More U.K families are planning on staying in holiday villas this year as confidence returns to the travel industry. Recent research carried out by First Rate Exchange Services has shown that consumers are definitely looking to start booking foreign holidays again with a staggering 58% of holidaymakers stating that they plan to book a holiday abroad this year.

We are seeing this boost in confidence as this January we have had a record number of bookings of ski chalets and holiday villas here at Compareaway.com. It seems as though we are all getting sick of this doom and gloom and the recent cold spell has given us the incentive to book a holiday home in the sun to give us something to look forward to.

This increase in confidence is reflected by Ryanair who have announced that they plan to add new routes from East Midlands and Stansted airports. This means that it is now possible to book holiday villas in Fuerteventura, self catering apartments in Fez and holiday homes in Figari and depart from Stansted using Ryanair’s new services.

It will also be possible to travel to self catering holiday villas in Fuerteventura from the beginning of May from East Midlands again traveling with Ryanair. Further good news is that Ryanair plans to open twenty five new routes across Europe from April this year. This means that families wanting to stay in holiday rentals will now have even more choice as where to fly from and at even more competitive air rates. We at Compareaway.com say  - Keep up the good work Ryanair!

Well it makes a lot of sense to us.

If you live in the UK, it can’t have escaped your attention that Comparing Products and Services is right at the forefront of consumers minds.  Turn on the TV or do a search in Google for an iPod. You’ll see them everywhere because they make our lives significantly easier.

When I want to buy something, I usually know the top 4 or 5 companies I will buy it from. Question is, who has what I want, when I want it and at the best price?  For that I need a comparison site.

Now, the one thing worse than no comparison site is a comparison site that is out of date or missing half the information. That is just rubbish, but you see them on the Internet all of the time. That is why we have invested a load of time and effort in integrating our site with all of the main players in the Holiday Rental market.

We show you all of the images, all of the information and CRUCIALLY, real-time pricing and availability.  So what you see is what you get….there is no going through to the Agent only to find out that the rental was sold last week or that the price is actually £300 more.

That is all except James Villas who are not yet able to supply this. But we are working with them to bring you that ASAP :-).

If we come across an Agent who we feel is making things more difficult than they need to be we’ll tell you and, if required, shoot a quick video to show you how to get around the issue. We’ve already done this with Hoseasons who automatically add 2 insurances to their holiday prices, which is fine, but they then make it very difficult to remove them if you don’t need them.

If you find any issues with any of the Agents we compare, let us know and we will either sort it out or make a video showing a work around. Our goal is to show you how to get the best and lowest price holiday rentals in the UK.

Last week we released our new website redesign.

We have spent the last 6 months getting feedback from anyone who would give us it, and as a result made some significant changes. These changes include:

· No BS. No clutter. Just a straight forward search for holiday rentals straight from the page you land on.

· Results are displayed in blocks of 4 next to each other so you can easily compare them. You can see 8 properties at any given time on most browsers.

· You can see all of the images on the results page – just click the “<PREV” or ”NEXT>” link under the images – saving you viewing profiles of properties you don’t like the look of.

· You can filter down to find your exact property from within the results page.

· Added shortlist functionality with the ability to save the shortlist to your browser favourites.

· Generally tidied up the look and feel to make the site easier to use.

Other changes include making the landing pages (such as the homepage) load faster. One unforeseen problem is that we have managed to make the results page return results slower than before. We are working on this now as priority and I apologise for a little slowness – it will be sorted quickly.

What else we been up to?

Well, we are about to add the awesome Sykes Cottages in the next day or so. I love their super low pricing for cottages that have been inspected and guaranteed by the Sykes team. They are amazing value. Sykes only charge £29.50 booking fee over what is effectively private owner pricing. That fee covers their agents being available to help you 7 days a week and most evenings, as well as making sure the property is inspected and exactly as described. They also take credit/debit cards with secure online payments. Hassle free booking at rock bottom prices!! Just as we like it.

Sykes Cottages will be listing their excellent Holiday Cottages here on Compare Away.

We love Sykes cottages because they hand pick the 1000 holiday cottages they manage, based primarily in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

All of their cottages are subject to their rigorous quality assurance programme. They make sure they check out every property and have that small agency feel, backed up by a large company.

We will have their properties added within the next couple of weeks.

As mentioned last week, we have never been 100% happy that the property types entered have been accurate enough. So we have now completed the exercise of manually reviewing all 120,000 properties and making changes where needed. To say that was a big task is a bit of an understatement!

With the work done, you can now search by property type with confidence.

There is always an issue with “Home”. For example a 4-bedroom property in Spain is a Villa, yet in England is a house. That’s a clear cut example. But some places have houses and villas or gites.

