Mas Talaya is a beautiful old country villa north of Barcelona, Spain that is rented out year round. The villa has been trading for four years but was not generating sufficient holiday vacation rental weeks from its online presence.

The owners felt there was an opportunity for the vacation villa to increase rental weeks by having a website that could offer more service and information.

We decided to go through the whole process of researching the villa vacation market in Europe and Spain in particular, looking at numerous summer vacation rental websites, contacting owners/agents for information and availability, and then making a booking. We even suffered the hardship of travelling and staying at the villa.

During this process there were a number of things that came to light which ultimately helped us devise a plan to present to the owners.

As a result we proposed the following:

• Scrap the existing site
• Build a new site that was more user friendly right from the point of entry
• Contemporise the villa branding
• Optimise the existing content
• Consolidate information, rates and availability on other agent sites
• Set-up a content management system to update content, prices and insert news

This proposal was accepted and the new website was launched on March 1 this year. We await the flood of bookings!