Cities Reference's Discounted Commissions - Discount percentage on total and its real weight on our own rental commission

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  Cities Reference's Discounted Commissions

This post is addressed to travelers, apartments' owners don't have to worry 'cause nobody is touching their net fee when we apply Cities Reference discount coupons to the bookings unless they signed up to being Priority Owners.

If you're reading this chances are you are already eligible for a discount on Cities Reference's network as a repeat client, friend or family of a repeat client or Facebook page fan. Therefore you know how easy it is to get our (in)famous 5% to 10% discounts on Cities Reference's apartments and villas.

The question we'd like to answer today is what does that 5% discount corresponds to when weighted against Cities Reference's official commissions as explained in our previous post. The answer is appalling (for us, mind you, it should sound just fine to your ears).

Here follow the list of the real % of discount we apply on our own commission when you cash on your CitiesReference discount, starting from our highest possible commission down to the lowest, mind you, we're dividing in discreet amounts although the descent from Max to Lowest happens gradually in inverse proportion to the total rent, you'll have to use your calculator and our previous post to figure what's inbetween the layers below:

• Discounted Max Commission: you get a 27% discount on our highest commission of 20.5
• Discounted Average Commission: you get a 34% discount on the medium commission of 16%
• Discounted Lowest Commission: you get a 66% (!!!) discount on our lowest possible commission of 9%

Oh boy, wish we'd done the math before we launched this campaign!

OK, OK, you don't care, you want to know how much you're paying in commissions exactly when you get a discount. Here we go:

• You're paying 14.9% if you're paying our Discounted Max Commission, which is to say you're renting a relatively cheap On Request apartment for a relatively short period of time.
• You're paying 10.2% if you're paying our Discounted Average Commission, which is to say you're renting a relatively cheap Instant Booking apartment for a relatively short period of time
• You're paying 2.7% (!!!) if you're  paying our Discounted Lowest Commission, which is to say you're renting a relatively expensive Instant Booking apartment for a relatively long period of time

 Ok, we hear you, how likely are you to get the nicer looking commissions?

• Max Commission is paid in 12% of bookings
• Average Commission is paid in 76% of bookings
• Lower than Average Commission is paid in 11.5% of cases
• Lowest Commission is paid in 0.5% of cases

Yes, you've got to really deserve that lowest commission! ;)

Important note: discounts do not apply on flat listing fee apartments and on third party apartments. Recognizing both is easy since their listing number starts in both cases with a letter rather than with a number.

Cities Reference's Fees and Commissions

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Cities Reference's Commissions

Following recent changes and Property Owners requests on Cities Reference Facebook page for ever increased transparency and clarity here follow the details of how our commissions work.

Most of you seem to know already that our Commissions and Fee can range from 3% to 20.5% and that owners can decrease it by 25% in one go when activating the Instant Booking. But you're unclear on how exactly you can push the rental fee downward, besides the promotions Property Owners can make and the discount coupons travelers can enjoy, that are detailed in our discounts post. Here follows our best attempt at shedding some light on the whole process.

Commission is composed of a fixed and of a variable factor,  Fee is one and only and it's 3% levied from the traveler on those apartments that are listed at annual flat fee. The fixed part of the Commission depends on the booking system you apply to your listing (Instant or On Request), the variable part on the total rent amount of your booking.  
The Variable Commission subtracts from the Fixed Commission in inverted proportion to the final rent cost.

The Fixed Commission

Instant Booking apartments are charged 16% of the price posted on Cities Reference's websites.
On Request apartments are charged 20.5%.

The Variable Commission

The above commission will decrease by 10% every 50% increase of the rental cost heading down to the set minimum 9%.

The Fixed Fee

 As of 2013 Property Owners have the option of paying a flat annual listing fee per apartment as opposed to the above commission structure and the fixed fee levied per booking will go down to 3%.

Please note: When comparing our fees to others please make sure their fee structure is clear, there often is a double charge, some to the owner and some to the renter. We only charge one flat fee.

Find furter information on Cities Reference help page.

Apartments' ranking algorithm change to be launched tomorrow

Don't be surprised if your apartment will rank different tomorrow.

In our bid to be as transparent as we can here follows the exact break down of ranking factors.

