Flipkey, owned by
Tripadvisor, began offering a 60 day trial a few months ago
and we decided to sign up with our
2 bedroom holiday apartment in Nice, France.
Flipkey is one of the larger vacation rentals sites, with
more than 100,000 properties listed and it comes with most
of the features you would expect of such a site. Owned by
Tripadvisor, Flipkey is an emerging rival to the industry
leader,
Homeaway. (Tripadvisor also owns
Holidaylettings .)
Sign up with Flipkey is fairly
easy: I mostly just cut and paste information from my
listings on other vacation rental sites. Also, there is a
dashboard for managing your property listing and enquiries.
As you would expect from a site owned by Tripadvisor,
there is an emphasis on soliciting guest reviews. Because
ours is a new listing, we have not yet collected any guest
reviews, but there is compelling evidence that
vacation rental properties with more guest reviews get more
enquiries. Hence, we advise that you solicit reviews
from any renters who book with you through Flipkey.
Flipkey also provides badges that you can put on your own
website, indicating that your property's guest review count
and average rating by Flipkey. (Of course, this is also a
good way for Flipkey is build links from your own site to
theirs!)
Many sites allow you to pay for "Special
Offers", such as limited time discounts or free nights.
Interestingly, Flipkey provides this facility for free and
these special offers are then highlighted on your listing. I
just discovered this feature and posted a special offer
today: it will be interesting to see if this generates a
specific response.
Over the course of two months, we have received 21 enquiries on our Flipkey listing. Of these, we confirmed one booking, which is pretty good for a free trial! (Some of the enquiries were for dates I already had booked: because I wanted to gauge the level of enquiries, I did not keep my calendar fully up to date.)
A full listing on Flipkey costs $299.99 per annum,
which is not cheap. However, my experience so far is that
would indicate that it could be good value. My
recommendation would be to avail of the
free
trial, see how it works for you and then decide at the
end of the trial period.