July is traditionally the second busiest month in the year as holidaymakers rush for last minute deals for summer so it's an important bellwether. Such a big lift is very, very welcome news.

Discount frenzy

We always knew 2012 would be a tricky year with consumers under real pressure to save money and wider economic confidence sagging under the Eurozone's problems. The inevitable result was holidaymakers leaving it later to book.

The good news is they still want to book - at the right price.

Traffic to España Breaks and Lanzarote Breaks has risen very strongly and our special offers pages have moved into top spot as the main landing pages.

We know constant requests for discounts can be difficult for owners but the best bet is to expect it. Consumers are programmed to ask for money off headline rates so it's wise to prepare for this when dealing with enquiries. Budget for it and plan ahead - it isn't an insult! Just a sign of the times.

More good news

We loved a report by Post Office Travel Money giving self-catering holidays in Spain a ringing endorsement for value. We were even happier to see these figures picked up in the national press this week, raising awareness of the excellent value we offer, to a wider audience.

Our own activity is also paying dividends.

The new Hot Bits section has been a big success, bringing some welcome zip to every destination we spotlight. We also revamped our main newsletter around this new content then cleaned up the subscriber list.

It has turned out to be very worthwhile: We're seeing much bigger traffic spikes (and very low bounce rates) from 38,000 happy subscribers.

Despite what the newspapers may say, there's still plenty of business out there. It just takes more agility and attention to detail to grab it.

Happy renting!

We're delighted to announce this is now available via an XML data feed.

How it works

XML feeds provide a way to seamlessly transfer data from your system to ours, saving the day-to-day issues of changing property details, prices and availability on two systems.

If you haven't used XML before, here's how it works:

Once the feed is created, we regularly parse it for property updates and make changes automatically to your advertising.

If this is of interest please give our feed specification to your tech people then let us know where to find it. We'll do the rest.

Happy renting!

It's high time to re-charge the batteries so we're taking annual leave and closing the office Monday 18th - Friday 22nd June. Our websites will continue to operate as normal but please note responses to advertising enquiries will be slower than usual or delayed.

Unfortunately that means our office will be closed and won't re-open until Wednesday 6th June. Our websites will continue to run as normal but customer queries will be delayed until our return.

If you're taking part, have a fabulous break and enjoy the party!

Here's our hit list of the worst, and most frequent, rental photo fails.

1. Timestamps

Nothing ages a photo like a timestamp and we would personally like to murder whoever added this terrible feature to modern cameras. Timestamps instantly age your photos and can alarm guests: Is this advert trustworthy? Will the property actually look like this? Can the owner be bothered?

Timestamps turn guests off. Ensure they're switched off on your camera.

2. Toilets

This issue vexes lots of owners: "I've spent thousands on my bathroom, I want to show it off!" Unfortunately unless the bathroom is enormous and stunning, guests see something quite different: "I'm going on holiday. Oh look - I can poop indoors."

Unless your bathroom is worthy of The Queen, find angles that avoid toilets. Or avoid bathroom shots altogether.

3. Pants, mess and other stuff

When photographing your property, it's advisable to spend 90% of the shoot on cleaning and dressing each room. Pants on the line, dirty clothes on the bed, filthy floors - we've seen it all.

We often laugh but if messy photos are costing you bookings, they probably aren't all that funny.

4. Friends and family

Unless you have a professional photographer, his assistant, a make-up artist, full lighting rig and a supermodel it's probably best not to put people in a holiday rental photo. A photo of your Auntie Marg's wobbly bits and Uncle Dave smoking 20 B&H while getting smashed by the pool isn't going to inspire any bookings.

Guests are looking for a blank canvas on which to paint their holiday.  Ask family (politely) to go elsewhere while you're taking pictures.

5. Blurred / dark / light / rubbish photos

This is a real conversation we've had several times:

Us - "Sadly we couldn't use this blurred photo of the villa that was taken during an earthquake, force 9 gale and torrential rain storm at night."

Owner - "Yeah but it's the only photo we had time to take. We're not going back for 6 months!"

Us - "Oh."

Guests won't be so polite, they'll just move on and look at other properties. If your photos aren't up to scratch, hold off advertising until they are. It'll save a lot of time, money and angst.

6. Inappropriate close-ups

A close-up of the sofa doesn't qualify as "The Lounge" and a full frame image of your pillow doesn't count as "The Bedroom". Close-ups get only one reaction from guests: What are they hiding?

Every photo should be a vista, setting the scene on a wonderful holiday. Lose the close-ups, stand back, shoot.

7. Pools that aren't blue or watery

The holiday photo is a long established genre and the rules cannot be broken: Swimming pools are always blue and contain water. Which means pool photos shouldn't ever include the cover or be green. Remove the cover before taking pictures.

