Marketing our self catering Holiday Cottages in Loch Lomond and Trossachs

Trying to find the best way of promoting our self catering holiday cottages is always an area of concern because although what you have in place may be effective now, there is no guarantee this will still work in the future. The methods of business promotion are constantly changing, for example when we first started the internet was almost non existant as a means of advertising our lochside holiday cottages, we had to advertise in the brochure of the holiday cottage agencies.

Now we have our own websites with online bookings etc http://www.lomondandtrossachs.com/ that work very effectively along side the agencies and their websites and brochures. We are now slowly entering the new face of beginning to use Blogs, Flicker, Twitter, Facebook.

The problem is now deciding if we should continue to stay with the agencies and pay their high commission fees or risk using only our own sites. The benefits are we would save about £10000 some of which could be used to fund our own marketing initiatives. We also already have one cottage Waterside Cottage http://www.waterside-cottage.com/ which is independant from the agencies and is generally fully booked each year. The anxiety is that the level of bookings would drop and and cost us more than the commission we pay.

So far it has been easier to stick with the status quo, no risk involved...Oh the joys of business planning.