Foreign Perspectives

Yes, folks, we appear to be within sight of the promised land of a French Child Benefit (Allocation Familiale) payment. At last, courtesy of a phone number that Colin acquired, we have prised a little note out of the Child Benefit people back in Belfast to the effect that they stopped paying us on July 12th. We’re looking at getting on for 3000‚€ of back payments.

We had a little trip up to see the people at the Auberge du Balestie near Carcassonne. They took over last June so, in theory, we’re running a few months ahead of them. In some ways we are, for they’ve not really gotten into getting listings on reservation systems yet whereas we’re running out of new places that we can be listed on. On the other hand, their restaurant is miles ahead of us and we’ll likely adopt a few aspects of it that we’re quite taken with over the coming months. Basically it reflects a different emphasis: at the moment we are essentially an accommodation provider that has a restaurant, whilst they are a restaurant that has some accommodation.

Our website is way ahead of them, of course, but then that reflects the fact that we’re not paying for the web development and have therefore ended up with a website of a scale more befitting something with several hundred rooms than our somewhat more modest establishment. In fact, we’ve yet to see a hotel, no matter how large, that has a website remotely approaching ours: no doubt you guys will email me straight back with one though!

Technically, we have (or had: we’ve yet to nail that fact down!) two stars whilst they didn’t inherit any from the previous owner. It’s difficult to say what our respective rating would be at the moment as we’ve both been upgrading things since we took over. Their restaurant is clearly better than ours in terms of appearance and ambiance whilst we’ve been luckier with our rooms. In practice the differences will be gradually diminishing over the coming months as they’re presently upgrading their rooms whilst we’re intending to up the ante with our restaurant so it’s anybody’s guess what the rating would ultimately be.

It looks like it will be useful for us to get together now and again as they’re coming at the hotel business from a different starting point and we’re looking forward to their critique of our setup on the return visit.

On the website, I’ve just finished a complete refresh this evening so if ‘yall all have a look I’d appreciate comments on the new style. Not radically different from last month but it is quite a change if you’ve not looked at it for a few months. Notable additions are that we’re now up to six languages on the hotel and transport pages (the hotel pages are very basic for Catalan, German and Italian at the moment but will improve); there are page navigation buttons on the english, french and spanish hotel pages; there are site navigation buttons across all of the english, french and spanish pages; the “book now” button features on the english, french and spanish hotel pages; and I’ve added google ads to all but the english hotel page. I’d particularly appreciate comments on the placement of the “reservations” button.

Tomorrow we’re off to see about getting the front wheels aligned and to book the car in to get the radiator sorted. I don’t know why, but they won’t do any work on the car without seeing the log book (carte grise) so I’ll have to hunt that out this evening.