"Is your aim to become a re-seller for the existing sites? So you'd be a one-stop-shop for getting your holiday home listed in the places most likely to convert."
Yep, that's it exactly.
The selling point to them is that we bring them new customers. We're seeing that owners aren't marketing as they should because everything they do is incremental work and upkeep. If we can make launching into a new channel (or listing site) as easy as a click, and centralize the management of it all, we believe owners will increase their marketing. It helps that we can also bring large quantities to the listing sites, so that we can also get discounts for our owners (a further incentive to increase their marketing).
Particularly if you can break the annual or 2-yearly contracts and allow owners to experiment with different listing sites for short periods of time (monthly listings).
This is even more compelling if you are the ones centrally managing the visibility of availability across the listing sites (so if a booking is made via site A the unavailability is reflected on site B).
The fear in making a bad marketing decision for a small holiday home owner is real. Their margins being small they can only afford 1 listing usually, 2 at a push. But just as with Open Table and restaurants, the home owner isn't really sure whether it works, or if it does whether it works better than other alternatives. Giving them the ability to see this stuff would solve a real pain point for them and truly make them happier.
Unfortunately, for some of the smaller listing sites they're likely to go out of business. In somewhere like the Lake District in the North West of England, there are about 5 or 6 listing sites but only 1 or 2 that really work... as soon as home owners have visibility of this the smaller ones are likely to sink very quickly.
Of course, this is to the advantage of home owners, but I wonder whether the smaller listings sites will see the big picture and realise that your solution is good for everyone but them. Not that they deserve to survive when all they sell is fear and very little real marketing power.
Yep, that's it exactly.
The selling point to them is that we bring them new customers. We're seeing that owners aren't marketing as they should because everything they do is incremental work and upkeep. If we can make launching into a new channel (or listing site) as easy as a click, and centralize the management of it all, we believe owners will increase their marketing. It helps that we can also bring large quantities to the listing sites, so that we can also get discounts for our owners (a further incentive to increase their marketing).