Great Photography Sells Your Holiday Home

Good quality exterior photography

Travel companies spend large amounts on getting photography right for their brochures. Pictures of white sand beaches, aqua-marine water, fabulous sunsets, and trees gently swaying in the breeze are all designed to entice the holiday decision maker into choosing their holiday home over another. When photographs and a small amount of text are all you have to attract business, it’s important to take the time to get it right.

Photographs taken when the leaves are off the trees or early in spring before flowers and shrubs are in full bloom will not show a property in the best light to attract summer bookings, so why not use the opportunity now to get out and create some great images for your listing.

Plan on including two or three exterior images in a listing, but take plenty so you have them in stock for answering the questions you will be asked about proximity of neighbors, views of different elevations, and terrain around the property etc. Create a photo album on Flickr  (example) so you can set up folders for each season of the year and then send a link when you are asked for additional pictures.

Patio table set up for an al fresco meal

So many listings show a deck or patio with a bare table, chairs without cushions and a folded-down umbrella. How much more enticing it is to create an image that will engage the imagination and have potential guests picturing themselves enjoying lunch in the sunshine, or a glass of wine as the sun goes down. Set the table with a bottle of wine and glasses, along with a centerpiece of flowers to add color. Put up the umbrella, and make sure the chairs are set out neatly around the table.

Mood Image

Mood images are great as they can be taken with just a few props.  An image of a person sitting on a waterfront dock with a cup of coffee and a laptop, may be enough to convince someone that they can take a few days off work because they can still keep in touch with the office from their vacation location. Mood photos should generate emotions and feelings such as relaxation and comfort or amusement.

Facebook:  set up a facebook page and use it to regularly update photos throughout the year  … example

Exterior of the property with flower tubs in full bloom

Your exterior photos should show the property in the best light and taking them on a great summer’s day is the best opportunity to capture the most appealing image. Use summer blooms to add interest to the image. Hanging baskets, flower tubs and even vases of flowers on an outside table all create appeal.

Views from the Holiday Home

If your property is blessed with fabulous views, then you need to show them off. Whether it’s a mountain vista, a seascape or an open landscape with sunflowers on the horizon, use a wonderful summer’s day to create a ‘must have’ feeling.

**Make sure the images you use are actually ones that your guests can see from your property as any image you show on a listing should be directly visible unless you mention otherwise in your text.**

Show off your outside attractions

Summer visitors will be spending most of their time outside so take pictures of the exterior attractions – perhaps a hot tub (lid open with jets going); swimming pool with lounging chairs around the edge; a hammock in the shade between two trees. Once again this will generate an emotional response that could make the difference between a casual look at your listing and a further inquiry or even a reservation.

The photos you use can make or break your listing, so the extra time and effort used to compose and select your images is vitally important. Make the most of the beautiful soft light in late summer and get your best shots!

Tyrconnell Irish Whiskey

FATHER MATHEW must have turned in his grave last month at the news that, for the first time in its 39-year history, the World Distiller of the Year award was going to Ireland.

Although he didn’t live to enjoy it, the Apostle of Temperance would surely have cheered the century-long decline in Irish whiskey’s fortunes that began soon after his death. But Cooley Distillery’s success at the latest International Wine and Spirits Competition in London suggests his triumph was temporary. Whiskey with an “e” appears to be making a comeback.

A measure of the Irish industry’s fall from global leader to also-ran is that, en route to overall success, Cooley had first to win the European Distiller of the Year Award.

This is a bit like being European champions at cricket. Once our poor relations in whiskey production, the Scots are now so dominant they have a category of the competition to themselves. We’re in with the rest of the continent. But in the last round, as it were, Cooley polished off the likes of Chivas and Inverhouse to take the ultimate honours.

Despite being very much the new kid on Irish distilling’s block, Cooley’s path to glory started way back in 1971, in a bar in Massachusetts. The Plough and the Stars in Cambridge now carries a plaque to the effect that it was here Willie McCarter – then a student at MIT – and Harvard boy John Teeling hatched their whiskey-making plans.

One of the first things McCarter did when he came home was buy a couple of dormant brand-names from his native northwest: Tyrconnell and Inishowen.

In this he was consciously acquiring some of the area’s ancient distilling heritage: legal and otherwise. He quotes an official 1825 report that estimated there were 10,000 unlicensed distilleries then in Ireland and that “fully one-third” of these were in “the barony of Inishowen”.

