Foreign Perspectives

Archive for July, 2004

Last time we left John S in the dust when we were listed as THE CHEAPEST accomodation in Perpignan.

That was Monday. Tuesday, we figured it would be at least a couple of weeks before we got any bookings from them and may as well go up to Gracay to get the pillows, soap, mail, etc. from William Gowdy. Gracay’s not an awful lot south of Paris and takes about eight hours of driving to get to so that was an overnighter.

William’s settling in pretty well and has acquired a car. He’s not got a landline yet so no internet access but he does have a mobile; if you want to call him let me know and I can pass on the number. Gracay is a nice little village; shame it’s so far from here or we’d be calling in now and again. He’s also getting his first visitor on Tuesday this week who will also be my first visitor as the whole lot of them are going camping in the south of France so will be camping in the field that I don’t know what to do with across the road. Have to see about getting the lawn mower out to tidy it up a bit for his tent.

We called in with him on the Wednesday morning and filled the trailer up with the stuff that he’d brought over. Between one thing and another we didn’t get away ’til almost lunchtime. Incidently, the road down (the A75) is brilliant and toll free but has one or two stretches that haven’t been completed, notably the big bridge at Millau just to the north of Beziers which you may have heard of. That road is part of the Paris-Barcelona european highway which should bring us a whole lot more visitors when it’s completed. William tells me that it was just filled with UK registered cars yesterday which is a good sign.

The late start meant that we didn’t get to here ’til after 11pm. I generally check the mail in the morning and evening “just in case” and it was just as well I did that on the Wednesday night as we’d seven separate bookings awaiting us and one for the Thursday! It certainly looks like the Ryanair/FlyBE site is a good one to be on: up to now we had the problem that the tourists coming off the planes had already booked somewhere to stay. Since the cheap Ryanair/FlyBE flights are booked a few months ahead we figure that we’ve probably missed a heap of people who would ordinarily have stayed here but there’s nothing we can do about that. We might pick up some of them later though as all the other accomodation listed on the site seems to be fully booked right through August.

That site is quite an expensive way to book accomodation as it follows the Ryanair model ie give us your money and we’ll keep it regardless oh, and give us a couple of quid to cover our costs in taking your money. So, you need to pay a booking fee of £3 plus 10% of the accomodation price to the booking company. Since 10% of the accomodation is about £3 in our case it means they’re billing you getting on for 20% of the cost of the booking if you’re only booking the one night. However, from my perspective it seems quite good as, so far, they’ve tended to book the rooms that I wasn’t bothering to list elsewhere (ie the two non-ensuite ones) and, so far, I’ve cleaned up on the meals & airport pickups so their charge is much less than 10% of my income from the bookings. The only downside is that their reservations are “guaranteed” which means that if we get a booking from them we have to honour it which in turn means that we need to keep our reservation calendar up to date all the time. We can still take drivebys though as they’ve set us up as needing 24 hours notice of a reservation so if a room is empty tonight we know we can let people have it.

To further complicate our lives, we’ve registered on another guaranteed booking site today. Just in case we’d get double bookings, we’ve had to reduce the number of rooms a bit but I figure that two sites like that is about the limit that we could juggle. As it is, we can’t put the gite on the second site as we’ve only one of them although it’s pretty much booked up throughout August now anyway.

Oh, and then there’s the small matter of our own direct reservations! We’re only taking guaranteed ones for those too now (via Paypal, as suggested by JW) and have had our first couple of those for August. We’ve also had our first couple of “no shows” in the last week as a result of which, we’re going to start taking deposits from people who call in to make a booking too and will be checking with the bank as to how we go about making the French equivalent of “customer not present” transactions for the telephone reservations.

As you’ve probably gathered, I spend a fair chunk of time finding ways of getting this place listed, preferably free (though I have paid £30 for the greatbedandbreakfast.com site which I’ve already recouped in bookings from it). I’m also branching out a bit in other areas so, all being well, we will be able to accept American Express cards fairly soon and the restaurant will be becoming a Ticket Restaurant and taking “Déjeuner Cheques” (the French equivalent of Luncheon Vouchers). I’m still looking round for the accomodation equivalent of LVs but, so far, have only come across “Cheques Logis”. Roger: suggestions welcome here!

A question: since France Telecom are charging me a fortune to rent the coin payphone in our lobby, I’m looking for alternatives. Any suggestions folks? And, no, removing the facility isn’t a realistic option. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it is, we have a total of less than ‚€4 in coins in it (and that’s including ‚€1 from the previous owner) yet are forking out ‚€70-odd a month to rent the thing.

