CoastRentals Beach Vacation Blog

Myrtle Beach is definitely one of the hottest travel spots in the U.S. these days.  The sand, the golf, the great weather, what’s not to love right?  We here at CoastRentals have always known that MB was going to have to be a big focus for our site from day 1 (that’s why we featured it on the home page upon our launch), and it hasn’t lost steam in the meantime.  We are currently working on expanding our marketing efforts in the Myrtle Beach area so the people that choose to list with us end up renting their vacation properties out as often as possible.

I also got a nod of approval from Myrtle Beach Blogs, which was gracious enough to include us in their listings of MB-area blogs.  There truly are a lot of great sites out there that can give you information about what to do, where to eat, and where to say while in Myrtle Beach - and hopefully over time we can become the best.  Myrtle Beach, we salute you.

We recently added a link on all of our vacation rental listings at CoastRentals (and across the FYE Network) to remind the potential renters visiting our website that all inquiries submitted through our website are sent directly to the property owners through our secure system.  You can see the link to it just to the right of the “Submit Your Inquiry” button on each property listing.  We absolutely will not mishandle any email addresses that come our way, and that includes our property owners’ as well.  We thought it would be a good idea to remind our visitors just as they are about to submit their inquiry of this fact.  It should result in increased confidence and an increase in inquiries for all of our property owners.

We promise to continue to ensure that potential vacationers find your listing, and when they do, that they get the best possible presentation of your property as possible.  Our easy to navigate website, complete with our large pictures (supported by Ajax), and our guaranteed proper treatment of email addresses and other submitted personal information illustrates that commitment.

Thanks for reading and thanks for choosing CoastRentals and the Find Your Escape Network.

We here at CoastRentals.com have noticed that property listings that are equipped with a lot of feedback / comments tend to get more inquiries, and thusly, more renters.  We recently launched a new feedback system on all of our listings across the Find Your Escape Network, so now property owners who use CoastRentals can go back and upload past feedback they have received as well as encourage future renters to go back and applaud their properties on the site.

It is definitely a fact that people are more comfortable with making a purchase, or in this case renting a home or condo, when they can see the opinions left of past users.  That’s one of the main reasons websites like Amazon and eBay have done well - they built strong user feedback / rating systems that created a lot of user trust and also repeat users.  There is a lot of value in having such a system, and that is why we have added to our vacation rental sites.  We strongly encourage all of our listers to take advantage of this and to remind the people who rent their property that they can come and leave a few comments about their stay.  They don’t even have to had booked it using our website, as long as they stayed there send them our way.

Check back for more new features from CoastRentals.com and the Find Your Escape Network soon.

Many people search for vacation rentals online. This can be a great way to find the perfect rental home for your vacation. Unfortunately, scam artists have found ways to use this technology to get your money. You search the internet and look at pictures of homes in the area where you will be traveling. You find the perfect house at a good price and make the reservation. Of course, you are required to put down a deposit, sometimes a substantial amount of money. You arrive at your destination only to find the house doesn’t exist. You are in a strange place with no where to stay and you lost your deposit money.

There is another variation of this scam. You arrive at your destination and the house is there, only it isn’t the same house shown in the pictures. The vacation rental is a dump. It looks nothing like the house you saw pictured on the internet or described in the written description. In some cases, the house may be nothing more than an abandoned shack. Again, you are at your destination with no where to stay. You have lost your deposit money.

You may be contacted on the phone or through email and told you have won a free vacation. How exciting, a free vacation! This is just what you need, right? Wrong. Remember when your grandmother told you that nothing in life is free? She wasn’t kidding. The scam works like this: you are notified that you have won a free vacation; you just have to pay a few fees. These can range from a few hundred to a thousand dollars or more. The destination is tempting, such as Hawaii or the Caribbean. You pay the fee and the agency vanishes into thin air. The phone line is disconnected and your money is gone.

Another common scam is to offer discount vacation packages. The price seems very reasonable, so you book your trip. You fly to your destination only to find you are booked in a cheap, dirty motel. You are told you can’t check out or your return airline ticked will become void. The only options you have are to stay at the bad motel or pay an exorbitant amount of money to get out of it. You are then left with the option of finding other accommodations and paying for them yourself. The trip ends up costing more than if you had paid the full price through a travel agent.

Other scams offer cheap vacation packages. You are told that you have to pay a reservation fee to hold your place for the trip. The scam artist talks a good game and makes you believe you are saving a significant amount of money on your trip. So, you pay the reservation fee. Later, you try to book the trip only to find the dates you suggest are not available. After you attempt to book the trip a few times, you may be told the deal has expired. The company will then disappear, taking your money with them. This scam allows the person to prey on more victims before it’s time to close up shop and move on.