We have taken a fairly pragmantic stance on catagorising these and think it’s the best balance. However, if you want to see everything you will want to add the “Home” filter.

Now we are moving on to a better feature based search, focussing on features such as private pools etc.

Does search improvement ever end?

Cottages4You are the next agent to join us here at CompareAway.

Cottages4You have over 9000 UK based cottages and  around 5000 European cottages and villas. Their range is second to none and we are in the process of adding these properties over the coming week or so.

In the rental business for 30 years, they say they offer more holiday cottages and villas than anyone else. Perhaps more importantly, they ensure that each one is inspected to ensure your peace of mind.

We now personally visit the offices of every new agent we work with, and were really impressed with how the cottages4you group operate. We saw first hand their truly massive operation, with a call centre for sales and support as well as a fully supported and managed business functions throughout. Very impressive.

As you would expect, Cottages4You are ABTA approved for your protection.

After what seems like a life time of back and forth with Apple, today we have finally launched our CompareAway Iphone App.

This app allows people with either the iPhone or an iPod touch to search, compare and even book holiday rentals while on the move.

The app is fully featured and allows a full search, displaying all of the results as per the website. You can flick through the pictures, read the descriptions, see pricing/availability and then either contact the private owner or book an agent managed property online.

I love the iPhone and think this first iPhone app is a great test for us all to see if this is a useful addition to the website. Please give our CompareAway Iphone App a try and let me know.

Example screenshot:

We have been working on some much needed improvement to our search functionality.

First off, we have added a lot more filters so you can fine tune your search to whatever combination of requirements meets your needs. You can filter by the more obvious stuff like bedrooms, availability, region, city etc. as well as by manager (private or agent). We have added specific agent filters, so if you only like booking with say Hoseasons then you can just see their properties.

There have been lots of little changes too, all aimed at making the search a little bit easier for you to use.

Try it out running a search by entering your favourite destination here.

Next week we will be adding “filter by property type”, but we just need to do a bit of a tidy up exercise to make sure they are all correct before we make that available.

Is that better?

I was going to respond to the concerns regarding our new name, CompareAway.com, in the comments of my last post.

But as there were so many negative comments I thought it best to do a fresh post to clarify what we are doing.

The concerns seem to centre around 3 key areas:

• - Impact on Search Engine rankings
• - Relevancy to consumers
• - Just don’t like it

So I’ll explain each point in turn.

Impact on Search Engine rankings

There is no doubt that a completely relevant domain name is at least 50% of the battle. However, as you would expect, all of the ones we initially came up with were already gone.

You therefore have to take a call as to whether you sacrifice a bit of SEO juice for a shorter, more memorable name. I took the decision that being more memorable was better than squeezing an extra place or two in the search engine results.

That decision was taken after very careful analysis, and do bear in mind that we hold top 4 rankings in Google for terms such as Holiday Accommodation (1), Holiday Cottages (4), Holiday Apartments (3) and many more. So we have a fair idea what we are losing and in our opinion it is a change worth making.

Relevancy To Customers

The Internet is a fantastic place to check stuff out and compare before buying. Customers love to compare. Just check out the popularity of sites like Compare The Market or Go Compare for financial services and insurance.

If we can lever off the back of that demand and allow our users to compare a broad section of leading UK agent managed properties and leading privately managed properties then that has to be valuable doesn’t it? Certainly more valuable than just another listing site. Those guys at Holiday Lettings etc. seem to do a great job of that already

Just Don’t Like it

That’s fair enough.

We thought it was quite short, quite catchy (certainly compared to Direct Holiday Bookings) and a little bit different to the usual variation of Holiday Rentals that usually gets rolled out.

The name change is a decision we don’t take lightly and is, in my opinion, critical to the next stage of our development. Bear with us and lets see where we are in 6 months from now - I am cautiously optimistic that you might just be surprised!

So, deep breath - let’s go for it!

Does that help ease your concerns? Please let me know in the comments.

Yesterday we formally announced our new name on Twitter; CompareAway.com.

The new name reflects the slight change in focus as we work to allow people to more easily compare the different holiday rental options available. This is quite a big change for us so we will do it over 3 weeks and several steps:

1. The first step of this process is to change the current website address to CompareAway.Com.
2. Next we will launch our new site in private Beta (do you fancy testing it with us?).
3. Then we launch the new site in live to replace the current site ( last week of July).

This change marks an exciting next step for us and I really appreciate all of the feedback and support that has helped us to come up with something we hope you will find really useful.

During the name change there is likley to be a loss of some traffic as Search Engines make the adjustment. This will pass and normal service will hopefully be resumed within a few weeks.

Do you prefer the new name? Please let us know in the comments.