Foreign Perspectives

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We don’t get an awful lot of group bookings but, whilst welcome in terms of the money, they’re consistently very disorganised in comparison to either normal bookings or what you’d expect from an “organised” group.

For example, we’ve one group of 12 at the moment who booked nearly two months ago. They’re here for a very popular local festival which tends to fill up all available accommodation for miles around and puts severe pressure on the tourism infrastructure as a consequence of the scale of it. Everyone knows that and therefore books the various components necessary for their trip quite early. This lot? Well, they arrived and wanted to rent a car. There was one 2+2 seater sportscar left in the rental car park so they’ve ended up spending around 6 hours a day ferrying people back and forth to see the festival. Taxis? Nope, all at the festival and refusing to do any short runs at the moment. Meals? Well, it’s hard enough to get 12 people booked in at the best of times so I’m guessing they’re living on pizzas.

The other summer group was that made for a family wedding held locally. They started out with 2 rooms for 3 nights and ended up with a total of 29 room nights. Family weddings are a bit of a nuisance at the best of times as the people rarely eat anywhere except with their family so you often don’t even sell as much as a breakfast and they’re always wanting a discount. Since they’re usually held at the height of summer, we could easily book the rooms with people who’d be taking breakfast and meals and wouldn’t ask for a discount. The bunch this year went even further though as the wedding didn’t go too well and decided that that must have been our fault and that they’d like to get all their money back (this despite us not even knowing that they were here for a wedding ’til they arrived!). Net effect? Well, we’ll be cancelling any reservations in future that look as though they might be for a wedding: it’s just too much hassle for no real reward.

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Even the most boring of jobs need to be done but whether or not they really are boring depends a lot on your point of view.

For example, most people would class admin jobs as being, on the whole boring. Some may well be certainly but it’s far from the case that all are boring. How about being the NASA administrator for instance? That’s an admin job but a job where the salary is pretty much irrelevant as there are many people around the world who’d do it for nothing.

And that’s what you need to consider with “admin jobs”. Yes, the job description might well appear to be humdrum or even out and out boring but if you look at where it actually is you might find that it’s a place you’d love to be in. Remember too that many of those admin jobs are stepping stones for other rather better ones (this is frequently the case in broadcasting organisations).

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One of the ironies of the explosion of the various money making schemes available on the Internet in recent years is that it’s come at a time when it’s become virtually impossible to get the ideal type of bank account for these activities namely an American one.

However, recently there’s been a slow but growing number of alternative banks starting to fill in the gaps that the 9/11 security crackdown forced normal American banks to create. Thus far these have been quite limited in capability but that’s starting to change.

For example, Gem writes about one upcoming innovation from Payoneer which is basically creating a virtual bank account linked to the prepaid debit card that they issue on behalf of a number of organisations. It’s currently in the “coming soon” category but will permit you to quote a real bank account number to the likes of paypal thereby making it possible to convert your virtual money into the real kind by way of their debit card.

I suspect that there’ll be more such innovations coming over the next year as already paypal themselves are rolling out a similar, albeit more limited, scheme in some countries.

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