WeNeedaVacation.com is a Web-based travel business started in 1997 in Wellesley, Mass. to help match vacationers with rental properties in resort locations. Founders Joan and Jeff Talmadge now have seven employees and list more than 3,500 properties on Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and in Florida. Jeff Talmadge tells how digital video is adding a new dimension to his business.
Elizabeth Wasserman: Tell me about your business.
Jeff Talmadge: We advertise private homes or condominiums on behalf of homeowners on the Cape and Islands off the coast of Massachusetts and Florida They pay us to advertise. We use the classified advertising model. Our goal is to find as many vacationers to book those homes as possible. Our success is directly related to how well we can attract vacationers to our site versus other competitive sites. Their interest is what ultimately makes the homeowners happy because they get the booking.
Wasserman: Why did you decide to deploy video on your site?
Talmadge: It was a very exciting and difficult and yet exhilarating decision. Since beginning of our site 10 years ago, we’ve prided ourselves on being able to take the latest technology and provide it to homeowners and vacationers. We’re always looking for something that gives us the technological edge. Technological edge, in turn, gives us an edge in capability and performance. Video came about due to an awareness that the whole social networking world was exploding in front of our eyes. We wanted to be a part of that. Last year, we did a photo contest to dip our toe in that water. We had thought about video in the past. We had been approached by the classic virtual tour companies. It sounded too expensive. Didn’t see how anybody could make any money at it. We just put it on the back burner. Then we got a call from Fliqz and the rest is history. They really made it so easy and affordable.
Wasserman: What were some of the challenges?
Talmadge: We had a really tricky problem figuring out how to make it financially sensible to us. We wanted to be able to charge for it. And yet charging too much would be kind of like shooting ourselves in the foot. We felt in essence there were benefits to our two main constituents. Vacationers more and more need a vacation with the stresses of life. Our name is poetic. The more information they have about a property before they go, the more confident they are that they’re making the right choice. With over 3,000 homes on the Cape and Islands alone, there is a dazzling array of homes. Which is the best home for me and my family and my set of friends? Over the years, we’ve included the addition of many pictures, snapshots, still photography and that’s been wonderfully helpful. We even have a photography service to go out to a home and really make it sparkle. But there’s nothing like video to make a vacationer feel like they’re there. It’s the next best thing driving to the home.
Wasserman: Do homeowners shoot their own video? How does it work?
Talmadge: That again was a really crucial piece of puzzle. If we had to do it all, it would slow things down too much. Homeowners are absolutely able and willing to do it. We also have services where we can go out and shoot them. The crucial strategic decision here is: Do we believe with some help from us that our homeowners can do this easily? If they can’t, why bother. We’ll get five, 10, 15, 20 videos shot by us and that’s it. Unfortunately, we decided to start offering this in August. It’s been a bit of a tough sell over the winter. So far we have had a few submittals from homeowners, but the weather was a bit of a showstopper.
Wasserman: How difficult was this to set up?
Talmadge: It certainly took a few days of work. As programming tasks go, it was a piece of cake. Our issues were not at all with the Fliqz platform. The problems were on our end: how do we price it, how do we do it? It’s both a software and a service. They provide a set of components that enable you to upload video to their site and then play that video on your own site. We wanted that to be as easy as possible for our homeowners — we didn’t want them to have to upload videos directly. So we had to do some programming of our own to get the videos from them to us and then we upload them. What they provide is an upload capability that is programmable. We can do it automatically through API calls, through Web service calls to them. Then once the video is up and encoded, they return their unique identifier to us, and we stick that in our database. We then rebuild our listing as the homeowner submitted it and we add a button that says “Play this video.” The video plays in our little custom player.