• 30% will depend on our recommendation
• 20% on whether you're listed as Instant Booker
• 30% on bookings, ie how often and for how long for your apartment gets booked. Note that booking logs are erased shortly after check out, so the ranking you earn with bookings is not there forever.
• 10% on reviews, ie how often and how well your apartment gets reviewed by clients
• 10% on interaction with Cities Reference, ie how often and how deeply you interact with our website.

Please note: In August 2012 we added the Priority Owner status as a ranking factor affecting an additional 10% on total.

Got more questions? Find more answers in Cities Reference help page or through Cities Reference contact page.

Best tip to gather rankings fast? Get bookings. How do you get bookings even with a low rank? Competitive rent price, many travelers sort by price...

Image credit: socialmarketing.oneupweb.com

Export (or import) your calendar with Cities Reference

Did you know you could export your calendar with Cities Reference? It takes the time of a copy and paste and it allows you to update just one calendar for all the websites you're using. This is going to make your life a whole lot easier and allow you to activate your instant booking with us which multiplies 10x your bookings.

Are you using the 'Map View'?

Are you using the map view when searching your rental apartment? This is a great tool that will give you total control of the area where you want to be located. It will show you only the apartments available in your time frame and its cost. You can seamlessly go from map to apartment description and booking.

Check it out here: explore the apartments and click on 'Show on map'.

A benevolent Generalplan Ost for Cities Reference

Two months on a lot has happened, especially East of Europe Warsaw, Krakow, Prague and Belgrade apartments  are now listed, even Apartments in Venice are kind of East after all.) Sites listing vacation rentals (that is not blogs) are 17 therefore a whopping 70% up compared to our last post. Apartments are 1,333 compared to just 860 (55% growth). Most importantly the ratio Instant Vs On Request apartments has jumped to 46.2%! A productive couple of months indeed!

This is low season for monthly bookings (just over a 1000 they went down ca 30%) and it may be what helps apartments' growth since single owners get more spare time and an urge to fill the gaps

Let's give a look at the details

Cities Reference confirms its parent site status with 68,000 alexa (basically stable), disk usage is 4 times lower than Roman Reference still yet 6 times higher than the third ranking website (Paris). Analytics ranks it our second site in traffic twice more traffic than Paris Reference and stable at 33% of Roman Reference speed. Traffic is unsurprisingly down (7%) month on month (this is low season) but it's gaining speed on a yearly basis at 627% growth.
Time on Site (8:07) and Bounce Rate (36:38) are by far the best of all

Roman Reference
Alexa 66,000 is down 10% in two months (which comes with low season) and meeting with Cities Reference in the middle, this was bound to happen and likely Cities Reference should pass Roman Reference soon since it's become the general hub the previous used to be.
Disk Usage is still the highest with 25,000MB and 41,000MB of traffic
Analytics still the highest (66% more traffic than the 2nd best - 10 bookings everyone made by the second best). 14% growth in traffic year on year.
Apartments: With 667 apartments it has grown 13%(!!) compared to two months ago and almost 45% since May 2010. That seems to show a hell of an acceleration since its annualized rate, if it kept the pace is 156% almost 300% faster than last year.
Visitors Vs Apartments Ratio: 19.5. Considering only Instant it's 48.
Instant Vs On Request: Also the Instant ratio is improving sensibly with 41% compared to 38% only two months ago.
Conversion: on bookings is also improving to 83% of online bookings converted Vs 81+ two months ago
Booking requests: 887/Month, the slow down is pretty normal in low season, although 26% is double the slump in traffic.

Paris Reference
Alexa 127,000 is down 13.5% with low season and still firmly our third website.
Analytics:  our third site on traffic still faring at 16% of Roman Reference's speed, time on site is 40% lower than Roman Reference and bounce 22% higher so there is improvement in all measures. Year on year traffic is also improving to just 3.8% slower than last year.
Apartments: It's still our third website on apartments although the competition seems to be gaining speed. With 175 apartments it grew 9.4% in two months, so half the speed of Roman Reference and nothing compared to the speed of the developing websites below.

Visitors Vs Apartments Ratio: 11.5. Considering only Instant it's 54.

Instant Vs On Request: ratio has improved a lot to 20%
Conversion on bookings has improved sensibly to 57.3%
Bookings are still just below 10% of RR's
Altogether a reasonably good picture compared to two months ago and taking the season into account.