But he was also buying into the era when Irish whiskey was supreme in the US. One of the distillery’s prized possessions, an old photograph from baseball’s 1919 World Series, underlines the point.

This was the infamous series thrown by the Chicago White Sox: the one that spawned the legend of a young Sox fan looking up at his hero, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and pleading: “Say it Ain’t So, Joe.” Cooley’s fondness for the picture, however, relates purely to the fact that in the background, you can see a large billboard advertising Tyrconnell Whiskey.

The rise of Scotch was well under way by then. But fate – possibly influenced by Father Mathew – was about to deal a series of savage blows to the Irish distillers. First, ironically, there was independence, and the economic war with Britain that followed. Then there was US prohibition. Then there was the depression.

To cap it all, there was the second World War, when, in a Scotch maker’s dream, huge numbers of American GIs arrived into the UK. Survivors would take their new drinking tastes back across the Atlantic, just as the Scots were getting very good at international marketing. In the meantime, Irish whiskey manufacture shrivelled behind tariff barriers until what was left of it finally merged into a monopoly.

It was only in 1987 that McCarter and Teeling finally got around to setting up their distillery, in one of the old State-owned alcohol factories.

Built in the Bauhaus style, (another vestige of the economic war, when the fledgling Free State looked beyond Britain for architects) this is a little piece of 1930s Germany peering out from trees on the Cooley peninsula. But it was the beach-head from which the two men mounted their assault on the market.

It is another measure of how far it had declined that Irish whiskey generally is now again the fastest growing section of the market, with the muscle of Diageo (which now owns Bushmills) and Pernod Ricard (which owns Midleton) pushing the brands.

Even so, the industry still resembles Cinderella after the clock struck midnight. Scottish production is 100 million cases a year; Irish a mere 4 million. Of the latter figure, Cooley accounts for a tiny 200,000 cases, or 5 per cent. But it has a large and growing war chest: with 25 million bottles in stock, about half of them the single-malts much prized by whiskey lovers.

Thanks to taxation, the days when – to every temperance campaigner’s despair – whiskey was the poor man’s drink were already long gone. But a bottle of 10-year-old Tyrconnells, “finished” in a sherry cask, will cost you at least €70. Such specialist products prepared the way for the London award when, at a blind tasting session in San Francisco last April, Cooley won nine gold medals.

There is one slightly awkward fact about the McCarter/Teeling whiskey partnership: namely that, despite starting their adventure in a pub, neither man now drinks. Teeling gave it up 30 years ago; McCarter more recently, when he decided it was not compatible with his then busy life as head both of the International Fund for Ireland and the Fruit of the Loom textile company.

You might think their teetotalism would undermine Cooley’s sales pitch. On the contrary, when the question was raised once, McCarter remembers Teeling pointing out that both men had backgrounds in textiles (Teeling’s via Glen Abbey). “He said that at one time, between us, we were responsible for producing vast quantities of women’s knickers,” recalls McCarter. “But that, so far as he knew, neither of us had ever worn a pair.”

The Irish Times – Friday, December 5, 2008
Frank McNally – An Irishman’s Diary

If you travel to Ireland’s most northerly point, Malin Head, Dominic and Andrea will be glad to serve you at Caffe Banba – enjoy the fantastic views over a latte.

Caffe Banba website

View all self catering accommodation at Malin Head

Bed and Breakfast at Malin Head

Watch out for this new online phishing scam which uses ‘tab napping’ to attack your computer – and your finances…

As internet users we’re all vulnerable to online scams. Unluckily for us, as soon as we become pretty good as spotting one type of attack, another more sophisticated version comes along in its place. In fact, technology company Mozilla – which developed the Firefox web browser – has recently warned against a possible threat from a new scam known as ‘tap napping’ which takes phishing one step further.

What is tab napping?

Tab napping is essentially a new kind of phishing scam. Until now phishing has involved sending hoax emails in an attempt to steal your usernames, passwords and bank details. Often the sender will claim to be from your bank and will ask you to verify your bank details by clicking on a link contained in the email.

The link actually directs you to a fake website which looks just like your bank’s own website. Once you have typed in your login details they can be accessed by the criminals who set the fake site up.

But we’re beginning to wise up to phishing attacks like this, and many of us know we should be very wary of clicking URLs even if they appear to be in a legitimate email.

With awareness of phishing on the up, making it more difficult for scammers to succeed, tab napping could be the scam to watch out for next.

