While there are a number of vacation rental sites on the market, Portugal Villa Renters is the only vacation rental site that targets the Portuguese market, a rapidly expanding local tourism market with greater buying power throughout the year, especially out of season.  Portugal Villa Renters has tapped into this market by offering bilingual listings, something which can be overcome with an automated translation tool on Google or Babel.  These listings have gained higher rankings on Google.pt and have attracted a whole new audience otherwise overlooked by competitors.

Unlike other rental sites, Portugal Villa Renters does not charge a commission on sales/leads, nor does it confuse the renter by offering affiliate services such as flight bookings & car rental options on the same page.  By including a "Wishlist" which works with the renter's cookies, the renter can select a number of properties which can be saved for future reference for up to 30 days.  This overcomes the need for reference numbers and manual searches to relocate a property during the next browser session.

Another unique selling point of the site is its ability to list individual properties on several other sites via an automated RSS feed.  The sites are carefully selected to include travel and rental sites, but all enquiries are passed on to the villa owner via the Portugal Villa Renters web site.

Apart from web promotion such as the methods outlined above, Portugal Villa Renters has also embarked on a sizeable land based campaign and has placed ads in publications ranging from national newspapers, international edition publications and local press. Although most people search for their vacation property on the internet, it is believed that up to 15% of renters were initially captivated by a land based publication first.  

As a niche site for Portugal only, Portugal Villa Renters will ensure that your property is not lost amongst thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of listings and automated recommendations.  This should lead to higher conversion rates, and we await responses to our initial questionnaires in order to evaluate this hypothesis.  

The site owners have set up a number of successful Web 2.0 companies in the past ranging from social networks to a private members forum, both of which lend itself to the vacation rental market and highlight the importance of new technological developments to keep up with an increasingly web savvy audience.

For more information, please visit Portugal Villa Renters or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it