Some cheap vacation rental scams have you book your accommodations and pay for your food in exchange for a free plane ticket. Since airfare can be very expensive, many people fall for this one. You accept the offer, thinking you are saving a lot of money. The scam artist won’t give you time to think about the offer. There will be a sense of urgency. You must book now to get the great deal. Later you learn that the prices for the rental and meals have been greatly inflated. Once you do the math, you learn that it would have been cheaper to pay for the plane tickets.

The time share vacation package is another very common scam. The idea behind this one is to sell you a time share. You are told you are getting a free vacation. Sometimes the person will tell you that you just have to sit through a brief presentation on time shares. In other cases, the person may not even bother to tell you about the presentation. You arrive only to find that you can’t get your accommodations or food vouchers until you sit through the presentation, which is very long. Some people have been bullied and coerced into signing contracts by unscrupulous sales people.

Vacation discount cards are another common scam. You are told that by purchasing the discount card you can save money on vacation rentals, airfare, entertainment, amusement park admissions and other events. You are planning a vacation and figure the card will be well worth the money in savings. Later you learn that there are so many restrictions that it is impossible to ever get the savings you were promised. If you can use the card, you have to reserve through the company and end up paying as much as you would have without the card.

A scam artist may contact you and tell you to become a travel agent to save money. Travel agents get free and discounted fees for vacations. The person makes you believe you will be an insider and will save a lot of money on all your future vacations. What could be better? The only requirement is to pay the fee to become an instant travel agent. The savings seem well worth the fee, so you go for it. You will later learn that the credential is not recognized in the industry and you are not able to get the discounts you were promised. You paid for a useless piece of paper.

Car rental schemes go hand in hand with vacation rental schemes. You shop around for the best price and reserve the car. When you arrive, you find that the price has gotten much higher and even doubled in some cases. You need to pay the increased price to rent the car.  The best way to deal with this scam is to get everything in writing when you rent the car. If you reserve it online, be sure to print out the information. Make sure all taxes and fees are included in the price you were quoted. By doing this, you can protect yourself from an unscrupulous rental agent.

Tips for Avoiding Scams:

1. Don’t fall for high pressure sales. Most scams involve telling you that immediate action is needed, or the deal will be lost. This won’t happen with a legitimate offer. They are trying to get you to fork over the cash before you have a chance to think about it.

2. Get all the details of any trip you purchase, including the name of the hotel where you will be staying. Check out the hotel and read consumer reviews. Call the hotel and verify that they do work with the company for vacation packages.

3. Get any information about the deal in writing or email before you give over a dime of your hard earned money. Make sure to have them include all restrictions, terms or conditions. This will save you from paying money for a trip that is so heavily restricted that you won’t be able to use it.

4. When renting vacation properties, be sure to use a reputable rental company or real estate agent. Be very careful when reserving properties far from home. It’s easy to get scammed if you can’t verify the condition and location of properties pictured on the internet.

5. Don’t ever give anyone your credit card number until you have verified the authenticity of the company making the offer and the deal.

6. Call the Better Business Bureau to check out any travel agent or vacation rental company before you give a deposit.

7. Once you have gotten all the details of your vacation package, compare the deal with other travel agencies. You may find it’s cheaper to go with your local travel agent rather than the deal that was hyped on the phone.

8. Never forget the old saying, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.”

We will be introducing a new home page look to CoastRentals this week (some of the features are already up) that should hopefully make our site more easily-navigatable and more user-friendly.  The top navigation box now includes links for a Watch List and for our Palms backend account login.  We also will be altering the layout of our home page to increase the prominence of where our visitors can head to find out how to list on CoastRentals, as well as where to start browsing for beach properties.  If you’re coming to our site, chances are it’s because you’d either like to find a place to rent or to list your property and begin getting viewed by thousands of interested vacationers.  So we figured, why not make it even easier to do those 2 things?

We hope you benefit from our improvements, for more information on site-type updates and features check out the CoastRentals’ Tech Blog.

The big season for inquiries is on its way, and whether you’re looking to head out to Hawaii or down to Myrtle Beach in ‘07, CoastRentals will be the place to start your vacation planning.

