Today we released a new version of SunnyRentals.com with major improvements to the Search Result page and Property pages.

Here is a summary of new features:

Across the site
- Simplified search bar
- New method for saving search criteria to be remembered as you browse the site
- Improved type ahead search with exact matches first

Home page
- very small update to search box for consistency
- more partner logos

New search results page
- Refine on left and narrower
- Simpler refine controls
- Compact top section shows more results
- More natural blending of private owner and agency properties
- Faster search refining
- Improved map view

New property owner page
- New layout showing all content on page (headings to jump down page)
- Larger property photos
- Updates to the calendar / pricing calculator styling
- Property owner photo (uploader on owner profile page)
- Easier to see how to contact the owner with contact form in the right column
- More properties from the same owner (for private owners with more than 1 property)

Partners
- all above updates have been applied to co-branded sites

Job role

As Junior Accountant, you will be responsible for invoicing, payment collection, supplier invoices, book-keeping, supplier payments, payroll and cash-flow planning.

As our business is online, we aim to automate as many routine tasks as possible, therefore you will also be involved in product planning where invoicing and payments are concerned.

You should have experience in all of the tasks above, as well as experience with online payments and business without borders.

You will report to the Senior Accounting Manager.

Personal nature

• Structured and detail focused
• Self-managed and able to plan your daily work
• Willing to learn and try new things
• High proficiency in Danish (or Swedish, Norwegian) and English
• Confident computer and internet user

Skills and experience

• Qualified with a suitable accounting qualification
• Use of web-based accounting software (e-conomic)
• Issuing invoices and reminder notices
• Experience within Denmark for reporting and payment of VAT, salaries etc.
• Basic reporting and financial analysis
• Experience with payroll (esp. Danløn system)
• Automating routines between accounting and banking systems

About SunnyRentals.com

SunnyRentals.com is one of the fastest-growing vacation rental companies in Europe, with more than 54.000 properties available for rental in 50 countries. The website is available in 8 languages and allows powerful searching and booking for guests with instant confirmation. We are based in central Copenhagen.

Applying for this job

If you think that you have what it takes, send us your cv and motivation letter to jobs (at) sunnyrentals.com.  The position is based in Copenhagen, Denmark and you must have a permit for working in Denmark.

Did you know that Facebook now attracts more minutes of people’s time than Google with nearly 50% of all online users in the EU having a Facebook profile?

Social media is becoming a larger and larger part of our lives, and provides an engaging promotional channel for your holiday home. Today we launched some new integrations of SunnyRentals.com with some of the top social media.

Now you can share a holiday rental property from SunnyRentals.com on Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest, as well as sending the property to a friend by email.

We’ve added a sharing toolbar to every property advert like this:

Fact sheet on Social Media

Estimated 66.8% of Internet users generate hundreds of millions status updates, comments, likes, shares, etc. every day.

Facebook:

- 845 million users
-  60 billion button servings daily
- an average user has about 180 friends with 180 friends each, with 180 friends each…you get the idea

Twitter:

- 500 million active accounts
- 200 million tweets every day

Google+:

- 3.1 million brand followers
- Relatively young, but showing strong growth
- Google combines sharing and searching. Reach billions of daily Internet users.

Pinterest:

- 11.7 million unique users
- 2000% increase in the number of users since May 2011
- visitors segment: 68% are women, 50% of users have children
- 1 million people spend on average 15 minutes on the site very day

How to share from SunnyRentals.com

Sharing on Facebook

Click the Facebook ‘Like’ button, and a pop-up will open allowing you to post a recommendation for this property on your Facebook wall.  If you are not logged in to Facebook, it will ask you to login first.

Then the post will appear on your Facebook timeline and activity list.

Your friends will be notified and will also have the opportunity to like, comment or share your post.

Of course, the benefit is that people on SunnyRentals.com who like your property will also share on their wall, exposing your property advert to thousands of new potential guests.

Sharing on Twitter

Click the ‘Tweet’ button, and a pop-up will open allowing you to post a recommendation for this property on your Twitter page.  If you are not logged in to your account, it will ask you to do that first.

Your followers will see your Tweet and the has tags (#) in front of the key words, will allow other users to find your message, when making a related search.

Sharing on Google+

Click the Google+ button on the property page, a pop up window with sample text, link and photo of your property will appear. Click ‘Share’ to post on your profile.

People in your circles will see your post in the activity feed.

Sharing on Pinterest

Click the ‘Pin it!’ button on the property page. Then a pop up window with sample text, link and a photo of your property will appear. Click ‘Pin It’ and the photo with a caption will appear on your virtual board. If you are not logged in to your account, you will be asked to do that first.

People following your ‘pins’ will see your post and be able to ‘like it’ or ‘re-pin’ it on their own boards.

About the job

We’re looking for a senior/lead software developer with a solid history of developing scalable commercial web applications, hands-on experience with the technologies that we use, and with experience in developing a web application throughout the full product life cycle.

You will be the lead developer in a product team, with experience for assisting the product manager in product planning, leading the design of technical solutions, ensuring that the application is scalable to support our business growth, and ensuring that other developers in the team deliver high quality code.

Personal nature

• Passionate about out product and the creative process.
• Self-motivated and driven by your results.
• Willing to contribute and take the initiative to execute innovative new ideas.
• Demonstrated leadership potential including team lead experience.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.

Responsibilities

• Designing system and application architecture.
• Coding front and back-end interfaces for our web applications.
• Reviewing and upgrading existing code base.
• Assisting in physical and logical database design.
• Daily and weekly planning in our Scrum structure.
• Within the team, leading the review and estimation of user stories.
• Planning development iterations and leading daily scrum meetings to meet goals.
• Ensuring good unit testing of code delivered by the team with a high degree of quality.
• Adhering to the latest coding standards.