How does tab napping work?

Tab napping is more sophisticated than the phishing scams we’ve seen so far, and it no longer relies on persuading you to click on a dodgy link. Instead it targets internet users who open lots of tabs on their browser at the same time (for example, by pressing CTRL + T).

How does it work? By replacing an inactive browser tab with a fake page set up specifically to obtain your personal data – without you even realising it has happened.

Believe it or not, fraudsters can actually detect when a tab has been left inactive for a while, and spy on your browser history to find out which websites you regularly visit, and therefore which pages to fake.

So don’t assume that after you have opened a new tab and visited a web page, that web page will stay the same even if you don’t return to it for a time while you use other windows and tabs. Malicious code can replace the web page you opened with a fake version which looks virtually identical to the legitimate page you originally visited.

How might tab napping work in practice?

Imagine you open the login page for your online bank account, but then you open a new tab to visit another website for a few minutes, leaving the first tab unattended. When you return to your bank’s site the login page looks exactly how you left it. What you haven’t realised is that a fake page has taken its place, so when you type in your username and password, you have inadvertently given the fraudster easy access to your account.

Even if you have already logged into your bank account before opening another tab, when you return you might find you’re being asked to login again. This may not necessarily rouse any suspicion since you might simply assume your bank has logged you out because you left your account inactive for too long. You probably won’t even think twice before logging in for a second time. But this time round you have accidently inputted your security details into a fraudster’s fake page which have been sent back to their server.

Once you have done so, you can then be easily redirected to your bank’s genuine website since you never actually logged out in the first place, giving you the impression that all is well.

How can you protect yourself against tab napping?

This is pretty scary stuff but thankfully tab napping should be relatively easy to avoid. Here are five simple ways you can prevent yourself from falling victim:

* Make sure you always check the URL in the browser address page is correct before you enter any login details. A fake tabbed page will have a different URL to the website you think you’re using.
* Always check the URL has a secure https:// address even if you don’t have tabs open on the browser.
* If the URL looks suspicious in any way, close the tab and reopen it by entering the correct URL again.
* Avoid leaving tabs open which require you to type in secure login details. Don’t open any tabs while doing online banking – open new windows instead (CTL + N).
* Finally, take a look at Online banking: How to stay safe to find out other ways to protect yourself from online scams.

Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport, Mary Hanafin TD last week launched the Summer Home Holiday campaign at Bloom Garden Festival in the Phoenix Park.

This next phase of Fáilte Ireland’s €4m home holiday campaign 2010 is particularly targeted at families and centres around promotions for families with many offers letting the kids go free!

These offers can be found in the new Discover Ireland Special Offers Brochure which has been distributed through national media as well as all tourist information offices around the country.

The brochure contains more than 200 special offers centred on accommodation as well as attractions and restaurants. There are also up to 500 special offers available online at www.discoverireland.ie. These offers are made possible through the contributions and participation of hundreds of tourism businesses

Fáílte Ireland plans to further enhance these promotions began earlier this week with a radio campaign specifically emphasising family holidays which will run throughout June.

According to recent independent research carried out for Fáilte Ireland as many as eight out of ten families may take a holiday at home this year.

Key Results

Based on a sample survey, undertaken by Millward Brown Lansdowne, of families, today’s research indicates that more than four in every five (81%) adults (with children aged under 18) are likely to take a holiday at home with their family in Ireland this year.

This is double the number of adults (43%) who indicated that they are likely to take a family holiday abroad this year instead of, or as well as, an Irish holiday.

When compared to the percentage of families who holidayed abroad last year (56%), a drop to 43% this year would mark a noticeable decline and represent a significant pool of potential home holiday business for the Irish tourism industry to aim for.

This new research came as Minister for Tourism, Sports and Culture, Mary Hanafin, TD, launched Fáilte Ireland’s Summer Home Holiday campaign.
Speaking at the launch, the Minister welcomed the research stating -

“These figures are encouraging and show that there may still be more business to pitch for in the home holiday market. As schools close, parents will naturally be looking for attractive locations with lots to do and see for all the family. For that reason, our Discover Ireland Summer campaign is rightly focussing on families and points to a wide range of options and bargains to suit all tastes and budgets.

“For all the necessary information, I would encourage everybody to look out for the Discover Ireland brochures in your newspaper over the weekend or to check out the website, www.discoverireland.ie. Ireland is a great value destination and, especially when the sun shines, can rival any overseas choice”.