Name of your website?
Finishing Touch Holidays
Your name?
Joanne Quilter
Your Location (city, etc)
Chichester, West Sussex
Please give us a short summary of your website?
At Finishing Touch Holidays we offer a wide range of quality properties for self-catering holidays in the Algarve. All our properties are well located in and around Albufeira, Vale de Para and Gale and, as you would expect from an established company, they are regularly inspected to maintain our high standards.
With detailed knowledge of our properties, we can recommend accommodation to exactly suit your needs, and can also arrange discounted car hire and airport transfers for you if required.
In addition to the Algarve, we also offer properties for rent in the Balearics and the Canaries. All our properties can be viewed online, so why not visit our website and start planning your holiday.
Whatever you need for your villa or apartment holiday make Finishing Touch Holidays your No.1 travel choice!
What inspired you to launch your own website?
A friend of mine offered to build us a web site in his spare time and I thought it would be a good source of advertising which had not been tapped into at that time - this was even before Google was ever heard about!
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
We first launched our web site in 1998 offering holiday rentals on mainland Spain and Menorca.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
Back in 1992 the original name of the company was Finishing Touch, we decided to incorporate the company and call it Finishing Touch Holidays, seemed a little more fitting!!
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
Very user friendly and easy on the eye.... many people tell us so!
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Keep it of course, we love what we do and we just want to offer a good service and have lots of happy guests!
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
At the moment things are a little hard but that is to be expected in a recession but we're doing okay.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
We working on that now and adding an availabiliy calendar but the site could possibly do with a re-design to make it more SEO friendly.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
We would not wish to take on too many destinations, we feel it is better to focus on the holiday destinations we offer and know our product by regularly inspecting them, thus enabling us to offer the right holiday to our guests.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
We have been working with a company for over a year who promised us a great travel agents booking system. We spent many many hours working towards the completion of the system only to have the company go into receivership a couple of weeks before our system was to go live.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Finding good staff.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Getting up in the natural Google listings
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
As time goes on we're having to constantly work on the web site to keep up with people expectations and what they wish to see on a web site and keeping up with web site optimisation to maintain high Google rankings.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
We launched our first site in 1998 and have re-designed the site twice. If business allows we wish to continue to keep the business running as long as I'm on the planet.
What else do you find affects your business?
As much as I hate to say it..... the sunshine. Our phone is busy all the time it's raining!
What is your website address?
Finishing Touch Holidays
