We’re expanding the Greek villas section on VillaSeek. We’ve split it down into several regions – so that you can go directly to holiday villas in Crete, Corfu and Paxos, Skiathos and Skopelos, and many of the other Greek islands.

We also list some holiday villas on the Greek Mainland. We’re always adding new villas, so keep checking back for new holiday destinations.

The company’s January sales trends show that longer duration holidays of 10,11 and 14 nights are more popular in 2010 compared to previous years – up 30 per cent on last year, when the seven-night short holiday was the most opted for choice.

With the recession having officially come to an end, it seems that people can afford to commit to spending more on a family holiday as they’re booking for peak-season, in advance, instead of waiting for last minute breaks, as in 2009.

Nick Bartholet at Villa Parade commented: “January has seen much more interest from customers booking peak-season breaks of a longer period compared with 2009. It’s a great start to the year as we had our highest value booking in our trading history in January.

“We’ve been hearing from customers booking this year, that they missed out on a big holiday last year, due to the effects of the recession and many who usually book villa holidays for half-term or the Easter break are choosing to splash out more this year on a longer summer holiday.

“Because of this demand for longer holiday periods, we’ve increased the amount of properties which are available for durations of between 10 and 14 nights and have also added Friday as a turn-around day to provide more flexibility for customers and to coincide with cheaper air-fares.

“It seems that booking patterns we were used to seeing before the recession have come back with a boom – a great start to a new decade for the luxury villa holiday industry.”

Villa Parade are offering some good-value spring deals – for example, villas with outdoor hot-tubs from as little as £595 per week.

Villa Parade say they’ve seen increasing demand for villa holidays over the past couple of years. Back in September, they added 40 new mediterannean properties to their portfolio.

You can save £25 through VillaSeek by using saving code HVVP1 online at Villa Parade’s website, or call 0844 72 00 40. Villas are available from £395 per week, excluding flights.

Just heard from Croatian Affair, whose Croatian villas are listed in the Croatia section on VillaSeek.

They are offering half price car hire (on category A and C hire cars), when you book any of the following villas before 20th February:

Villa Folio
Walnut House
Andigona
Graziela

Here’s a list of the discounted car hire prices:

I’ve been working on some more individual / tailored pages for the villa directory on VillaSeek.com. The eventual aim is to get an easy-to-navigate page for every region that we list, which links to articles here on the blog, and pulls in some more useful info about the region. If anybody has regions they’d particularly like me to focus on, drop a comment on this blog and I’ll add those… within a couple of weeks there will be a tailored page for every region.

As an example of some of the pages I’ve got up and running take a look at the listings pages for luxury villas in the Caribbean, and holiday villas near Disney…. Do drop me a comment and let me know any improvements… I’ll be working on getting all these up and running in the coming weeks.

Tom

Ski Train - courtesy of Flickr User McGeez

The Guardian has published an interactive guide aimed at helping you get to ski resorts by train. It lists 10 train-accessible resorts. It’s a little bit fiddly, but clicking on the thumbnails below the main picture on their guide, brings up more info on that ski resort, and enables you to see a map of the journey from station to resort.

Many of the resorts are accessible by Eurostar. So you board a train at St Pancras, go through the Channel Tunnel, and most often change at Paris for a train bound towards the slopes.

For example, to get to Montgenèvre, you could board the 5.30pm Eurostar from St Pancras, before changing to the Briançon-bound sleeper train at Paris. From there, a morning bus takes you to the resort itself. The whole journey, from London to the slopes, takes around 14 hours. And you get a good night’s sleep on the train, and avoid long waits at airports, and all the hassle of getting out to Heathrow or one of the regional airports.

And it’s probably a bit less of a hassle to take your skis on the train, too!

But for savvy travellers, it was always possible to avoid the Ryanair credit card charges, and really get flights for 1p. To do this, you could use a Visa Electron card. Well, that was until yesterday. Now, RyanAir will charge the same £5 per journey, to people who pay with Electron Cards.

But there is a new way to avoid the charges. Ryanair can’t claim to offer “flights from 1p each way” unless there’s a way to pay for them without any hidden fees. They’ve just changed the payment method this applies to. People who pay with a prepay mastercard can get the flights without paying extra for card processing charges.

According to money saving site MoneySavingExpert.co.uk, the best value card is from ICE. There’s a 2% fee and the minimum amount you can load it with is £100. But it could well be worth it for frequent travellers.

I’m off to apply for one now. I’ll let you know how it goes!

The Thailand and India section

Hi everyone

Just to let you know, I have rebranded our Asia Pacific section on Villaseek, to better reflect the villa listings within the section. It’s now simply the Thailand and India section. You can also access the two countries directly, by clicking through to Thailand and India.

So, the change doesn’t actually affect any of the villas in the section, but hopefully will make it clearer to people who are looking for self-catered accommodation in Thailand and India.

Holiday Villas and Cottages Magazine on MyeBook.com

There are several ways to read our paper-based sister publication, Holiday Villas and Cottages magazine. The most common is in popular news agents, such as WH Smiths. Or you might stumble upon it in the waiting room of a doctor’s, dentist’s, hairdresser’s, or health club.

But we’ve also been putting copies online. The usual way to read the magazine online is via Zmags — and you can always read the latest issue at the magazine’s website. More recently, we’ve been playing about with putting online issues on another virtual magazine publisher, myebook.com. The site allows you to flick through a virtual copy of the magazine and comment on the articles. You can read the latest issue via myebook.

We’re also really happy to announce that a previous issue of Holiday Cottages magazine has now reached over 12,000 views. So we’re looking forward to adding future issues onto the platform and reaching new audiences for the magazine.

It’s had a few stops and starts — for example, Ryanair blocked Skyscanner from displaying information on Ryanair flights a year or so ago. But this has all seemingly been ironed out. When used in conjunction with Ryanair’s occasional penny flights sales, it really comes into its own.

Ryanair’s own website is pretty depressing to use — and it can be hard to find the cheapest flights .The great thing about Skyscanner is that it can display a graph of a whole month of flights — so if you’re flexible about where and when you go, you can get a pretty good deal.

For example, I flew from Liverpool to Oslo last week for just a penny (including all the taxes). I then flew back from Oslo to Edinburgh (for a fiver) before getting the train back to Manchester.

There are a few catches when planning a trip like this — for example, to get that price you have to pay on electron card, and you can only take hand luggage. Plus, we were flying to Oslo Torp, which is 110km away from Oslo — and the bus there and back costs around £33.

Still, Skyscanner makes those elusive penny flights reachable—and with a bit of creative thinking and flexibility, you can plan a pretty interesting holiday on a shoe string.

The Spanish villa sales section is particularly busy, with properties including a large Townhouse in Orba, with its own private pool, situated near Denia. There’s also a collection of villas for sale in Mallorca and Menorca.

We keep adding other properties, so do check back from time to time…