Foreign Perspectives

Archive for July, 2008

When a bank holiday weekend falls in the middle of your vacation then you need to check out what facilities are going to be available.

For example, we’ve a group coming tonight who are relying on public transport. Their train gets in around 10.30pm by which time there’s a good chance that the taxis will have made a start on their own vacation. Even if they don’t, then they’re going to be with us all day on the 14th with no transport at all because everything from buses to taxis knocks off for the entire day locally.

Many shops close too. In fact, just about all of them except for the large supermarkets. Still, at least that means that you can get food on the holiday although from the queues at the checkout on Saturday you’d think that the shops were going to be closed for a week or more.

Even some tourist attractions close on public holidays which would be a peculiar thing for them to do but then this is France so it shouldn’t surprise you too much that tourist attractions close on public holidays.

We’ve had two separate groups booking with us recently who seemed to be experiencing senile dementia at a very early age indeed: their 20s!

The first group was Australian so Wendy was quite keen on having them here as she always likes to chat to Australian guests when she gets the chance. We did wonder about them a little early on though as they clearly wanted to be staying at a place on the beach yet had booked our place which is in the countryside although some people do that in the peak season as we’re cheaper. Not only that but although we offer pickups they turned up in a taxi (usually around three or four times the rate we charge). Although they were only here a couple of days they managed to go downhill from there ending up by booking a meal with us for 7.30 and not bothering to sit down to eat it. “More money than sense” is a phrase that definitely applies to them!

The second group was from the UK and couldn’t work out how to get here despite being told in the automatic confirmation that they received when they booked and again on the confirmation e-mail that they received from me the next day. What confused them was that there were no buses to our place at 7pm despite it saying on both e-mails that the last bus is at 6pm. Now, I know that most people don’t read the complete confirmation e-mails but this information was in the second paragraph!

They’re just the first of many similar guests that we expect to receive (or not as in the case of the second group) over the next month or so.

Many of the B&B and particularly gite owners accept payments by bank transfer to their account. What amazes me is that they never consider that it’s something of a risk to give your bank account details to a complete stranger and even more so when it’s a series of complete strangers.

If you think about this for a while you’ll realise that your bank account details are printed on your cheques but that’s not quite the same as you give cheques to people or organisations that you know. There is a safe way to do this though. Just quote a savings account number and, if you’re really paranoid about it, open a savings account in a bank that you don’t normally deal with.

Every time that I raise this issue, someone quotes their bank manager as having said that it’s perfectly safe to hand out your details in this way and that it’s impossible to take money out using only those details. Haven’t these people even heard of direct debits? After all, a direct debit uses exactly the same information as you quote to receive money.

Now, I’m not suggesting that a fraudster is going to set up a direct debit and then withdraw money from your account using it (although that has been done in some cases) but there are a number of very similar ways to do that. For example, if you care to give me your bank details, I could set up a one-off transfer by simply looking up the address of your bank and faxing them the instructions to do that. You might think that wouldn’t work as they check the signatures, but actually they only check a small percentage of the signatures so it almost certainly would work.

Then people say that it must be safe because the electicity company quotes their details for payments so how come someone hasn’t cleaned them out by now? They haven’t because they quote the number of their collection account and collection accounts reject electronic withdrawals.

Since a small business doesn’t have the option of a collection account the safest thing to do is to quote a savings account number as you can’t withdraw money electronically from a savings account.

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?

There’s a couple of the banks here that have offers of FREE MONEY when you open accounts for your kids. Red rag to a bull, of course…. Sadly, Societe Generale operates on a nationwide basis here so there’s only EUR 16 going on their EuroKid account.

However, Banque Populaire are one of the regional banks here with something like a dozen separate banks over France and the local bank is offering EUR 15 per child. Soooo,… nah, ’twas too good to be true: only the local bank seems to have that offer at the moment.

Just about everyone that moves here either has or opens very quickly an account with Credit Agricole. It’s certainly the simplest choice as they’re in every village of any size in France and they also have an English speaking branch in Normandy (you can use their accounts in the other Credit Agricoles without any real bother). It’s also an expensive choice: since they “improved” their computer system a few months back they now charge over EUR 5 per month just for the priviledge of having an account with them. Oh, plus the EUR 40 or so for their debit card. Anyway, you’re looking at EUR 100 a year just to have a very basic account.

Once people are here for a while, they tend to say “WHAT?” to the bank charges and change banks. I’m told that “the” one to go for is currently Banque Populaire where you can actually get a fully operational account for all of €20 per year.

Anyway, we’re doing a little more checking to confirm things then closing all of our personal accounts with Credit Agricole and moving to Banque Populaire (who, in these parts, seem to have branches just about everywhere that CA do).