Berlin Reference:

Alexa: 2,258,000 down 10% with the low season

Analytics: It's our 6th site on traffic (1.8% of RR, slowly gaining field) so it's up one position, time on site is 61.9% lower than Roman Reference (so improving), bounce is 33% higher (stable).

Apartments: It's our third site for apartments, so up one position. With 77 apartments it grew  140% in two months. Pretty stunning growth

Visitors Vs Apartments Ratio: 3. Considering only Instant it's 5.1.

Instant ratio is 59.7%!! A stunning growth.

Booking Requests/Conversion ratio is 50% double last time, as for booking requests is 4th on our site 0.45% of RR this is also improving.

Very good jump ahead with Berlin

Barcelona Reference:

Alexa: with 3,558,000 is 153% down...

Analytics: It's our 7th site on traffic (2 down, 1.48% of RR, so going down), time on site is 56% lower than Roman Reference (improved) and bounce rate 20% higher (improved!). Year on year traffic is up 48.68%, that's a great figure! 

Apartments: It's our 4th site with 71 apartments, so up two positions and up 163% compared to only two months ago. One of the biggest velocity we got.

Visitors Vs Apartments Ratio: 3.3. Considering only Instant it's 5.4.

Instant Vs On request ratio has come to a flattering 60%! 

Booking Requests/Conversion ratio are too low to mention, the booking requests are plenty though, by far 3rd site.

Analysis: the fundamentals of Barcelona are now in order we only need to bring in some traffic.

Prague Reference

This is just gone live but it runs real fast. 2,284,000 on Alexa and 62 apartments, mostly Instant. We've got great expectations

Madrid Reference

Alexa: 3,709,000 badly down

Analytics: It's our 10th site for traffic (stable, just .66% of RR, so going down in measure) time on site is 62% lower than RR, bounce is 9% worse than RR. So here there is a big jump in improvement.

Apartments: It's our 6th site for apartments (up 1 position), with 48 apartments it grew 243% in two months, the fastest website growth we got.
Visitors Vs Apartments Ratio: 2.3. Considering only Instant it's 3.

Instant ratio is 73%!! Our best on older websites

Booking Requests/Conversion ratio is Nil.

Brussels Reference

This is just gone live but it runs pretty fast. 3,193,000 on Alexa and 47 apartments, all Instant.

New York Reference:

Alexa: at 2,397,000 is stable

Analytics: It's our 5th site on traffic (up 1! 2.66% of RR so improving quite a bit), time on site is 59.2% lower than Roman Reference, bounce rate is 20% higher. Kind of stable.

Apartments: It's our 8th site for apartments, down 5 positions. Hardly surprising since we're growing in the Euro area mainly.  With 46 apartments it grew a meagre 5% in two months.

Visitors Vs Apartments Ratio: 10. Very good rate for a developing one.

Instant ratio is 2.1% and Booking Requests/Conversion ratio is too low to mention, as for booking requests though it's our 5th site.

Analysis: New York has slowed down, this is hardly surprising since we are concentrating on Europe right now

London Reference

Alexa: with 1,879,000 this has been the only site growing in traffic during the slow down.

Analytics: It's our 8th site for traffic (stable, 1.3% of RR), time on site is 27.4% lower than RR, which is great! and bounce rate is 6.1% higher than RR, which is also great!

Apartments: it's our 8th site for apartments with 33 of them, down 3 positions due to the Euro focus of the past couple of months, up 14% in two months on inventory which is not bad.

Visitors Vs Apartments Ratio: 4.8.

Instant ratio is Nil and Booking Request/Conversion is 8%, as for booking requests it's 3rd on our site 2.8% of RR which is not bad

We expect London to grow dramatically after the summer once we'll have sorted out our currency problem and concentrated on the non Euro countries

Krakow Reference

This is just gone live but it runs pretty fast. 4,200,000 on Alexa and 32 apartments, all Instants.

Copenhagen Reference:
Alexa: 3,998,000 traffic went tumbling down since we stopped believing in its growth and investing in it.
Analytics: It's still our fifth site on traffic (down 1 position and 2.5% of RR), time on site it's 64% lower than Roman Reference, bounce rate is 17% higher. Traffic year on year is down 28%.
Apartments: It's our 11th site with 13 apartments, precious little growth since six months, 33% year on year.
Visitors Vs Apartments Ratio: is still the best we got: 26! The problem are the deals on sale which just aren't great at this stage.
Instant is 0 and Booking Requests/Conversion ratio is 25%, as for booking requests it's our 6th site

There are 6 more websites, 2 of which brand new, although they're either too slow or too new to mention. Next time!

