Total 469 words used.
HCPL balances maximizing nightly rates and occupancy with keeping support costs low. By launching an AI tool to drive pricing, revenue for participating properties rose by more than 27%. This revenue was a combination booking volume changes during off-peak times AND higher booking bookings during peak times at premium rates. Property owner hesitations with AI pricing their nightly luxury vacation rental rates quickly faded with higher revenue commission checks.
Next, HCPL worked directly with search companies to drive our average cost/click to nearly half the competition at [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION]. Additionally, improvements in SEO and social media drove no-cost search results up [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] p.p., incremental traffic up [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] and page views up [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION], year over year. In fact, at the end of 2020, these efforts resulted in the need to deploy a separate vacation rental property acquisition site at the beginning of 2021 to support the sales team. More than [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION] visitors in 2021 used the site to determine if HCPL was a good fit to list their vacation rental.
Finally, HCPL visitor traffic and behavior indicated a UX review and website architecture redesign. Findings indicated a need to decrease average page load time, reduce exit rates prior to reaching the booking page and organize features and properties into experiences and amenities most frequently requested. This redesign deployed 12/22/21. The new site has already seen year-over-year improves of 16% average session duration, a 4 second page load time decrease and a 10% increase in the number of repeat sessions per visitor.
The highly competitive vacation rental industry has a very low ‘cost-to-switch’ to another provider. This can be done often within hours. To retain a wide variety of vacation rental properties with desirable amenities, customer retention requires performance almost immediately. Property owners demand these things: high nightly occupancy with maximized rental rates, low support costs and fees, adequate guest vetting for safety and security, and a support team monitoring guest trends and keeping owners informed.
Many companies and OTA’s (Online Ticketing Agencies) pass fees, marketing and similar support costs either directly to the vacation rental property owners or to their guests. HCPL takes a different approach by using technology and AI to determine market prices and anticipate visitor demand, constant manual pricing changes do not require payroll costs to be incurred.
Next, HCPL continually monitors search elements and digital marketing practices with Google, Bing and others directly. Keywords and ads are updated frequently to match with what shoppers are looking for and drive down spend-per-conversion. These findings drove the demand for an improved website experience. In particular, faster page load times on graphically intense pages, better organized search elements and shorten the distance between landing page and booking page. In short, drive marketing performance efficiently. These elements save owners money because there are fewer fees to pass along.
