Foreign Perspectives

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One of the handy things about where we live is that we have a choice of four airports within reasonable striking distance which makes for an enormous range of choice when we’re looking for a short break.

In practice, we try to aim for afternoon departures to get a sensible starting time for ourselves but this time Venice seemed too good to miss out on so we had to set off at 7am to get there in time for the 10am flight. Online checkin is wonderful if you want to skip on the sitting around in the airport but unfortunately Wendy’s Australian passport means that we can’t avail of that.

The earlier than normal departure meant that we arrived in Treviso (Ryanair’s “Venice” airport) just after noon and by the time we’d checked into the apartment we were still in reasonable time for a late-ish lunch. Treviso airport is fairly small so there’s not much time wasted walking miles to the exit as you often find in regular airports these days although you lose time on the hour long coach journey to Venice itself (EUR 10 return, children under five free) which takes you through some pretty grim looking towns.

From the bus station you walk across the road to Piazza Roma where you get on one of the quite expensive boats that take you pretty much everywhere in Venice. It’s EUR 6.50 for a one hour ticket (enough to get anywhere) or EUR 14 for a ticket valid for 12 hours. In theory you can get one two or three day tickets as well (actually 24, 36 and 72 hours) but Venice is quite a small place so it’s best working out roughly where you’ll be going as often it’s quicker walking. In our own case, over a four day stay we bought two of the one hour tickets (to get there and away) and one 12 hour one when we were going over to Murano for the day.

Unless you’re seriously into churches, there isn’t really an awful lot to see in Venice. Yes, it’s a lovely place but it’s not one that you’d be wanting to stay more than a week and in practice we found that four days was enough to see all that we wanted to see at a nice gentle pace ie it’s perfect for a short break.

What is there to see though? Well, the major sights are:

• the cathedral square containing San Marco (that’s the interior above);
• the Rialto bridge;
• the island of Murano for the glass;
• the island of Burano for the lace;
• Lido; and
• the canals themselves.

In between all the above you’ll be surrounded by the typical Venetian architecture with loads of cute buildings and, of course, untold numbers of very upmarket shops.

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When you’re online shopping it’s not really a good move to use a debit card and you certainly wouldn’t want to be bandying about your bank account details outside your own banks website. But what if you don’t have a credit card or don’t want to use one?

Up to now the options have been quite limited but that’s changing which is handy with the biggest holiday shopping event of the year (ie Christmas) just around the corner.

One of the latest entrants to this field is ebillme.com which shields your personal details a whole lot more than any other similar sites that I’ve seen. There’s a two step process to purchasing via them: 1) order something from one of their retailers (there’s a reasonable selection now and you can expect that to grow) and then 2) use your own banks bill payment facility to pay ebillme.com . Needing to log into two sites to buy something might sound a pain but it gives a major increase in the security to you.

To spread the word they’re even running a contest with some pretty respectable prizes. If you refer to the URL of this post I might even win something too

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I’ve been looking at our booking stats covering the last year and wondering if we can go about running the place somewhat better in the coming year.

Thanks to the recession rolling around the world at the moment particular categories of guest don’t turn up much anymore. In particular, those looking for cheapo short breaks are obviously fairly thin on the ground in that the euro is pretty high compared to just about all the other currencies and also the flight prices from the various discount airlines are way up too (around five times the price in June 2008 compared to June 2007). That combination clearly has an effect on the booking patterns.

Now, on the whole we figure that whilst we’re here, we may as well be open. Fairly logical really. However, in that outside the main April to September season this makes for very few guests checking in we’ve been thinking that it would make more sense for us to be elsewhere over that time and we’re looking into the logistics of such a thing at the moment.

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