation of over 206,000 so the property should prove popular with readers.

Lavender House in North Devon is also the prize for a short break stay which is being featured in Coast Magazinewhich has a circulation of 42,000.

Finally, Essentials Magazines‘Holiday Cottage of the Month’ for February is Mickle Rigg Cottage in the Lake District which looks set to receive some good publicity as the magazine hits the shelves in the prime booking month of January.

Latest Blog Posts

Launching our New Website for Oyster Cove

A New Loan for our company allows more growth

Half Price Website Designs

A more in depth look at QR Codes.

Finally...

We would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, As always we’d love to hear from you about the articles in this newsletter, or if you just fancy a chat about the services we can offer you then feel free to get in touch.