FORUM

For the last seven years I have advertised my French house for rent through the Homelidays website and achieved a very good response rate. It cost me about £270 a year to advertise with them and I had the facility, at no extra cost, to show my house at the top of their listing, if I updated my advert each day.
Unfortunately another company HomeAway has now bought them out and not only am I being asked to pay more each year to advertise with them, they want the same again to show my advert near the top of their listings. That is if I take up their Bronze package (Which is the cheapest) but they also offer Silver, Gold and Platinum packages so I am still not going to be that near the top.
I get the feeling, from the number of hidden extras I will have to pay, that they are basing themselves on Ryanair and I do not want that stress all year round, so if anyone can recommend another holiday let company specializing in French properties I would appreciate it.

It depends on where you hope to source your clients.

We used OwnersDirect for a few years, which is UK focused, but enquiries dropped off recently and had lots of people trying to get reductions.

We now like Pour-les-Vacances. It brings in a fair number of French and Belgian clients.

Another good one (and pretty cheap as it is PAYG) is Holiday Rentals, part of Trip Advisor.

It also depends on your price bracket. Some companies specialise in high-end properties and some are better for lower-end.

One thing I would not do is use Gites de France. Really expensive and absolutely no inquiries.

I use holiday rentals for my place in England. Very cheap, easy and straightforwards and have been full with good customers all summer.
The only slight downside is that you don't get any of the rental until 48 hours after the holiday has begun.

I have used Homelidays for four years now with great success. With the sell off of Homelidays.co.uk to HomeAway we elected to convert to Homelidays.com albeit everything is now in french. HomeAway is geared to attract the english and when we used them in the past this was not successful. None of the english based websites have worked for us.

We do not attract many english bookings to our property which is in Sainte Marie la Mer, the majority are french who love the area. July and August are peak months and our bookings for these months have always come from Homelidays. Homelidays.com appears on page 1 of Google.fr under locations vacances (holiday lets).

Alternatives are Vivastreet.fr which we have used with very minimal success and Arbritel which we have had no experience of.

I recommended Homelidays to another english couple who have a house in the same resort. They used to struggling for bookings until I introduced them to Homelidays. They too have now converted to Homelidays.com.

I still would support HomeAway.co.uk. They are vitually worldwide now and I get enquiries and bookings from U.S., Canada, N. Zealand etc.in the winter. I ONLY pay the minimum subscription. I do not go automatically to the top of the list, but when the English were not booking in the last couuple of years, I got clients from Germany, Belgium, Swedish etc. The ad can be sent to other european countries if one finds bookings are a bit thin' thus only pay for a few months. I know I sent my views on the Company to you in a p.email. I think they are worth the fee.