PhoCusWright Travel Innovator: The Society of Leisure Enthusiasts
No, it’s not some strange underground club at University where members stand around in robes and pledge allegience to some ancient relic, though the name does have a movie title ring to it. The Society of Leisure Enthusiasts is in fact a members based organization that puts those who enjoy luxury vacation rentals and beautiful homes together. In their own words…
Imagine the possibilities…whether your next vacation is a girlfriend’s getaway, a family adventure or a multi-generational reunion, the perfect vacation begins with The Society of Leisure Enthusiasts. With the largest online network of hand-selected vacation rental homes around the globe, you have a range of homes from the affordable luxury to the ultimate in prestige. The Society, along with our trusted luxury alliance, examine each property to ensure we can deliver on our promise of exceptional quality and service. We enable you to rent a vacation rental home in confidence.
From the homepage of the Society website, you can browse through over 5000 hand picked vacation rentals from around the world, many of which are multi-million dollar homes. This is definately not your “bring your own bedsheets” type vacation rental. Most of the homes don’t display any pricing information and you must be a member to send a request for pricing. Basically, if you have to ask the price, you probably can’t afford it.
Rental managers and property owners can apply to list their properities in the Luxury Alliance. The Society only charges property managers when a booking or reservation is made by the Society. This is a pretty common practice for accommodation providers, but when the homes are this pricey, the revenue from fees is probably pretty impressive.
Question:
- In the current climate, are luxury vacation homes a stable bet for generating bookings?
- I understand the luxury angle, but is this innovative? Why?
- There are other sites competing for the vacation rental market, is luxury too specific to generate the volume of bookings required to capture market share?
Great questions Stephen.
1. Luxury rentals provide tremendous value especially when you compare to Destination Clubs and luxury hotels such as the Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton.
2. The luxury angle by itself is not necessarily “innovative” unless of course you consider changing the frame of reference a marketing innovation. For example, by comparing these homes to private destination clubs then the value is clearly stated.
The true innovation lies beneath the surface within our QA process that not only validates a home but also gives us the data to properly “match” up homes with requests and vacation desires. You can utilize our Match Maker tool at http://www.thesociety.com/matchmaker
3. The luxury segment is quite substantial when you consider we are competing with hotels, destination clubs and resorts and not just vacation rentals.
Great questions. I’d be happy to clarify any of my answers. Thanks for the write up.
Cheers, Mike
great post..
Interesting post. I have made a twitter post about this. Others no doubt will like it like I did.
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