Working on a Cities Reference t-shirt concept

Moon, Sun, Travel ;)

Owners: we'll launch the new website next week!

Here follow the instructions on how to merge your old accounts whenver you'll see the new website change:

1. Go to the site: http://www.citiesreference.com

2. In the top right header, click the "Sign Up" link.

3. Follow the instructions to sign up for an account. Facebook is fast and easy, but you can also create a Cities Reference account.

4. After your account is created, click on the "My Account" link in the top right header. (you will need to be signed in to see the link)

5. Click the "Merge Old Account" link on the left side.

6. Enter your old Roman Reference username and password. If you have forgotten this please contact us at info@citiesreference.com

That's it! You now have a new Cities Reference account and your apartments should be listed in the dashboard page!

2011 - let's compare a year on

One year on since our first post blog with metrics on Cities Reference let's see what has changed:

Roman Reference Alexa of 68,750 is 4% down in ranking, as of January 2011 it has 525 apartments, a growth of 15% compared to last year
Paris Reference With Alexa of 133,700 has improved ranking by 2% compared to last year, and with 178 apartments it has grown its inventory by 131% (!)
Cities Reference With Alexa of 430,700 has improved ranking by 17% compared to last year. That's the parent site so we expect it to keep growing faster than average.
Copenhagen Reference Alexa 707,600 is down 49% in ranking compared to last year (!) and with 12 apartments has grown its inventory by 33%.
Madrid Reference With Alexa 1,163,600 has improved its ranking by 92% (!!) and with 12 apartments has grown its inventory by 33%.
London Reference with 2,268,000 goes down 115% in rankings and with 29 apartments strikes a 4% growth in inventory.
Barcelona Reference With Alexa of 2,798,000 has seen his rank worsen by 58%(!) and with 21 apartments it has improved its inventory by 11%.
Berlin Reference with Alexa 2,300,900 has lost 53% in ranking and with 13 apartments it has grown the inventory by 30%
Miami Reference with alexa 4,123,000 strikes a record down (240%) and with 8 apartments no growth in inventory
New York Reference with 3,500,000 has the biggest decline in rankings of all (340%) but with 21 apartments it has the biggest percentage of growth on inventory 162%.

Once again Analytics seems to have a slightly different, if realistically more precise, narrative. True Ranking and Visits are indeed two different metrics although we would tend to expect more alignment.

It reads a growth in visits of 16% on Roman Reference and ove 100% growth for Cities Reference, London and Miami, on Madrid it sees a record growth in visits by over 260%. Paris and Berlin instead decline in visitsby just over 20% and New York a staggering 95%. Barcelona barely equal to the previous year.

Last but not least there is one more metrics worth comparing, probably the most important, conversions. We have tracking only for Rome (+30%), Paris (+47%) and Copenaghen (-46%).

If we look at Paris we get some clues. Inventory grows 131% and as a consequence ranking goes up (looks like Alexa values especially returning customers) and, most importantly, conversions go up, even in spite of a decline in visits.

Inventory is clearly key!

A new look at the metrics

Six months on Alexa is dropping all over the place while apartments are growing steadily:

Roman Reference: Alexa is down a further 11% to 83,233 while apartments (now 507) grew a handsome 10% (20% annualized.
Paris Reference: Alexa instead is improving handsomely 13% up to 150,000, on apartments the results are even more flattering. With 158 apartments the growth rate is 85% (170% annualized)!
Copenhagen Reference: is down 14% to 630,000. Apartments growth, with 13 now, is ok on a percentage basis, over 40%.
Cities Reference: is also going 10% downwards to 684,000.

The other cities don't have noteworthy differences

Cities Reference teams up with Blizzard Marketing

We're eager to announce that we just partnered with Blizzard Marketing in Colorado, the aim is boosting our online standing and reputation.

In the past few months growth has been lagging behind. There has been a general slow down in traffic (see details below) and overall apartments grew by just (5%). We need a boost.

