Cities Reference discounts EXPOSED!

There's been a lot of asking both on the part of apartments' owners and travelers dealing with our vacation rental websites on how exactly discounts work and how to be eligible.
As for all things human, events and initiatives stratified across years (just over 15 now) gets piled up one on top of the other and there comes a day when you finally, albeit belatedly, feel that urge of getting it together and restore the illusion of order. Ok, this is the day and I'll try and give it a final shot.

Discounts should not be confused with Promotions which are activated by the owners when setting up their apartment listings' prices, ie last minute, long stay, etc and they cumulate on top of it. Discounts though, will not cumulate on top of one another and the highest one you can get is equivalent to 10% off.

Here follow a step by step road map to get you the best discount

Step1

'Like' Cities Reference Facebook page. There is no point filling in the discount coupon code if you're not a Cities Reference 'fan' because you're not going to get any discount without it.

Step2

Have a notion of what the discounts are and beware that

• you are not able to cumulate discounts on top of one another
• discounts are valid on all apartments besides those showing listing codes that start with letters instead of numbers (ie: AA, RU, BL, etc)

Try2: this is a 10 euro flat discount if you tried booking a On Request apartment that declined your booking request
Repeat client: it's a 5% discount to all repeat clients, just input you previous booking code to qualify.
Owners' discount: it's a 5% discount to all apartment owners listing their apartment with us. Just input your apartment's listing number when booking.
FB5%: this is a 5% discount on the total posted, all you have to do is be a Cities Reference fan on our Facebook page and stay put to qualify. For those of you who appreciate clarity, if you go on just the time of the booking and off when the booking is over you won't qualify for the discount.)
PO10%: this is a 10% discount and to qualify, on top of the above, you need to find an available Priority Owner's apartment. To see if an apartment is of a Priority Owner go to the apartment listing, click on 'Description', top left, beside 'Apartment' and Verified™ you will see it marked as 'Priority Owner'.

Step3

If you qualify to all the above all you have to do is input the appropriate code where it says 'Coupon Code' on step2 (final) of the booking process.

Verified™ Apartment and Priority Owners EXPOSED

If we were to single out the two most important Trust factors an apartment listing can weigh in after travelers' reviews, they are certainly the Verified™ tag and the Priority Owner status.

How do you get them turned on for your own listing?

Verified™

Assumed that all apartments go through a verification process to be live on Cities Reference which encompasses among other measures cross checks on the web, valid and tested phone number and identity, etc. An apartment owner can further get the Verified™ tag on his apartment description by either

• meeting one of our representatives and show the apartment's paperwork;
• at least 3 completed and successfull rental bookings and/or receive at least one verified traveler's review (we will contact the travelers directly for further confirmation).

What you get in return is that your apartment's listing will be marked as Verified™.

Priority Owner

Getting the Priority Owner status is more challenging, but reaps great benefits at the same time.
To qualify as Priority Owner you have to:

• Grant a 5% discount on the grand total to qualified and repeat customer travelers. Qualified travelers hold a personal coupon that is assigned to them only if their identity has been verified and/or they have already rented successfully through us in the past. They represent roughly 30% of our customers' base. Unqualified travelers' bookings will not get any discount from you.
• Qualify. Only optimized apartment listings will qualify to join the Priority Owner program. You can set up an appointment with our Optimizers' Team here.

On the other hand you will get:

• Exposure on the homepage with dynamic rotation depending on the availability of your calendar and the general ranking.
• Verified customers, who will be incentived by the discount will prefer your apartment to the one that is not Priority giving you a edge and a more trustworthy clientele.
• 10% worth of Ranking. Becoming Priority will give your listing a boost to your apartment's ranking.

Interested in turning on any of the above? Contact us and we'll set up an appointment!

Instant Bookings Advance Notice

Good news for Instant Booker owners: the much touted and long awaited advance notice is now available in your back end!
In other words you can put a gap between the booking and the check in that goes from none to 7 days, if you want to avoid last minute bookings that get you unprepared for check in.

• Just log into your account
• go to your apartment, 
• Details
• Top right where it says 'Allow last minute bookings?' use the scroll down and pick the minimum advance notice you require

Not clear enough? Just contact us.

Travelers' reviews

Ever since Tripadvisor.com came out with the unbiased user generated content at the beginning of the last decade our internet life has changed... for the better.
At first we didn't quite think so. It was 2001 and a client fishing for a refund wrote harshly about us. We dind't know a thing about Tripadvisor or even the concept of user generated content. We found it shocking! We thought she wasn't in good faith and, thankfully, Tripadvisor pretty quickly agreed with us and took her comment offline. Fair enough ;)
Within a year we had adopted user generated content in our website and the whole philosophy of unbiased reviews.
A lot has changed since and there is a lot more automated checks and balances in place nowadays when publishing a traveler's review.

