Worldwide holiday rental company, YourHolidayRentals.com will soon celebrate its first birthday, and despite the economic downturn, goes from strength to strength. The family-run business based in Norfolk, has been a hit with overseas and British home owners and holidaymakers alike, and that’s probably down to the friendly approach of founder Mitch Ablitt. I finally managed to pin him down at his home last week.
‘I think one of the keys to our early success is the design of the website,’ he said. ‘It has been designed for home owners to easily list their rental properties, and the easy navigation allows potential renters to find somewhere without trawling through hundreds of pages. We knew it was a competitive market, but we’re really pleased with the way the first year has gone.’
As an exercise, I went through the motions of listing my own house and the attractive website really is a treat. The listings page assigned to each property allows for up to 16 photographs, and the end product was really very pleasing, so it was easy to see why the website has taken off. Then I had a go at reserving a holiday villa.
‘When I’ve booked holiday villas in the past,’ Mitch said, peering over my shoulder, guiding me through the process, ‘it’s always been a struggle to find exactly what we wanted, so I began thinking about how to make things easier. One thing led to another and here we are today with Your Holiday Rentals.’
The website’s portfolio grows daily and being free until February 28th, it is attracting a lot of attention from home owners. Unfortunately, I don’t have a holiday home to put on the website, or it would be my first port of call, and Mr Ablitt, as nice as he his, wouldn’t allow me to use the villa that I had booked, but never mind, I still had a nice time with the Ablitt’s.
I asked Mitch what he would be doing on the first anniversary. ‘Working,’