Vacation rental websites are a dime a dozen these days, all the way from the big international sites that have been around for 10 years (VRBO) to the little area-specific ones that are maintained by individual property owners (Kauai Vacation Rental).  CoastRentals, of course, falls somewhere in between all of these, but definitely towards the upper echelon all things considered.  In reality, most property owners only care about one thing - generating inquiries and subsequently getting bookings for their vacation rentals.  The goal of any good vacation rental website, then, is to become a visible brand online that brings in targeted vacation rental seekers on a regular basis.  While the big international websites are certainly visible through the search engines, more targeted sites like CoastRentals are able to bring in more visitors searching only for beach-area homes and condos, while at the same time only having xx-number of listings as opposed to 50,000.

Simply put, a themed website such as CoastRentals is able to generate more exposure for each property listing on its site because it is more visible than the Average Joe’s personal site through the search engines, yet at the same time it doesn’t contain a watershed of listings that go on and on like an encyclopedia index.  By assuming our position in the “beach” niche for vacation rentals and combining that with our superior site design and large pictures, listing on CoastRentals is a great choice for any property owner.

Buy a condo on your favorite beach, rent it out when you’re not using it, get some tax benefits - is there a negative in this situation?  As long as you can be successful at step 2 (”rent it out”), then there probably isn’t.  Owning a vacation property can be a very pleasant experience, both psychologically and financially, but the key to it all is ensuring that you rent your property out enough to enjoy positive cash flows.  Over the past 10 years, the internet has emerged and grown into the absolute best place to market your vacation rental to millions of people worldwide.  Websites such as CoastRentals.com are fully optimized and heavily invested in the major search engines, meaning that when a person sits down and types in “maui vacation rentals” into their favorite search engine, they will be making a stop by CoastRentals to browse our properties in Maui.  And while the cost to list on CoastRentals (and other websites) will float between $100 and $300 per year, the profits made from just a single booking on your vacation rental should outdistance those fees quite nicely.  The web offers a flexibility and timeliness that no other medium in the past has, not to mention the widespread audience you will always be connecting with.  There truly isn’t a better way to get the word out about your vacation rental, not to mention one that even comes close.

While I’m sure this may also be featured on our tech blog, we recently launched new search pages on CoastRentals that will make it easier and more efficient for our visitors to find the properties that suit their needs and to inquire about them.  We overhauled the filter features for the properties by adding Quick Links in place of our old drop down menus and we also re-did the look of the page.  For an example, check out our Myrtle Beach Rentals.

We also have continued to work on building the site’s descriptions for each beach area.  This will ensure that potential renters get a clear understanding of each area (and hopefully it will entice them even more to visit).  Good content is essential to any website’s success, whether it be with respect to serving its customers and visitors or for marketing purposes.  We are committed to maintaining the most diverse, unique, and up-to-date information across CoastRentals.com in the vacation rental industry.  As such, we are always open to suggestions from our visitors, as well as any corrections if in fact we have made a mistake.  If you’d like to leave feedback, please send us an email at info@coastrentals.com.  Thanks.

Florida has long been a favorite of East Coasters and Midwesterners for warm-weather vacationing and it seems that almost every inch of coastline is being used to attract vacationers these days.  Whether you’re thinking of heading down to Daytona, Miami Beach, the Keys, Sarasota, Tampa, or the Panhandle, there are vacation homes and condos in abundance for rent.  During the first 4 or 5 years of the 21st century, many people invested in second homes / condos, with a large majority of the population choosing to invest in Florida.  Beachfront property was at an all-time premium and the saturation of the market has left vacationers with many options to choose from as far as location goes as well as a market stocked full of vacation rental owners hoping to rent out their properties as much as possible.  We encourage vacation rental seekers to inquire with many rental properties before settling on a single one. 

With the possibility of bad weather in the later months, vacationers are also seeing large discounts in both airfare and accomodation costs.  If you can bear the chance that some bad weather might pass through, now can be a great time to head down to Florida and soak up the remaining sunshine before we head into the colder months.  After scouring through the airiline discount rates, come back to CoastRentals and find the right home or condo for your Florida getaway.

Welcome to the official CoastRentals.com blog.  We here at CoastRentals hope to utilize this space to provide our users and our visitors with up-to-date information on how to better use our site, whether they are looking to rent out their beach vacation property or to find the perfect spot for that next vacation.  We are committed to keeping all of our visitors abreast of new developments in the vacation rental industry as well as to provide them with the best website on the net for listing/finding a beach vacation home or condo. 

Vacation hotspots such as Myrtle Beach, Kauai, Miami Beach and Southern California are all prominently featured on CoastRentals.com.  We focus our marketing campaigns on the most searched destinations and thusly those that have some of the largest markets for vacation properties.  Please check back for individual posts about how to sign up to list with us, ongoing updates on the best beach destinations in the world and where to stay while you’re there, as well as specials running on our site.  Thanks for choosing CoastRentals.com.