We ensure the following

1. The traveler posting the review has to be 'real', we'll cross check the email address and dates provided to verify he actually stayed at the apartment she is reviewing.
2.  To ensure it's unbiased we don't allow either Cities Reference and/or rental apartment owners to 

• edit reviews. Rental owners can add a separate response that is displayed in addition to the original review.
• delete reviews. However rental owners can protest a review.

To leave your traveler's review

1. either access the property listing using the direct link you find on your booking correspondence with us or go to CitiesReference.com and use the listing number or the address in the quick search.
2. On the listing page for your apartment rental, click ‘Been here? Write a Review.’ Top right hand, just below the apartment's address.
3. Describe your experience. Tell everyone about your stay and the apartment.

You will find your review

1. On the homepage, where they are listed as they come, in chronological order to improve the immediateness and transparence of the travelers experience on our website.
2. On the apartment listing's webpage, as a useful, if not just essential tool for the traveler's informed decision on booking.

Happy rentals everyone!

6 months on, the numbers

Last march we ended an Era and now we want to take a good look at what has changed exactly when looking at the numbers.

First off Cities Reference has finally and definitely passed Roman Reference for good. We're looking at over 75% more traffic and growing (alexa has it at 61,000 against 110,000 - this is ~ 15% growth year on year for CR, traffic to vacation rental websites in may is seasonally low, just a month ago CitiesReference reached its peak ever of 55,000 alexa).

Facebook page of Cities Reference has 5,860 fans against the 521 fans of Roman Reference's fanpage. RomanReference's FB page has grown 25% in 6 months which is reasonable, the real noteworthy change is Cities Reference, which, thankfully has taken full parent site status at this point and it's faring at full steam.

Cities destinations covered are now 45 with a 36% growth in 6 month.
Apartment rentals on offer are now 4,421 with a 21% growth in 6 month and a 350% growth year on year.
Instant apartment rentals are now 893 with a 10% growth in 6 months and 260% growth year on year. It's 20% of total against the 23% of all the apartments in inventory of January 2012. So this particular ratio is going the opposite direction than our wishes. Probably due to the fact that we've become tougher with apartment owners listing as Instant, but unable to be precise when updating their calendars.

Rome apartments are 953 with a year on year growth of 63% (this looks like a very good measure, especially the fact that we are keeping the 60% growth speed since quite a while yet).
Instant apartment Vs On Request apartments ratio is stable at 39% (improved a year on and double the average of all sites).
Conversion ratio booking requests Vs Confirmed bookings is 81.5%, stable a year on.
Resident apartments (ie apartments that use us as primary contact) are 95%
Bookings are 1,425/month so up 18% year on year.
Unique visitors are stable year on year for Rome. Duration, bounce and new visits are all improving ca 5% year on year.
Conversion rate has become really hard to track now, because many visitors decide on Roman Reference and book on Cities Reference. Cross guessing though and doing some counting to double check I'd estimate growth in conversion rate at ~20%. This is a welcome piece of news, May last year the new website started to stabilize and we're finally looking at the conversion growth brought over by hundreds of thousand of euro and most importantly thousands of hours of cumulated work to raise this measure that, be it the deepening of the crisis or the growing competition, has become really hard to deal with. Cities Reference is not done at all as for what regards efforts to make it more conversion friendly. After all we just belatedly added a press dedicate page and made customer reviews visible on the homepage and other chosen general content pages across the website, just to mention a couple of examples. We wish to see this measure keeps growing ;)
Weight of adwords doubled year on year to 31% in traffic and 35% in transactions, it is now the biggest source of revenue and the second source of traffic. While organic traffic went down almost 15% to 35% of total traffic and 30% of total revenue, direct traffic went down18% to 20% of total traffic and 21.5% of total revenue. There are explanations to this. A lot of traffic is now stirred to Cities Reference and also SEO efforts are all concentrated on CitiesReference right now, while ad-words is still dealt with at a local level that the closest it lands to the target the better it performs. Facebook, although still tiny as a general impact (~2% of traffic and 1.5% of total revenue), went up 46% year on year. Bing and Yahoo are also growing 100% each, but they remain irrelevant ~1% each. Worth noticing that while CitiesReference last year was contributing almost 5% of traffic this measure went down half percentage point this year giving the measure of which direction is the traffic now going, if you look at it the other way round you see ~30% of CR traffic coming from RomanReference.

