Foreign Perspectives

Another hectic month of marketing is the excuse for the long delay since the last issue. All being well, we’re nearly the end of the work that was thrown off as a consequence of the marketing blitz about a month ago and can sit back and wait for all the reservations to flow in.

Leaving out a heap of minor additions to our listings we added the following list of major places in the last month:

– ActiveHotels…. who do “own label” front ends to their system so you’ve probably used them in the past;
– Bookings… who seem to pop up all over the place;
– Expedia… well, you know these guys;
– Gullivers Travel… who are the people behind loads and loads of different reservation systems from Ryanair Hotels to Octopus Travel;
– Hotels.com … who feed the databases of all kinds of listing sites; and
– TravelExtras… the new people supplying FlyBE’s accommodation.

We’re now starting to panic about the effect of managing all the bookings that those listings should generate. Last August we were on one similar system which gave us about 11% occupancy by itself so, in theory, the above lot should add something like 60% to that on a like for like comparison ie a total of 70% or so occupancy before you even count the other listings we have, our own website and people just dropping in.

Wendy has told me not to even think about any more listings ’til we see if we can cope with those we’ve already got!

It is going to be pretty time consuming to keep on top of the whole lot as in addition to the above major ones we also have RatesToGo which has started to bring in a fair number of bookings and Venere who are pretty consistent over the year. We’re also expecting to get considerably more bookings directly from the website now that we’ve add the “book now” facility.

If I had the time, I’d be inclined to run a book on which will pull in the most business. My money is on WebReservations (our original and, so far, best system) because it’s syndicated all over the place but I imagine that Expedia/Hotels.com will not be far behind. I don’t think that TravelExtras will feature highly because they’re very new and we don’t get a lot of FlyBE business anyway. Third place will probably be a three way tie between ActiveHotels, Bookings and Gullivers.

Any thoughts yourselves? What systems do YOU use to book your accommodation?

The car has been causing us all kinds of grief over the last month so we’ve decided that it’s time to get a new one. If nothing else, it will greatly simplify our life as we won’t need to go through all the hassle of having to get the Toyota through the French car importation process. Interestingly, the car prices seem to be much the same as in the UK with the main difference being that they use a euro symbol here instead of the pound sign ie they are considerably cheaper. Funnily enough the second hand car prices are almost the same as the new car prices, or at least the French tend to ask for much the same.

Anyway, we’re looking for a diesel (preferably automatic), 5 door. We’re probably going to use this as our second car in due course so EUR 10,000 to EUR 15,000 is the budget. Sort-of like the Volkswagen Polo or perhaps the Mercedes A. Suggestions welcome!

We had yet another long phone call from the TV company who said that they like our story so perhaps we’ll have to make a decision as to whether or not to appear. At present they are looking to do one or perhaps two places in considerably more detail than they’d originally intended so Mayhem at the Mas may yet appear on a screen near you next January!