Skills and experience

Must have:

• Strong expertise with PHP5, familiar with the latest features in PHP5.2.X and 5.3.X.
• XHTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX – expert level JavaScript/XHTML/CSS development will be necessary.
• Experience with ExtJS library (or similar).
• MySQL – modern database development expertise, words like ‘trigger’ and ‘view’ should be part of your vocabulary.
• Object Oriented Development / CS Background – ideal candidates should understand object oriented development, and apply OO concepts to everything they do. Formal CS background or experience preferred.
• Expertise with geographic databases and Google maps.
• Expertise with search technologies, particularly Sphinx.
• Multi-language and localised web applications.
• Integration of payment gateways for subscription payments.
• Experience in Software Development life cycle processes and procedures.

Nice to have:

• LINUX and Apache knowledge is a plus.

• Expertise with social networks, platforms integration (fx. Facebook OpenGraph, Twitter)
• Development of Web Services to enable widgets and white-label solutions.

You should have the appropriate university level education and a minimum of 5 years in web application development including successfully launching several interactive Web applications.

About SunnyRentals.com

SunnyRentals.com is one of the fastest-growing vacation rental companies in Europe, with more than 54.000 properties available for rental in 50 countries. The website is available in 8 languages and allows powerful searching and booking for guests with instant confirmation. We are based in central Copenhagen.

We believe that development is not just about coding, but contributing to a great product that is useful and designed to work in the way our customers expect. We therefore work with an agile development methodology that gives maximum input and control to developers – and with that autonomy comes a responsibility.

Applying for this job

If you think that you have what it takes, send us your cv and motivation letter to jobs (at) sunnyrentals.com.  The position is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Relocation may be considered.

- 53,000 holiday rental properties from SunnyRentals.com are now available on Resfeber.se, Rejsefeber.dk and Reisefeber.no

Each year, more and more people are choosing to rent a private villa or apartment for their holiday accommodation. In 2011 the European holiday rental industry will generate €20 billion in revenue, with more than one in four European travelers booking a holiday rental property.

Resfeber, one of Scandinavia’s largest online travel agencies has launched a new partnership with SunnyRentals – a leading online provider of holiday homes. Resfeber will provide its users with the possibility to search and book SunnyRentals’s offering of holiday properties from large agencies and private owners.

“We are seeing an increased demand from our users to rent private villas, chalets and apartments. Scandinavians are generally very discerning – we like to be self-sufficient and create our own travel experience. Having your our own house is a convenient and comfortable solution for families while holidaying. SunnyRentals is a perfect partner due to its large selection of homes in destinations that suit Scandinavian travel behaviour,” said Lena Wennerstein, Sales Director for Resfeber.

SunnyRentals looks forward to the new cooperation.

“We are delighted to enter into this partnership with Resfeber. It is an important strategic step to strengthen our brand and increase sales. We believe that this cooperation will significantly contribute to our growth in 2012,” said Andrew Martyn, CEO of Sunny Rentals.

During the autumn, the greatest demand is for weekend trips or school holidays to destinations such as Paris, Rome, Barcelona and Nice. During the winter, rentals of ski chalets and apartments in Chamonix, Val d’Isere, Tignes, Egelberg, Zermatt, Verbier, Bad Gastein, St.. Anton, Zell Am See, Cervinia and Livigno are most popular.

For more information please contact:

Andrew Martyn, CEO, SunnyRentals.com
Mobile: +46 709 727 727
E-mail: am@sunnyrentals.com

Lena Wennerstein, Sales Director, Resfeber Scandinavia
Mobile: +46 703 50 87 39
E-mail: lena.wennerstein@resfeber.se

About Resfeber:
Resfeber.se established in 1998 is one of the leading tour operators in Scandinavia. The company is aimed at leisure travellers, and primarily sells holiday packages, airline tickets, hotel accommodation and event tickets. Resfeber.se is part of Travelocity Group, a leading global online travel agency. Additional information is available at: www.resfeber.se

About SunnyRentals:
SunnyRentals.com is one of Scandinavia’s leading online providers of holiday rental accommodation with more than 50,000 holiday homes and apartments in 34 countries. SunnyRentals.com includes properties from Europe’s major professional rental agencies in one place, as well as unique properties from private owners and smaller agencies. Holiday rentals with online booking are quality assured, graded from one to five stars and available in all price ranges. www.sunnyrentals.com

SunnyRentals.com, Scandinavia’s leading holiday home rental website has launched a new partnership with Discovery Channel to promote its holiday home collection.

Visitors on Discovery Channel’s Danish website can now search for more than 53,000 holiday villas, chalets, apartments and cottages on SunnyRentals.com.

SunnyRentals has launched its ski campaigns for the 2011/12 season.

If you are website publisher, email marketer or SEM publisher and interested in running our campaigns, you can find take part in 3 places

1. Contact us to sign up for our direct Partner Program
2. TradeDoubler (UK and Denmark)
3. Euroads (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, UK)

Some samples of our campaign creative are shown below.

Flash Search Banners

Expandable banner (collapsed)

Expandable banner (expanded)

Gif Banners

Today we launched a re-engineered search and refine results feature to provide clearer search choices and more accurate results to guests on SunnyRentals.com.

Users still start their search with inputting a destination (country, region, area, town/city) and then refine their search results to find available properties that specifically meet their needs.

Here are the new features:

• 2 types of date search – exact date range or flexible date range
• Sliders to set more accurate requirements for duration, number of guests, bedrooms and bathrooms
• Proximity to ski-slopes filter
• Last Minute deals filter
• New search technology to improve search speed

And we are pretty chuffed that SunnyRentals.com is still one of the few holiday rentals websites that allows users to search for properties with Internet access!