Andrew Gibson the creator of DirectHolidayBookings.co.uk talks to Europe a la Carte about his holiday home listings site.

1) What is the aim of you site?

We aim to grow Direct Holiday Bookings into the largest holiday home site in Europe. We strongly believe that the site should be free to holiday home owners to advertise their properties on. There is no need to charge home owners to advertise and we believe that the quality of our site will attract people to list with us.

In todays economic climate home owners have to watch every penny that they spend and by offering our free service will certainly help them. The question that we feel holiday home owners should be asking the other holiday home sites is ‘Why do they charge?’

2) What prompted you to start the site?

I started the business because I had a holiday home in Florida and was sick of paying to advertise it and was not happy with the number of bookings that I got. In the end I decided that rather than sit about complaining, that I would build my own website. Hopefully Direct Holiday Bookings has learned from the mistakes that other sites have made.

3) What has been the hardest thing about setting up the site?

The hardest thing of having Direct Holiday Bookings has been to convince people that there is no catch in having a free site! You can not immagine my frustration with emails from homeowners wanting to know why we do not charge. I would love to be able to contact all of the holiday home owners out there and get them to ask the question from the other prospective – ‘Why should they pay when a new company like Direct Holiday Bookings can do it for free’.

4) What is the funniest thing that has happened to you setting up the site?

The funniest thing that has happened to me so far has been editing some of the photographs that we have been sent in. I always thought that I was quite open minded untill I saw some of the holiday pictures that we received!

5) Is there anything you would do differently with hindsight?

The only thing that I would do differently would have been to have launched the site earlier. We have had a great response to the site and now know from the number of home owners that we now have and the positive emails that we get, that the holiday home rental market has been waiting for a free site like ours for a long time.

My comments – It’s interesting to read about the problems that Andrew has had setting up a free listings service for holiday home owners. I have to admit I’d be sceptical too and wondering why a site would offer free listings as I’d think how could the listing site would make any money from their site. I had a look on the Direct Holiday Bookings site and evidently Andrew already runs an successful internet marketing company so he has no need to make a profit from supplying this property listing service.