Paris Apartments are 347 now, growing 117% year on year. It's our third destination (after Rome and Budapest) in terms of rental apartment numbers, but by far our second in terms of bookings.
Instant apartment Vs On Request apartments ratio is stable at 12% (slightly down from 13% last year).
Conversion ratio booking requests Vs Confirmed bookings has been booming to 60.2% compared to a meagre 36% last year, which is a great sign of maturity for this destination.
Resident apartments are 55%.
Bookings are 115/month so stable with last year.

London Apartments are 258 now, up 790% compared to last year this time. It's our fourth destination in terms of rental apartment numbers and our 4th in terms of bookings (after Rome, Paris and New York).
Instant apartment Vs On Request apartments ratio is almost 45% which is great.
Conversion ratio is 30%, up one third compared to last year.
Resident apartments are just 15% though.

New York Apartments are 192 it grew 335% year on year. It's our seventh destination in terms of apartments (the 4 above + Amsterdam and Istanbul) and third in terms of bookings.
Instant apartment Vs On Request apartments ratio is just 10% (still a 300% growth compared to last year).
Conversion ratio  is 50% which is a fantastic improvement compared to last year.
Resident apartments are 36.5%.

These are our main destinations at the moment (yeah, not the most surprising really) worth a mention are
-apartments numbers in Budapest, Amsterdam and Istanbul (respectively 2nd, 5th and 6th destinations for that measure).
-conversion rate at 100% in Venice, Prague, Florence, Madrid, Lisbon and San Francisco.
-number of bookings and traffic in Berlin, Barcelona and Bruxelles.

Kinko Tochi or when the future of cities almost happened - Re-visiting Vacation Rental's concepts

image credit Frieze. 

Reading Amelia Groom's essay (Frieze march issue) on the Japanese manifesto 'Metabolism 1960' the other day sparked a little debate here on whatever happened to the future of cities and where do we stand now, focusing on vacation rentals, are we swimming against or flowing within that vision?
The vision, in Amelia's words, is a promise of

" design spaces for living bodies that would be more in line with the metabolic processes of those bodies, they conceived of cities as living, moving and evolving creatures. Buildings would be adaptable organisms perpetually rejuvenating themselves; the metropolis would be a verb rather than a noun."

nagakin capsule tower. im. credit stephendavidsmith.net

Cities as verbs. Super-organisms evolving and changing. Living as a pret-a-porter, a snack. Humans flowing through cities as blood through cells. Travel as compulsion rather than occasion, closing that circle that started as nomadism and to nomadism gets in this fin-de-siècle (siècle meant as civilization) we're living in.

kenji-ekuan-dwelling-city-1963.jpg. Credit relationalthought.com

Where do we stand? Looking from inside out it all seems to boil down to the dichotomy of Hotels Vs Vacation Rentals, a trivial commercial war underscoring fundamentally different interpretations of the future. Assuming Metabolism is happening and the state-of-traveling ever more is going to be a state-of-being, can living be just a snack that can be cleaned up and served or should it rather be somewhat unpredictable, open, in one word, personal?
'My house is your house'... up to a degree, for a given timeframe and for a fee, rest assured. Yet if you spend most of your life out of your own capsule, you may as well borrow a piece of my own life rather than eat and digest yet one more snack.
Where are we heading? To a post-human that will accept alienation as a state-of-being or rather to a 'What's Mine is Yours - The Rise of Collaborative Consumption' kind of future.
We're betting on the latter...

Cities Reference to include mountains, countryside and seashores into the inventory or the concept of Outer Area.

"There is more to a city than bricks and mortar"

Bisonblight blogging on skyscrapercity.com - Image credit  shunvision

That's what we were thinking when we finally decided to include 'Outer areas' into our listings a fortnight ago.

Back in '97, if your apartment was a inch away from Campo de' Fiori you wouldn't get admitted. What the hell was that? Snobbery? That's as anti-our-own-mission as it gets.

Over the years the radium got expanded, started including suburbs and then new cities and their suburbs. Know what? Travelers loved to be enabled to choose, as long as it was well marked in the description. To hell with the historical center, many must have thought, you get more space for less money at the cost of some extra time on the metro, big deal? Depends...

And now the 'Outer areas', my friends, just get ready to see prices drop at the cost of a simple change of perspective. The real 'City break' we may say. You spend the week swimming and skiing only to go into town for the week end, only that's all part of your holiday, and cities look much more relaxed when their business self is reversed. Do that out of seasons and prices can be 1/10th than those in the historical center in some cities.

How do you do it? Just pick 'Outer area' when booking your 'city break'.

Where is the catch? If you actually wanted to be smack downtown you better give that extra look at the map and the area from now on, if it's marked 'Outer area' you may end up sharing your next Bright lights Big City experience with a bunch of cows.

...Go ahead and flood us with comments (swear words not admitted ;)