Roman Reference alexa ranking slowed down from 66,000 to present 77,000 (down 16%) and compete from 360,000 to 535,00 (down 48%!). Also in terms of apartments growth raise has been slow from 455 to actual 461 (annualized growth 2.9%).
Paris Reference lost positions from 137,00 to 172,000 on Alexa (down 25%) and from 649,000 to 753,000 on compete (down 14%). Apartments grew into 86 (annualized growth 24%).
Copenhagen Reference went from 358,000 to 553,00 (down 35%) and from 878,000 to 847,000 (so it actually grew on Compete.com). Stable on apartments.
Cities Reference from 518,000 to 624,000 (down 20%) and 742,000 to 988,000 (down 33%).
New York Reference from 793,000 to 1,584,000 (down 99%!), while it grew 10% on compete from 936,000 to 847,000! Apartment growth has been astounding from 9 to 21 (270% annualized growth).
London Reference from 1,053,000 to 1,755,000 and from 742,000 to 1,073,000. Stable on apartments.
Berlin Reference from 1,090,000 to 1,494,000 on alexa, while it grew on compete from 1,197,000 to 1,070,000. Stable on apartments.
Barcelona Reference from 1,186,000 to 2,575,000 while it grew on Compete from 935,000 to 846,000. Stable on apartments.
Miami Reference from 1,223,000 to 3,041,000 and 927,000 to 1,074,000. Stable on apartments.
Madrid Reference from 2,235,000 to 2,654,000 and now ranked on compete at 1,073,000.

Get a 5% discount!

See the details on Roman Reference Blog

Nice new features for CitiesReference's Owners

Starting this week owners are enabled to change/update your apartments' weekly prices and upload new apartment's pictures directly from your back office access. As usual you are very welcome to keep your calendar updated and write a personalized unedited blurb on your own apartment and its whereabouts. Questions are welcome, contact us or comment here.

More metrics for the cities reference network

Alexa rankings are not nearly as precise as Google Analytics. Although I'm not quite ready to make public the analytics results I can say that broadly speaking the differences you see on the alexa rankings underestimate romanreference by a measure of half (romanreference has actually 450% more visitors than parisreference (not just 200%) and 1,300% more than copehagenreference (not just 540%)).
Broad differences do reflect analytics measures from there on though, with paris going some 250% faster than cph and copenhagen going ca 150% faster than citiesreference. Major difference otherwise is that Berlin and Barcelona are actually 100% bigger than the other younger websites.

Looking at the analytics each website visitor's size, broadly reflects its age online with the only exception that to get really close to the precise measure you should double the value. For example RomanReference is 250% older than ParisReference, but ca 500% more valuable in terms of visitors and 1,000% in terms of revenue, ParisReference is 150% older than CopenhagenReference but 290% more valuable etc.
Age does matter for websites' visitors and market value. For a reason.

Let's look at another public measure, listings
Roman Reference as of January 2010 has 455 apartments
Paris Reference 77 apartments
London Reference 28 apartments
Barcelona Reference 19 apartments
Berlin Reference 10 apartments
Copenhagen Reference 9 apartments
Madrid Reference 9 apartments
Miami Reference 8 apartments
New York Reference 8 apartments

Welcome to Cities Reference

Welcome to CitiesReference.com blog. In the past years we've kept a blogonly for Rome and one for Paris, with Rome, romanreference.com being our best and foremost website, picking up on all our best posts.
The idea is to slowly move all generalist and vacation market related posts here and leave strictly those related to Rome in romanreference blog, Paris in parisreference.com blog, etc.
Cities Reference blog should sort of encompass all the other cities and we though a good way to start with this would be to take a picture at the Alexa and Compete rankings of all our network's websites from most to least relevant/visited:

Roman Reference clearly comes first with alexa ranking of 66,000 and a 360,000 on compete
Paris Reference is second with 137,00 on Alexa and 649,000 on compete
Copenhagen Reference is third with 358,000 and 878,000
Cities Reference with 518,000 and 742,000
New York Reference with 793,000 and 936,000
London Reference with 1,053,000 and 742,000
Berlin Reference with 1,090,000 and 1,197,000
Barcelona Reference with 1,186,000 and 935,000
Miami Reference with 1,223,000 and 927,000
Madrid Reference with 2,235,000 and not yet ranked on compete

In other words, at the beginning of 2010 our Rome vacation rental website is still leading uncomparably faster than the other. We'll take other measures in the next posts and see how this is going to change now that we'll start implementing a more global strategy.