Foreign Perspectives

We’ve been rolling out our marketing campaign to pull in more entries on our B&B listings sites over the last few weeks and it’s interesting to see how differently the offers have been taken up.

First off, the Spanish began with a vast number of duff addresses which implies that a lot of them don’t bother with e-mail for their bookings. Virtually all of the addresses were from free accounts like hotmail and the Spanish equivalents which also implies that they’re not really using the Internet as a primary means of promoting their businesses. Overall takeup was really low at around 0.5% although, to be fair, it’s my first attempt to do a mailshot in Spanish so I wasn’t expecting an overlly high response. What did surprise me was that they looked at the example sites I quoted in really big numbers and also clicked on the various ads that they came across.

This was my second major mailshot aimed at Scotland. The first, about a year ago had a fairly low takeup but this one completely took me by surprise and the takeup has been over 3%. By contrast, they didn’t look much at the example sites nor did they click on the ads: they just went ahead and either signed up right off or passed on the offer.

It’s my first run at Ireland too and early days with that as yet. What has surprised me already though is that a much lower number of places quote an e-mail than I’d expected. In fact, the Internet presence seems largely to be confined to B&Bs with hotels not bothering to quote either an e-mail or a website. Still, we’ll see about Ireland over the coming week.

Next up is England and Wales which I hope to do over the coming week or two. It should provide an interesting contrast with Scotland where I went from fairly low numbers a few weeks ago to quite a sizeable and growing presence today.