Eleni may find that they have done her a favour in the long run. More and more people are going DIY nowadays. There are several places in Greece that have been really difficult to book independently as tour operators have bought most of the beds in the resorts. Going it alone has its drawbacks for apartment owners but then they won't have to be dictated to be the companies! With the popularity of the internet it is far easier to market your property nowadays.

I feel sorry for the apartment owners who have been caught out by this problem with Simply Travel and they have my best wishes.

I do not completely agree with Fiona though, having been involved in trying to help several owners of private independant accommodation to find guests. The Internet is so vast that on its own it produces very few bookings from single sites, certainly no where near enough to survive on.

Extra advertising somewhere is necessary such as in newspapers, magazines etc but is extremely expensive for a good coverage. For example a few lines of plain text recently cost me £70 for one insert in a week-end edition of a National UK newspaper resulting in 2 phone calls but no bookings. Obviously an agency for numerous properties can afford this but not a single individual.

It is very frustrating knowing that people want this type of holiday but there is no way of getting the message across without a huge cost.

My opinion is that the individual apartment owner is better off with an agency, the larger the better, assuming this is on a commission basis as opposed to an "up-front fee".

Unfortunately in Corfu there are apartments everywhere many of which stay vacant continually.

Hmmmm, looks like Simply have finally gone the way I suspected they would when I first heard that they'd been taken over by TUI.

We had 5 brilliant pre-TUI holidays with them on Paxos and couldn't recommend them highly enough. However, my daughter and s-i-l went to Tenerife with them last year and had a very bad experience, for which they are still fighting for compensation. I wondered whether that was just a one-off, but reading Rich's report, it looks as though unfortunately it's becoming the norm.

Shame

great news the people are fighting back--i heard this morning that one of the big t/c`s are stating all rooms must have air cond. new linen,rooms cleaned every day,fresh linen & towels every other day and they they are dropping the payments to the owners. so who is going to pay for these demands. the owners get next to nothing now . it really is a rip off,so come on folks book privately. it was said a while ago to me we should not upset the t/c`s but there is a limit.

Some interesting points Iluvsangeorge.

Maybe I can give you an example of how Internet advertising has paid off.

I have lived in Pelekas for 15 years and had long visits for 5 years before that.

As you may know, the village never worked with TOs, only with young independent tourists. As long haul to Asia became cheaper and both Interail tickets and prices in Greece went up, the number of people reaching Pelekas dwindled.

The village tourist trade had always existed solely by word of mouth, but this bush telegraph system obviously worked. In its heyday the village boasted a staggering 1,800 beds in pensions, private houses and small low grade hotels.

Four years ago I decided to set up http://www.pelekas.com. The reasoning behind this was two-fold - to tell the world about my new home and to give my friends a chance to promote their businesses (mainly rooms to rent) by putting them in direct contact with customers and without having to pay a percentage to a travel agent/middleman.

After a couple of years we decided to sell the advertising instead of giving it away but made it very affordable. Roughly based on the price of a double room for one week in the high season. That meant that if people could achieve that, the annual hosting and management fee for their pages had been met.

90% of our friends/clients fill their rooms, especially in the low season, from Internet bookings and their testimonials are heart warming.

We have since grown into a company (http://www.truetype2000.com) with clients in Greece, Scandinavia, UK and the US and we further promote our Corfu clients on http://www.allcorfu.com.

Why are our accommodation owners successful? I think that there are several reasons.

Because their pages are part of an evolving information site, they are highly rated by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. They are also well established and unfortunately, once pages are uploaded, there is a certain amount of patience required before they are picked up by search engines.

Secondly, I shall eschew modesty if I may, and say that our web pages are well optimised for seach engines. There are so many "home made" pages on the market that, due to design deficiencies, are never going to get onto search engines, let alone feature strongly.

Thirdly, and most importantly, you have to have something that people want to buy and in Internet terms be able to present it in a visitor friendly manner. Research has shown that you have less than 20 seconds to capture a visitor's imagination and get him to delve deeper into your pages before he moves on. Since some sites have pages that take that long or longer to open or to reach a page with any actual information on it, they will never succeed.

The number of people who book online is increasing dramatically year on year. In theory Spiros and Maria can put their pension on every computer screen from Brazil to Bangladesh! But at the same time so can their competitors and the rule of the Internet jungle says that whoever gets the higher search engine rankings will benefit from a bigger slice of the cake.

It needn't cost very much at all, but like everything, if you decide to use the Internet as a promotional tool it needs to be done as efiiciently as possible.

Keep up the hard work and welcome to the future!

I believe it is me you slightly misquote in saying not to upset t/o's. I would like set the record straight and hopefully give food for thought.
What I said is that as we do not have any other direct flights to Corfu other than Tour operator charters, so whilst I too would like to see more people book direct and have my own accommodation company where people book their own flights to get here, there is little point in, sometimes unfair, criticism of tour operators and driving their business even further down as how then we will get our people here to stay in our accommodation that we want them to book direct?
People are unlikley to accept the alternative of flying via Athens, the extra time, inconvenience and cost will drive them to more easily accessible destinations.

this has been a very interesting thread. I have not tried to get flights to Corfu so did not realise the situation. My most recent experience was trying to get a room in Lindos and finding that most rooms were bought by tour operators. BA are beginning to use their low cost version to fly to various tourist destinations. I wonder if Corfu may be added eventually. I find it hard to believe that there are no scheduled flights there yet so it must only be a matter of time!
However, I thought you could actually book flights only on a chartered airline as well?

Please note the word CHARTER. That means some one effectively rents the plane, makes the schedule, and markets it. The someone is a TOUR OPERATOR, They have to commit to a contract of X many flight rotations which have to paid for regardless of how many people are on the plane.
So, yes, to ensure better capacity and in recognition of the fact that there is such a market, tour operators will sell seat onlies on their flights.
There has been a campaign to get a no frills airline to fly into Corfu, but no one is interested, they want a guaranteed capacity of 80% ALL YEAR round, impossible here we do not have enough residents /students to fill that capacity.
It is rumoured that Cyprus air will be operating a Corfu/London service from November, it will be a flight from Cyprus making a drop here en route. I hope it works, but wonder at what cost.

Having flown independently to Crete it is the same there, they only do charter flights. Some are extremely expensive i.e. prices varies at different times of the year and direct flights stop in October. Then you can only get flights via Athens or a boat from Piraeus which takes 8 hrs. As Crete is the largest Greek Island you would think it much more financially viable for them to have easily accessible flights. Monarch do flights direct but even then they are expensive and even tho my daughter works for them the concession is not much and its only for her. If you can get direct cheaper flights then I think it is much easier to do DIY holidays and the owners get all the money for the accommodation not having to pay agent fees, which is better for them and their economy. If you do early flight bookings then sometimes you can get cheaper seats and also more choice of flight times.

We have to find an alternative to CHARTER flights to make DIY successful.