Advertisement maintenance

Extra promotion

Advertisement performance

Billing arrangements

Change of ownership

Guest reviews

Scams and fraud

About how we operate

Phone numbers:

Multiple phone numbers can be listed, for example both landline and mobile, to ensure potential guests can try a few options if they need to speak with you directly. If you have a toll free number, you may also wish to list that to encourage people to make contact.

Email address:

It is your responsibility to ensure that email address displayed within your advertisement is functional. Contact us immediately if you require changes to your listed email address. We cannot be held responsible for lost emails if the email address you have provided us with is incorrect, is not accepting new emails due to a quota being exceeded, or you have spam filters in place which are causing the enquiries sent to you being classified as junk or discarded.

We only permit one email address to be displayed within your advertisement. Listing multiple addresses may confuse potential guests as to whether they should send an email to one of the addresses or separate individual emails to each of the addresses listed. If you need each email enquiry to go to multiple people or addresses at once, create an email list of addresses (consult your email provider for help setting it up) and we will display the address of the email list for enquiries.

The email address published within your advertisement is spam database protected by using an image to represent part of the address. This image is clearly readable by humans, but usually is able to fool those automatic internet harvesters that scour web pages to build up huge databases of email addresses for the purposes of sending out spam email. Note that while this effectively stops the harvesting of your email address into a database for a spam campaign, this does not stop a spammer manually copying your email address or using the direct email message window within your advertisement to send you a personal unsolicited commercial message. If you receive an unsolicited commercial message in this manner, you can report it to the Australian Communications and Media Authority who enforce the Spam Act 2003 in Australia.

Descriptive text:

Include here descriptive information about your property. If you have your own website, there is no need to repeat the entire contents of it here - simply provide a summary of what you offer as people can simply click the link to your website for further details.

Try not to use the descriptive text to repeat information already displayed elsewhere in your advertisement such as specific tariffs, phone numbers or star ratings. Those items have dedicated sections for them. When updating your advertisement, it can be easy to miss amending all occurrences of something if it's repeated in multiple places.

Accommodation rates:

Please pay close attention to these. While we try and cover variations within your tariff with a "conditions may apply" clause displayed next to your published rates, you should ensure your tariffs are relevant and up to date. You can either specify a simple base rate, a broad range of rates, or provide a more detailed schedule which lists rates for different room types or particular times of year.

Instead of displaying accommodation rates, you may be tempted to instead request people contact yourself for the current tariffs. While this gives you the ultimate in flexibility and saves you specifying and updating the rates within your advertisement, it does place you at a distinct disadvantage. Some people may simply skip your property and move onto the next one if the only way for them to get an idea about your rates requires them to make an effort to phone or email you.

You can also display details of packages or specials. For specials spanning a short and fixed period, consider promoting it on our specials page - it's free and gives you great additional exposure.

Star rating:

The star rating scheme for accommodation is a certified trademark of AAA Tourism. Only AAA Tourism, on behalf of the RACV and Australia's other automobile clubs, is permitted to certify a star rating for an accommodation property. This means that we can only display official star ratings within your advertisement - not star ratings that you have assigned yourself or star ratings that have expired. Further information about star ratings can be found on the Star Ratings Australia web site.

Property facilities:

There are two areas within your advertisement that you can specify the facilities you offer to guests. They can be mentioned within the descriptive paragraphs of text within your advertisement, providing as much detail as you like. Additionally, there is a dedicated "property facilities" box (just above the nightly rates section) which is a check-box list of selected facilities available to guests. This is a fixed list that can only contain the facilities people can specifically search for on the advanced accommodation search page (see step 3). Any other facilities not on the list that you would like to highlight should be included within your property's free-format descriptive paragraphs. Note that the wording used to describe a specific facility in the "property facilities" box cannot be changed as only very generic terms are used. So if you have "Pool" listed, and you want guests to know it's solar heated, then that extra detail will need to go in your descriptive paragraphs as "Pool" is a generic term that cannot be uniquely modified for each individual property.

