Foreign Perspectives

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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.

Popularity: 20% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Although the main customer base for my listings sites is essentially the English speaking population of Europe, there’s an even larger English speaking population just across the Atlantic that don’t see the sites as often as they should since they’re hosted in the UK.

I have tried the sites on an American host in the past and it was a complete disaster because the main interest at the time was from people in the UK and Ireland.

However, roll on three years and I’d quite like to create a foothold in America. Not with all of the sites, of course, but rather a small selection of the sites so that I could pull in some guests from America and, for that matter, add properties from Americans too.

As a taster for this, I’ve set the geographic target for a couple of the sites in google to America and they seem to have pulled in a different audience than they had when they were fully based in the UK. However, that’s just with google and I do pretty well on both yahoo and msn.

So, I’ve been looking for a cheap hosting service that would let me move over one or two sites and I think I’ve found it in the form of 3ix who charge $12 per year. Now, “all” I have to do is to work out how to have the site over in America but with the database that supports it still in the UK.

Popularity: 27% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

After you’ve been blogging for a while you tend to find that some of the articles you write could be collected in a series.

So, for example, this blog has a series on living in France, another about banking, and so on.

However, I’ve been thinking of doing a blog for the listings sites which is quite different. For one thing, it’s a blog with quite a narrow remit ie to write about the listings sites themselves. More significantly perhaps is that I’m planning to do it as a blog consisting of a collections of series right from the start. Today starts off the series on marketing your property which will be an ongoing thread but there’ll be several other threads intertwined through the blog as time goes on.

It’ll be a while before that becomes apparent though as it’s not going to be a daily blog by any means (there just aren’t enough hours in the day for that).

Popularity: 46% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!