To get enough rental bookings you will need a large number of rental enquiries. The conversion rate from enquiry to booking will always be low, sometimes by a factor of 1 to 100 or more. However much work you put in to converting each enquiry into a firm booking, you will fail in most cases.

For every booking you take, you will have lost at least another ten or twenty. And that is under ideal conditions, and if you do everything right. So you must have access to a lot of enquiries.

There is no better resource than the internet for this purpose. There are alternatives - some owners use local or even national newspaper and magazine advertising very effectively, while others pay to have their homes included in specialist villa rental publications.

While these options will usually generate some enquiries, their potential is very small compared to the vast potential of the internet. Also, their cost is in some cases relatively high, so the cost per enquiry (which is an important factor in profitable renting) is also high. It is easy to spend several hundred dollars a year on magazine advertising, and to see no more than a handful of enquiries from it. An internet rental site, on the other hand, can generate several hundred enquiries for a few dollars.

The internet offers several alternatives, ranging from signing up to a few traditional villa advertising web sites to having your own full-featured web site.

Using traditional villa advertising web sites There are many rental villa advertising services on the internet. If you have owned your rental home for any length of time you will probably have seen something of these, perhaps even tried one or two yourself.

Some of these services are effective, but their success is very much linked to the level of effort on site promotion that the site owner puts in, and to how vigorously you follow up on enquiries to try to convert them into bookings in competition with many other owners.