Scotland

Enjoy Hebrides is a new network of web sites dedicated to the promotion of accommodation in the Hebrides of Scotland. Covering both the Inner Hebrides (including the Isle of Skye) and the Outer Hebrides/Western Isles (including the Isle of Lewis and Isle of Harris), Enjoy Hebrides aim to provide a simple and easy to use system of booking accommodation online.

One of their key aims is to provide clients (Hebrides accommodation providers) with a means to advertise their sites and properties in a low cost but highly effective manner. It is hoped that this will be achieved by all of the sites gaining high placements in search engine returns for all the searches relating to Hebrides accommodation – such a s Harris Self Catering, or Stornoway Hotels.

At the moment there are a multitude of web sites which charge from £50 to £150 for a listing. If you include only a few such sites and a listing on the official tourism sites (visithebrides.com & visitscotland.com) the cost can suddenly increase to well over £1,000 for just a single property. Enjoy Hebrides has already managed to get a few of their sites onto the front pages of the main three search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN) and they have associate agreements with more than ten other sites catering for Hebrides accommodation. These associate agreements ensure that a client can pay Enjoy Hebrides for a listing and they will appear on all sites within the Enjoy Hebrides network that are applicable to their accommodation PLUS any of the associated  sites that match their criteria.

Through advertising a property with Enjoy Hebrides an accommodation provider will simply have to pay a small fee to one company rather than various fees to various web sites. This not only reduces the cost to the client but also simplifies the whole process of gaining listings.

The project is still very much in it’s early stages of development but there are already ten sites in the network and at least another ten sites that are associates. With a further ten accommodation sites being developed that will make a total of more than thirty such sites on which a property could appear.

With the amazing success of their first sites EnjoyHebrides.com have rushed to provide a support portal at EnjoyHebrides.co.uk. Unfortunately, because this immediate success was unexpected, the support portal is rather low on content. Currently there is a list of the active sites within the Enjoy Hebrides network and a, simple to use, helpdesk. Sadly there is no list showing the associate sites or those sites due to be developed but a company representative says that these will be listed shortly together with other support features such as a members only section which will include such things as tutorials on Internet promotion and SEO techniques. The company representative stated that the Enjoy Hebrides network support portal is not a sales portal and will be wholly geared towards helping Hebrides accommodation suppliers gain a better understanding of the Internet, it’s many benefits and some of the common pitfalls that many fall into so easily.