Photos:

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so you should try to ensure the photos displayed within your advertisement are clear, up to date and give a true indication of the accommodation offered and facilities provided. Poor or inadequate photos may discourage people from enquiring about your accommodation, so it can be quite a worthwhile investment to organise good photos to showcase your property.

While there are no hard limits to the number of photographs you can display within your advertisement, most providers tend to supply between 5 and 10 of them.

To update photos, we can either copy them from your website or you can email them to us. We resize the photos ourselves, but if you wish to do some preliminary resizing to speed up the sending of the email, you can scale them back so they aren't more than about 800 pixels wide, or keep the image file size under about 100 kB.

Videos and virtual tours:

Videos or virtual tours of your accommodation property can be included in your advertisement. We do this by including link to your video or virtual tour which people can click on to bring it up in a pop-up window.

Accommodation location map:

We use Google Maps to provide an interactive map allowing people to locate your accommodation property if you wish to make public its exact location. The pointer showing the location of your property is usually defined using the street address, but if that results in the pointer showing your property in the wrong spot, let us know as we can move the location marker. Unfortunately we can't change the actual contents of the map, such as street names or locations of roads, although Google Maps are updated regularly with changes and corrections. If you don't include a street number with your property's location (some holiday house owners prefer not to make public the precise location), the location map will show a general pointer to the street rather than the exact location. A traditional location map (as an image) can also be included within your advertisement if you wish, but you must supply us with one.

Your property's own web site:

If you have a dedicated web site for your accommodation property, a link can be provided to it within your advertisement. This allows prospective guests to click through to it and find our more about your accommodation. It also provides a good source of traffic for your own web site.

We only provide links to websites which are working and are not "proposed", "under construction" or contain information that doesn't relate to your accommodation property. It's no use directing people to a website if they can't find any relevant information on it.

Be aware that while approximately 60% of visitors to the Travel Victoria web site are using the Internet Explorer web browser, the remaining 40% are actually using other web browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera. If your web site only works properly with Internet Explorer, then you are effectively blocking out 40% of visitors to your accommodation's own web site.

Real-time on-line booking system:

If your property is managed using a real-time booking system with an interface that prospective guests can use over the internet, notify us so we can include a link to it within your advertisement. This will enable guests to instantly make a booking themselves without telephoning or emailing you, thus saving you time.

Availability calendar:

If you don't manage your property's bookings with a real-time on-line booking system, but you do have a simple availability calendar, a link to that can be provided within your advertisement's "nightly rates" section. This saves guests telephoning or emailing you with simple enquiries about whether you have a vacancy on a particular day or not. If you don't already have a simple availability calendar system set up, many organisations can provide you with one. While some are quite sophisticated and may incur a cost for usage, the following organisations offer at least some of their calendar systems for free:

• Availcheck
• Holiday Site Central
• Rental Calendar
• Rental Calendars Direct

Updating your advertisement:

Updates are done personally by staff at Travel Victoria on your behalf at no cost. Simply contact us with the details you need changed. New photos can be emailed to us, posted out to us on a CD, or we can copy them from your web site. Ensure you have copyright ownership or usage permission for any material you provide us with to use within your advertisement.

Simple updates, such as changes to your tariffs, facilities or the wording within your advertisement, are in most cases implemented within 24 hours of being sent to us. More complex changes, such as updating or replacing photo galleries, may possibly require an extra day for us to process. If your requested changes have not been completed within two days of submitting them to us, please contact us to see where things stand. Sometimes emails do go astray or we may encounter periods of high workload which delay our responsiveness.

If you view your advertisement and the changes we have made don't appear to show up (particularly when it comes to updating photos), you may need to press the "refresh" or "reload" button in your web browser to force your computer to bypass its cache (local storage of previously downloaded documents) so it fetches the newly updated page. If you need further help, see bypassing your cache.

Please note that there are no self-serve facilities whereby advertisers can change the contents of their advertisement themselves using a password. We maintain full editorial control over the contents published on the Travel Victoria web site to ensure consistency and certain standards across all accommodation listings.