Archive for the ‘Bookings’ Category

How many fraudulent bookings do you get?

Most people will drastically underestimate that number because they’ve installed a spam filter and they just delete any dodgy e-mails as they come in. In fact, over the peak season the real number is probably several per day ie around a couple of hundred over the course of the summer.

However, in amongst those ones that people have deleted are a number of genuine bookings that just look dodgy.

From the spam filter, we find that we get something like one or two genuine enquiries a week that are blocked by it from normal people and one booking site gets all their e-mails to us blocked by it because of the method they use for sending out enquiries (no, it’s not possible to whitelist it).

From the dodgy e-mails we have had some of our largest genuine bookings. For example, would you have considered something along the lines of “i represent a traveling theatre group and i to book want 10 rooms for 2 nights. do you take bank cheques?” from a yahoo address? In fact, it was quite genuine, despite all the “red flags” (bad grammar, large booking, bank cheque payment).

So the question isn’t so much how many fraudulent bookings that you get, because that’s sure to be hundreds, but rather how many have you tagged as fraudulent but which were actually genuine booking enquiries?

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

How much do you trust an accommodation listings site?

Running an accommodation listings site is a peculiar type of business. Whilst in most businesses, you’d have contact with your customers be it in person, by phone or via e-mail in this business the guests of your customers are also your customers, or at least indirectly. It’s very much a business that’s involved in establishing connections between your customers and the guests that they may have.

In the early days, you’ll know the various owners that list with you quite well but as the business grows that connection tends to get lost. Those original owners that listed with you will disappear into the sea of new ones. So, for example, whilst most of my original 20 or so owners are still around (some have sold their places and dropped out, others have simply retired), they’re obviously overwhelmed by the more than 700 that have signed up since those early days.

Now the problem with that is that the whole process obviously becomes much less personal and more automated and one question that springs to mind after a while is: how do you know that these are legit places?

Well, actually, it doesn’t spring to mind with many places which is the problem. The vast majority of listings sites basically accept all entries that are thrown at them and yet one assumes that at least some of them are bogus. Where it’s a greater problem obviously is with those sites that offer either free or extended trial periods yet few of them appear to apply the checks that you’d expect, even to the extent of not bothering to verify that the properties are still in business now and again.

Whilst not wanting to pester the owners all the time, OurInns at least verifies the continued existence of them several times per year and has started on an owner verification programme too.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

So how DO you know it’s a scam?

One of the hassles of running any kind of holiday accommodation is that after a while you start to get regular scam e-mails.

The problem is that, in most cases, there is no foolproof way of separating them out from real enquiries. For example, some of the ways that people use are:

  1. Bad grammar. Sadly, even the grammar of native English speakers isn’t always the best and that’s particularly the case when they’re sending out a series of enquiry e-mails.
  2. It’s from a hotmail, yahoo or gmail account. Many genuine enquirers use such accounts so this is a particularly bad way of separating them out.
  3. It’s been trapped in your spam filter. A surprisingly high number of normal e-mails are trapped too so this is far from ideal.

In fact the only really sure ways of determining that it is a scam is that it’s from someone who has sent hundreds of similar e-mails or if it’s from Nigeria (nearly all scams originate there). Unfortunately, it’s only your listing service that can tell you that and most don’t bother to highlight the country of origin of enquiries. One notable exception is OurInns which automatically blocks anyone from sending “hundreds” of e-mails and also includes a scam checking facility so that you can tell whether or not the e-mail was sent from Nigeria.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Thought about advertising your holiday property in print?

Although many people concentrate pretty much exclusively on online advertising, there’s still a place for print based advertising.

It’s a very different medium though. Not only is it expensive, but you’re usually pretty limited in the amount of content that you can have and whilst it has a long lead-time, it’s quite time-sensitive too. It’s easy to pay over £500 for just 100 words and a photo. Similarly, whilst your ad may only be on the shelves for a few weeks, you sometimes need to have it with the publishers over 3 months in advance.

However, it does work well for some people and because of that I’ve covered it in quite a comprehensive article over on our listings site blog.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

We don’t speak French; why didn’t you speak French to us?

That’s the rather peculiar comment of some Germans who stayed with us.

Since German is a distant relative to the English language, English is much easier to speak for them than French and therefore we always start off in English with any German guests (learning German is close to the top of our “to do” list at the moment). Once we recognise where guests come from we try to speak to them in the most appropriate language at our command and we’re very confused by the comment of these non-French speaking Germans that stayed with us a few weeks ago.

OK, sometimes people like to practice their French on us but these people admited to not speaking any French!

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
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