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Homestead Website Helps SunTiki Cottages Vacation Rentals Triple Business

 “I am truly happy with Homestead. They helped my business grow from one vacation rental to three in less than two years. I should have done this a long time ago!”

—Gary Day, SunTiki Cottages Vacation Rentals, Indian Rocks Beach, Florida

 In 1994, Gary Day and his wife purchased several cottages at Indian Rocks Beach in Florida as income-producing property. For 10 years they rented out their cottages on an annual basis.  As their family began to grow, they decided they wanted to use that beach property themselves, but still wanted to generate some income from it. To that end, in the summer of 2005 Gary decided to offer a cottage they called “Sunset” as a vacation rental for the first time.

To assure the success of this new business venture, he checked out the competition and discovered that most of them had websites where prospective vacationers could “see” a property before booking them. Although Gary knew nothing about the web or websites, he was determined to learn. He read books, searched the web, studied what others were doing and asked a lot of questions. Before long he became convinced that the web would be critical to the success of his business, so he decided to build his own website.

He researched web hosting companies online, and Homestead Technologies stood out from the crowd. A segment on the radio giving Homestead high marks for helping inexperienced users like him confirmed his first impression. Once he began using Homestead’s novice-friendly SiteBuilder application, Gary discovered a wide variety of simple yet powerful tools that let him design his new SunTiki website without having to learn to a single line of computer code.

“Homestead SiteBuilder is so easy to use – from getting started through page layout, font design, adding photos and graphics and making changes, to publishing to the web. For example, I am constantly updating my site, and Homestead makes maintenance very easy. Some of my competitors have web consultants make the changes to their sites, and that can take a lot of time and money. I just log in, make whatever changes I want, save, and publish.” He adds, “If I have a question, I get the answer from online Help or I submit it to Homestead Customer Service and quickly get an answer back. My site has never been down, ever.”

When the Days put their Sunset cottage vacation rental on their website, it became very clear that building the site was a smart business decision. The cottage was so solidly booked that the family couldn’t use it for their own vacation. The success was so dramatic they decided to add another cottage, called “Tiki”, in early 2006, and another called “Castaway” by the end of the same year.

In addition to the SunTiki website, Gary markets his business through listings with several large vacation rental websites, high-quality street signs, brochures, business cards and even a magnetic sign for his car. He has submitted his site to all of the major search engines and developed a page on his site with links to vacation-rental-related partners. He also occasionally uses Google AdWords, Yahoo and online Yellow Pages pay-per-click advertising. Thanks to Homestead SiteBuilder’s statistical reporting, Gary knows which day of the week most potential guests are searching for rentals, who those prospective clients are, how they got to his site, which pages they viewed and what they did when they visited. If they found SunTiki through a search engine, Gary knows which one and which search term they used. This helps him determine the most effective keywords to use.

Without his own website, Gary would have to rely heavily on other groups like wholesalers, realtors and vacation rental agencies to handle SunTiki’s inquiries and reservations, which would require paying them commissions of up to 25 percent. When added to the maintenance costs for his cottages, those commissions would eat up almost all of his profits.  So he’s thrilled that the website provides all the information potential guests need to make a decision, allowing him to manage the reservations on his own and avoid those costly commission fees.

Gary’s advice to other small business owners, particularly those expanding to the web, is this: don’t be afraid, and to learn to do it yourself.   “Having others do things for you makes you reliant on them. People may tell you that it’s better to hire the experts, and while that may be true for certain things, it’s amazing what you can teach yourself. I looked at what others did, and made my business and website better. The web is there to help you succeed.”

For more information on SunTiki Cottages Beach Rentals, visit www.SunTikiCottages.com.