Green salt water pools have a real disadvantage here: They aren't attractive. If you have a green pool, never use it as the main photo and ensure the caption clearly says "Salt water pool".

It's our springboard for inspiring holidaymakers with the best that Spain has to offer and it's an amazing platform for anyone with a good story to tell. If that's you, read on.

Why Hot Bits matter

The buzz in web marketing circles right now is content marketing. There's been lots written about it and the definition is still very broad but the idea for us is very simple: Create stuff  people want to read and share.

For websites like ours that means we grow our audience and generate more interest in our holidays.

Unfortunately it takes rather more than installing a CMS and putting up a blog post. We've spent some time getting together good writers, hand building a content management system that integrates stories with our property listings (without being annoying) and nailing down a good newsletter system.

We currently have 40,000 subscribers to our newsletter alone and, in all honesty, what we've been sending is not good. In fact every holiday rentals newsletter we've ever read is awful: Issue after dull issue of property photos with a price tag. It's time to give our readers something much better.

So Hot Bits is more than just a new section on the website. It's also the juice for our Twitter and Facebook pages and the substance for great e-shots to holidaymakers.

How to use Hot Bits

The articles we publish will be going to a large audience and we've made a commitment to properly credit writers. That means a lot of eyeballs for the best work and an extraordinary opportunity to get a free plug.

Our owners and agents are a treasure trove of stories and local expertise so we want to unleash you:

• Where are the best beaches?
• Who serves the best food?
• How do you find the hidden gems tourists often miss?
• What are the strangest questions you've been asked by guests?
• Have you got an amazing renovation story?

Get the idea? Read our editorial guidelines then get in touch!

In the meantime we've had a chance to look at what's working best on this blog for owners and agents.

A review of the last 3 months web activity on El Blog made it pretty obvious what owners want: Advice.

There are some vocal finger-on-the-pulse types who follow the weekly round-ups religiously but unfortunately they're not large enough in number to justify the time involved. Conversely things like our top features infographic have gone completely viral, spreading to all corners of the web and getting a huge readership.

So given the new workload with Hot Bits, we've decided to cull the weekly round-up.

We'll continue to publish a monthly email digest containing the most important industry news. We're also cutting the volume of blog posts to concentrate on fewer, higher quality advice pieces.

Sorry to anyone who may miss the round-ups but don't forget you can get the latest good stuff in realtime by following us on Twitter @espanabreaks.

Recession is back (sorta)

The UK officially slipped back into recession this week, with a second consecutive quarter of negative growth. Strangely this news was knocked off the lead headline spot pretty quickly, displaced by the unending Leveson enquiry and an entertaining appearance by Rupert Murdoch.

There are some good reasons for this. The -0.2% growth figure is only based on 40% of the available data, much of which is skewed by bad figures from the construction industry. Retail looks much perkier and it's entirely possible this number will be revised up as more data becomes available. An upward revision may make this the recession that never was.

We don't think this is the main story.

What's more interesting are figures showing how British incomes have fared since the financial crisis. Taking growth and inflation into account, Brits are earning less now than they were before.

That's the real story: We're poorer.

Cash-strapped consumers aren't good news for the holiday market and we stand by our predictions for 2012 that it would be a year of tough discounting. Owners and agents need to keep a relentless eye on costs and creating genuine value for holidaymakers. The fight is set to continue for some time to come.

Other stories we bookmarked this week

• S&P downgrades Spain to triple B plus - the Spanish economic car crash continues with an official downgrade of their sovereign credit rating by Standard & Poor's. The agency predict the Spanish economy will contract in 2012/13 although the government complained that this doesn't take into account their recent austerity measures (via The Financial Times)
• Car rental costs in Spain could triple - holidaymakers are being warned about hidden fuel charges when renting a car in Spain (via The Independent)
• Spanish government does U-turn on NIEs - authorities have relented on the introduction of a (plain stupid) rule that foreigners would have to attend in person to be allocated an NIE number when purchasing a Spanish property (via Global Edge)
• Debate: Do all-inclusives damage resorts? - we know this topic causes real ire among owners of holiday rental property in locations where hotels use all-inclusive pricing schemes. Have your say on this popular blog (via Travel Rants)
• Sterling to the rescue! - holiday costs for Brits could now be up to 14% cheaper due to a soaring Sterling exchange rate (via The Independent)
• The perfect airline seat revealed - Skycanner have polled 1000 travellers and come up with a brilliant infographic showing where people most like to sit most when they're flying. Avoid seat 31E (via Skyscanner)

In case you missed it...

We now do a monthy email round-up of industry news and advice for owners and agents. These digests are also posted online so if you missed it the April newsletter is available to read here.

To subscribe, you only need to register a (free) advertising account. There's no need to start a paid campaign to receive the digest.