As of today (Monday) we are listed on both the Ryanair and FlyBE sites as THE CHEAPEST accommodation in Perpignan. In fact our “from” price is just over half of the next cheapest accommodation!

Bonjour mes amis:

Last time you saw the extensive July 14th celebrations in Estagel. This pic is of the parade of the “confreries” (wine lodges) of Languedoc-Rousillon today (Saturday). As you can see, wine is a whole lot more important in these parts than revolution! Quite a colourful parade which has had the side effect of filling up Mas Camps with people.

We were starting to wonder why we were getting so many bookings as the first we heard of the thing was Thursday. Yup, there’s us being the only accomodation of any consequence in Maury and they forget to tell us about one of the major events! That’s pretty typical of here as they’re awful at tourist promotion in general: virtually all of the cars parked in the town today were French, yet 60% of the tourists aren’t French but then they only advertise it in French, don’t have a website and don’t distribute their brochures that widely.

Actually on the website thing, I’m thinking of running up something to cover each of the local wine producers in a bit more detail than is currently on my little guide. I already get hits for the couple of domaines that I mention (none of them seem to run to websites or even to brochures in anything but French even though the bulk of the wine is sold to Belgium (OK, they speak French), Denmark and Holland (who generally prefer speaking English)). Nope, I’m not planning on charging them: it’s just that it’s in my own interest to attract more folk to the area and if they’re coming to do a tasting trip locally (quite a common reason for people to come) it should be useful to have my website associated with the various wine producers. Longer term, I’m also hoping to organise such trips as a package deal.

Someone else is buying a property in Maury and is staying with us for three or four days in August. We’re starting to discover more and more English in the area and sold a couple of bottles of wine to one of them the other day. It’s not, yet, a form of English colony though lately the local shops have started to develop little “English products” sections. It’s quite good business for us as people buying property tend to stay for longer than others and those that have settled in tend to be keen on our type of restaurant (haven’t managed, so far, to get big numbers of French weaned off their favourite: “burgers and chips”).

Oh, that’s me and James towards the end of a very hot day. I look much better in the mornings before it gets too hot!

And finally, for now, I’d be keen to get some feedback on mark #1 of my online shop (which needs lots of development!). It’s at Personally Chosen . The links on it are “live” but don’t be going as far as entering your credit card information just yet as I’ve not worked out how to transport the wine from me to customers.

Everyone’s seen the Bastille Day parade in Paris but you can say that you’ve seen the Estagel parade.

Yes, folks, that is the entire parade from the guy at the front with the wreath, the mayor with his little sash and the military might of Estagel (both policemen and the fire engines in the background).

Bonsoir encore:

I’ve missed the 12th but it’s the 14th today so Estagel will be coming alive with parades, riots, etc. shortly. Well, a parade and more than likely everyone will be too pissed to riot as there’s free plonk once the parade is over.

Had our first bunch of total **** arrive last week. Got a call from England early in the week to reserve rooms for two families who were driving down to a villa in Spain for a couple of weeks. We’re around the half-way mark between Calais and Alicante so we’ve had a few similar groups before. Anyway, these **** booked rooms, evening meals and breakfasts for eight: with such relatively large numbers, you need to buy a fair bit extra of the fresh food, of course. They were stopping off around Tours which is something like seven hours non-stop drive to here and, as they were intending to set off around 0830, we figured that it would be at least 7pm before they turned up: well, you’ve gotta have some rest stops, don’t you? Not these ****. Nope, they turned up around 5pm (ie pretty knackered due to no stopping). They left again at 5.20. The **** had decided that they may as well drive on to Alicante so our bin had a big heap of stuff added to it right away.

Anyway, net effect is that we decided that it’s time we started taking deposits from people so there’s now a little button on the website to let folk pay me money as of yesterday on the english page. Haven’t worked out how to do it in French yet.

Actually, they are the only English folk that we’ve had stopping (OK, only for 20 mins). Our marketing is bound to be better in English than it is in French, yet something like 2/3rds of the people staying so far have been French (sadly, they’ve only spent about 1/2 of the total money: have to see about increasing their expenditure).

Techie question time again: Remember the ADSL wireless connection? Well, it turns out that there were three problems with it. For a start, it’s pretty hot here and the gear was running somewhat higher than the recommended operating temperature: adding a fan has cooled everything down nicely. Second, the wireless link was hanging after an hour or so: applying the Netgear patch has sorted that one. However, it now has a peculiar problem: it tries to dial all the time but only connects when I leave the normal phone off the hook (just discovered that last night). This seems to be 100% consistent. Is there anything I can do, or is it a problem for France Telecom?