When you own a Costa Rican vacation rental, you will want to find the best way to rent and promote it. When you purchase a Costa Rican vacation home, which you might be able to do by using your retirement fund, you might not only decide to enjoy the home during your vacations but also look for a nice return on your investment.
Once you own a Costa Rican vacation home, you will be surprised how many family and friends will try to get a free ride. When I moved to Costa Rica many years ago, I would get nephews of old neighbors. I even got emails from a great uncle I had never met to reserve a free room in my home.
The smart move for you is to promote your home as a Vacation Rental, so you can earn a nice return on your investment or cover your cost at the very least, depending on how much effort you want to make promoting your vacation home or luxury vacation home.
In other articles, we have covered “How to find a Costa Rican Vacation Rental Property Manager” and “How to market your Vacation Rental in Costa Rica.” In today’s article, we’ll cover where to promote your Costa Rican Vacation Rental. Before you start spending any money on advertising, discuss the options given below with your property manager.
Promote your Costa Rican vacation rental.
We have already discussed building your website in another article. So let’s start first with the websites that are on the top of Google search results of Costa Rican Vacation Rentals. Photos and a good description that suggest an amazing vacation will help promote your vacation rental very well. People love to look at photos! Check out the photos I used in this article. They’re all Costa Rican vacation homes that you will find for sale on our Costa Rica real estate website.
Most top-ranking websites charge for advertising your Costa Rican vacation rental, so before you start listing your vacation home for rent, put them all in a spreadsheet for comparison before you invest.
If you have an ocean-view luxury vacation home, use photos like this to promote it.
Top ranking websites
- HomeAway allows you to pay $349/annual or $0 upfront and pay 10% for each booking you receive. HomeAway offers home and condo vacation rentals at all price ranges.
- Luxury Retreats specializes in villas and Costa Rican luxury vacation rentals. Luxury Retreats handpicks and personally inspects the villas to set a new standard of excellence.
- Flipkey by Tripadvisor allows you to sign up for free and charges you 3% per booking of your Costa Rican vacation rental.
- VRBO is one of the oldest Vacation Rental By Owner websites. They charge either $349/annual and 0% commission or $0 upfront and 10% per booking.
- Tripadvisor charges a 3% booking commission to list your Costa Rican Vacation rental.
- AirBnB charges a 3% booking commission as well as a 6-12% guest service fee charged to the guest.
- VacationRentals is owned by HomeAway and charges $199/annual and 0% booking fee or a 10% booking commission and $0 upfront.
Imagine sitting in that tub at the window, enjoying the view with a glass of champagne.
There are also other ways of promoting your Costa Rican vacation rental without having to pay anything at all. You will need to spend much time and effort on them constantly. Interested in spending some time and going through a learning curve on how to use social networking? Then read on.
Social Media
- Create a business page on Facebook, and you can also create all the ads that you want and promote your Costa Rican vacation rental yourself. You can also join various Costa Rican vacation rental groups on Facebook. There you can promote your vacation home.
- Suppose you already have a Linkedin account and have many connections. In that case, you can use those connections to promote your vacation rental constantly by creating new posts now and then.
- Google Plus will need quite some extra effort to create a following. But you can promote your Costa Rican vacation rental by posting photos. You can try photos of the beach, nature, fishing trips, hiking trips, and boating trips. Try any other great photos that you take during your vacation of different groups of people of your choice. You can create different groups of people—for example, realtors, travel agents, friends, and family. Try to get them to engage with your content by creating your online magazine.
- You can also post all those beautiful photos about the surrounding areas and things to do around your vacation home on Instagram and Pinterest, where you can create different boards for Costa Rican vacation rentals.
Free websites
- Craigslist allows you to promote your Costa Rican vacation rental for FREE, but you must post your ad at least 3 – 4 times a week.
- You can write your own travel stories and then post them on Blogger for free and put links to your vacation rental in the stories. You can tweet those stories on Twitter, where you can interact with many of the followers of your choice. It might also be a great idea to post those same blogs on your Facebook page and Linkedin.
- Build an awesome slideshow or put together an outstanding video that you can post on YouTube, and you can use that video wherever you promote your vacation rental property; nothing better than good images to rent your product. And if you want to get going, try Tumblr and Flickr, and share your expert travel advise on TravBuddy or join Wayn.
You can enjoy this sunset every day in your Costa Rican vacation home if you contact us now
I know all this sounds like a lot of work. But if you get yourself an iPad, you will quickly discover how easy it is to get going. Before you know it, you’ll enjoy the marketing of your vacation rental. The better way is to hire a Costa Rican vacation rental manager and have him/her do all the recommended work.