Video of the week

Google launched a fabulous new feature for Google Maps: User generated photo tours. Very clever stuff, prepare to get wowed with this short intro:

When your bookings go up or down you would probably like to know how bookings are more generally. Are you beating the average, or are you underperforming? We explain how to make sense of the picture.

1. Keep records!

If you've had a rental property for some time, tracking when you received enquiries, who from and whether they converted into a booking is absolutely critical. Year-on-year this will tell you the peaks and troughs of the rental calendar and which marketing is working best for you.

2. Watch your competitors

The best thing about rental websites is their ability to show what's available in a given area at any time of year.

Don't be afraid to bookmark competing properties and check in on them regularly. How many weeks do they have booked? Are they running offers? Is their advertising better than yours? Spend an hour or two every month being nosey.

3. Don't ask rental websites (much)

Online rental forums such as LayMyHat have lots of useful chatter between owners on where to advertise and which sites are performing. These can provide a barometer of sorts but looking back over the chat history, you'll see rental websites go in and out of vogue like flared trousers.

Meanwhile sites like ours sit on some very privileged information: We get to see the picture for thousands of properties. It's gives us a much better insight than random chat.

This information is also commercially sensitive which is why most rental websites are tight lipped on exact enquiry figures. Even were we to publish those figures, they'd still be very misleading at the location-specific level. Every site is strong in some locations, weak in others (for example, our secret success is Gran Canaria where most adverts perform much better than the site average) and just because an owner in France does well on a website doesn't mean an owner in Spain will do just as well.

That's not to say you shouldn't at least ask rental websites.

We've always tried to be pretty transparent and avid readers of this blog will have gleaned lots of honest insights into where we think things are going year-on-year. No site will tell you how much business your competitors are doing, but they may hint at how you're doing in general. Experienced editors are also likely to spot shortcomings in an advert very quickly.

4. Track the holiday press

Owning a holiday rental is a business activity and you are part of the wider travel industry. While the rentals industry itself provides very little data of use to owners (see above), the publicly listed package holiday behemoths are duty bound to report their sales on a quarterly basis to shareholders.

The results from companies like TUI and Thomas Cook give an excellent indicator for the overall travel market and should be followed carefully by owners who are hungry for information.

Watch to see if they're discounting, changing the number of holidays they make available (capacity) or indeed are making any money. These firms aren't an exact mirror of the holiday rentals market but it's safe to say if they're up, we probably are too - we're all trying to capture the same consumer.

Our favourite industry bookmarks are TravelMole and Travel Weekly (and Tnooz for online trends).

5. Be the awesome minority

Time to live up to our honest values and let you in on a little secret: A minority of properties generate the majority of enquiries.

If the bookings we generate were evenly spread across our entire property portfolio, this business would be a whole lot more profitable. Sadly, they're not. Some owners get the mix between price, location and enticing advertising absolutely spot on and they generate vast amounts of business with ease. Many more don't.

Ten years of experience and lots of data also confirms good adverts that fail are a rare minority. That's why we play it honest with our AdScore guarantee; great adverts deserve 100% backing.

In short, be consistently great. It makes the bigger picture much easier to fathom.

Stories we bookmarked this week

• Boomers taking over from Gen-Y in smartphone stakes - if our popular features infographic didn't convince you that WiFi is fast becoming essential, this article on the staggering growth in smartphone use probably will (via Tnooz)
• Holiday rentals emerge as powerful alternative to hotels - an excellent piece on the steady march of holiday rentals and how our industry is becoming a major competitor to hotels and package holidays. There's still work to do on the planning, booking and trust side but people like the concept in ever larger numbers (via EyeForTravel)
• King Juan Carlos says sorry - Spain has raged all week on news the King injured himself during an extravagant elephant hunting holiday in Botswana. At a time when Spaniards are suffering severe austerity and joblessness, the trip didn't go down well. He has now apologised (via The Olive Press)
• Spanish property prices fall further - the average price of a home in Spain fell by 11.5% in March compared to the same month last year, according to Spain’s most widely-watched annualised House Price Index compiled by Tinsa. Time to buy? (via International Estate Agent Today)
• Madeleine McCann sighted in the Costa del Sol - a new twist this week as it was revealed Spanish police are searching for the missing girl in Nerja. There's mention of a link with a cold case investigation by Scotland Yard. Hope for the best (via The Evening Standard)
• 9 worst hotel room views ever - I think we've stayed in a couple of these. A great reason to rent a holiday villa instead (via Huffington Post)

Fail of the week

It's not hard to make a total mess of Twitter and Holiday Velvet made us giggle with this social networking faux pas. Bit desperate. We're equally useless on Twitter, follow us @espanabreaks.

Video of the week

The Spain Scoop did an excellent interview with Xavi Montanya, a videographer who has made some fun, punchy and informative videos about Barcelona to show off his work. Gorgeous!