Foreign Perspectives

Last time we left John S in the dust when we were listed as THE CHEAPEST accomodation in Perpignan.

That was Monday. Tuesday, we figured it would be at least a couple of weeks before we got any bookings from them and may as well go up to Gracay to get the pillows, soap, mail, etc. from William Gowdy. Gracay’s not an awful lot south of Paris and takes about eight hours of driving to get to so that was an overnighter.

William’s settling in pretty well and has acquired a car. He’s not got a landline yet so no internet access but he does have a mobile; if you want to call him let me know and I can pass on the number. Gracay is a nice little village; shame it’s so far from here or we’d be calling in now and again. He’s also getting his first visitor on Tuesday this week who will also be my first visitor as the whole lot of them are going camping in the south of France so will be camping in the field that I don’t know what to do with across the road. Have to see about getting the lawn mower out to tidy it up a bit for his tent.

We called in with him on the Wednesday morning and filled the trailer up with the stuff that he’d brought over. Between one thing and another we didn’t get away ’til almost lunchtime. Incidently, the road down (the A75) is brilliant and toll free but has one or two stretches that haven’t been completed, notably the big bridge at Millau just to the north of Beziers which you may have heard of. That road is part of the Paris-Barcelona european highway which should bring us a whole lot more visitors when it’s completed. William tells me that it was just filled with UK registered cars yesterday which is a good sign.

The late start meant that we didn’t get to here ’til after 11pm. I generally check the mail in the morning and evening “just in case” and it was just as well I did that on the Wednesday night as we’d seven separate bookings awaiting us and one for the Thursday! It certainly looks like the Ryanair/FlyBE site is a good one to be on: up to now we had the problem that the tourists coming off the planes had already booked somewhere to stay. Since the cheap Ryanair/FlyBE flights are booked a few months ahead we figure that we’ve probably missed a heap of people who would ordinarily have stayed here but there’s nothing we can do about that. We might pick up some of them later though as all the other accomodation listed on the site seems to be fully booked right through August.

That site is quite an expensive way to book accomodation as it follows the Ryanair model ie give us your money and we’ll keep it regardless oh, and give us a couple of quid to cover our costs in taking your money. So, you need to pay a booking fee of £3 plus 10% of the accomodation price to the booking company. Since 10% of the accomodation is about £3 in our case it means they’re billing you getting on for 20% of the cost of the booking if you’re only booking the one night. However, from my perspective it seems quite good as, so far, they’ve tended to book the rooms that I wasn’t bothering to list elsewhere (ie the two non-ensuite ones) and, so far, I’ve cleaned up on the meals & airport pickups so their charge is much less than 10% of my income from the bookings. The only downside is that their reservations are “guaranteed” which means that if we get a booking from them we have to honour it which in turn means that we need to keep our reservation calendar up to date all the time. We can still take drivebys though as they’ve set us up as needing 24 hours notice of a reservation so if a room is empty tonight we know we can let people have it.

To further complicate our lives, we’ve registered on another guaranteed booking site today. Just in case we’d get double bookings, we’ve had to reduce the number of rooms a bit but I figure that two sites like that is about the limit that we could juggle. As it is, we can’t put the gite on the second site as we’ve only one of them although it’s pretty much booked up throughout August now anyway.

Oh, and then there’s the small matter of our own direct reservations! We’re only taking guaranteed ones for those too now (via Paypal, as suggested by JW) and have had our first couple of those for August. We’ve also had our first couple of “no shows” in the last week as a result of which, we’re going to start taking deposits from people who call in to make a booking too and will be checking with the bank as to how we go about making the French equivalent of “customer not present” transactions for the telephone reservations.

As you’ve probably gathered, I spend a fair chunk of time finding ways of getting this place listed, preferably free (though I have paid £30 for the greatbedandbreakfast.com site which I’ve already recouped in bookings from it). I’m also branching out a bit in other areas so, all being well, we will be able to accept American Express cards fairly soon and the restaurant will be becoming a Ticket Restaurant and taking “Déjeuner Cheques” (the French equivalent of Luncheon Vouchers). I’m still looking round for the accomodation equivalent of LVs but, so far, have only come across “Cheques Logis”. Roger: suggestions welcome here!

A question: since France Telecom are charging me a fortune to rent the coin payphone in our lobby, I’m looking for alternatives. Any suggestions folks? And, no, removing the facility isn’t a realistic option. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it is, we have a total of less than ‚€4 in coins in it (and that’s including ‚€1 from the previous owner) yet are forking out ‚€70-odd a month to rent the thing.