The Joy Of Vacation Rentals Searching On The Web (Not)

Later this year, I’m finally taking some time off with the family, a real
vacation. That’ll include a week over in Maui, where I haven’t been back to for
about 15 years. That also means finding a place to stay.

I left it to my wife to figure it out, and she went out and came up with a
few places after searching. One seemed perfect — its own jacuzzi, on the beach,
plenty of room for us all.

She called me in to take a look, and all my search spam radar detectors
started firing up. What’s with this multi-hyphenated domain? What’s with this
keyword stuffing? How come a search on the name of this place is bringing me up
over 500 pages all on different domains?

It’s hard when you’re in search marketing not to see all that stuff. I’ve
described it to some people like that scene in the Matrix, when Cypher is
staring at those three monitors with streaming code that looks like nothing. He
tells Nero:

I don’t even see the code anymore; all I see now is blonde, brunette,
redhead

When I do a search, it’s hard to look at just the content I’m being shown.
All I see is seo, seo, seo.

My wife used the "availability checker" for the house, only to discover that
just sent an email off to someplace that never emailed back. Disgusted, she
handed things over to me to continue.

I did a fresh search, then decided to follow up with one of the top sites
listed that seemed fairly legit. I mentioned those 500 pages before. Clearly if
you have a vacation home in Hawaii (and probably anywhere), you end up with
multiple people trying to get you renters.

What I was after was a primary rental agency or property management firm. For
example, I’m used to renting vacation houses in Newport Beach. Each house will
have one primary rental agency that handles it (and if you’re looking for houses
there, by the way, try Burr White,
Cannery Rentals and
Balboa Newport Reality as good
starting places). I wanted the primary agency for this house, rather than some
go between.

I ended up at Hawaiian Beach Rentals,
here. I have no idea if they
are the primary property management agency or not. But the site was informative,
plus I actually liked that they had a local 808 number shown rather than a 800
number. The houses were well described, and the guest comments section had
remarks that didn’t look faked. From an SEO perspective, I was pleased not to
end up at a place with a billion hyphens in the domain name. Sure, I held my
nose a bit at how every page listed every place you could think of in Hawaii as
links. Goodness knows, I’d seen much worse — plus at least those links lead to
actual listings. Don’t hurt them, Matt.

Even better, when I contacted them, I got an email back within about fifteen
minutes about the house. Sadly, it was already booked. They recommended another
one, but we didn’t really like it. So I started plowing through the listings for
Maui, as you’ll see
here.

Ugh. Eight pages of listings, 15 listings per page and no way to narrow down
to what I wanted. Still, I carried on, finding a few things and firing off an
email about them. While I waited for a reply, I went back to basics, more out of
curiosity than anything else. What would
Maui vacation
rentals bring up on Google?

As it turned out, Hawaiian Beach Rentals was number three, which I took as a
good sign. I popped open tabs to check out the other listings and was instantly
impressed with Vamoose. Wow, exactly what I needed. You could drill down to
anything.

Check it out.

Here are (1) three bedroom (2) houses (3) with pools (4) on the beach (5) on
Maui. Amazing, narrowed to five criteria.

Well, amazing not. The first three listings were all sponsored and none of
them on the beach. Below that were other results, some of which were matches but
plenty that weren’t.

Vamoose is definitely something I’ll keep in mind for the future, but it’s
not the perfection I’d hoped for. Meanwhile, my search marketing reflexes kicked
in, making me both annoyed by and admiring of how AdSense units had been worked
into the listings, so that you might mistakenly click on them thinking they were
real "listings."

I know, there are probably better places for me to seek vacation rentals,
specialty search engines that might do what I hoped Vamoose should do. Hey, feel
free to note them below. But to cap off my post today, one last thing, this time
on TripAdvisor.

I’ve known the site for ages. I like it as a way to see what others might
think about a particular hotel. And I just went over to check out hotels for
when I go out to Las Vegas in November (ended up at
New York New York, by the way).
But after searching for Las Vegas Hotels, does TripAdvisor really need to give
me a domain like this:

las-vegas-hotels.tripadvisor.com

Honestly, I had to laugh. What, two hyphens aren’t enough — you had to do
subdomains as well? I suppose I can be thankful that the page for New York New
York wasn’t:

new-york-new-york-las-vegas-hotels.tripadvisor.com

or

new-york-new-york.las-vegas-hotels.tripadvisor.com