Kanaloa at Kona Condos

Our Kanaloa condo rental site has new discounts posted for open dates in April—not a bad time to be in Kona!

Still trying to decide on the best configuration for the blog, rental site, and other features I want to add. Look for an expanded list of Big Island travel links and a Hawaii blogroll coming soon.

Today’s post, for whoever may be interested, is again dealing with the business of condo rental management. Can a private vacation rental site generate any extra revenue through Google AdSense, without risk of losing potential guests? We’ll see.

Why advertise the competition?

Those “ads by Google” you see on our Kona condo rental site are the result of our having joined the Google AdSense program. In exchange for hosting the ads we get paid a small fee each time somebody clicks on one of them. It might be argued that this was a very bad idea. I spend a lot of effort getting people to visit the site in the first place—why then provide extra temptation to leave? Especially when many of the ads are for other condo rentals—our competition?

Admittedly this is an experiment, but I’m reasonably certain we’re not going to lose potential guests this way—and hopefully quite the opposite. I’ll explain why in a moment, but first, a word about how the program works. I don’t choose the ads that appear—Google supplies them automatically based on the site’s content. So naturally, the ads you see are mostly for condo rentals in Hawaii, and other travel-related services in the Kona area.

I can, however, provide a list of specific websites we don’t want to see advertised on Kona1 Vacation Rentals. Do I maintain a screen-out list? You bet. But it’s a very short list of other private “by owner” rental sites focusing on properties at Kanaloa. Nothing against these folks—we’re all a very friendly and supportive bunch, and often exchange referrals. But if someone lands on my site, I do at least want to them to consider my place first.

It would be impossible however to screen out more than the smallest fraction of sites offering rental accommodation in Kona or elsewhere on the Big Island. And I don’t think that’s a problem. It’s no secret that there are hundreds of choices out there, and people have already seen that wide range of possibilities before ever landing on my site. Those looking for something smaller or in a lower price bracket aren’t going to rent my place anyway. And a large percentage of my guests already know they want to stay at Kanaloa, having been there before—for them it’s just a matter of choosing a unit.

Visitors will see other Kanaloa at Kona rentals advertised here. In the few days since we started this I’ve seen ads on our site from Outrigger (Kanaloa at Kona is part of the Outrigger chain) and from various travel packagers and discounters offering all sorts of great-sounding deals. I’m not just unconcerned about these ads, I’m particularly hoping that people will take a look at them!

I feel that I’m in a nice position here because I know that what I have to offer is always going to be a better deal—meaning equal or higher quality at lower cost—than any promotional offering from the resort chain, or Expedia, or any Hawaii discount travel dot com with a long hyphenated name. So hopefully people will click on some of these ads, take a look, and then come back to Kona1.

(A special note to prospective guests—if you find what sounds like a better deal through one of these ads, I’d like to hear from you. I might be able to beat it!)

I’ll have more to say about price comparisons another time. But for my next post—how about something not about the condo. Yeah.

Mahalo to anyone who is actually reading this!