Foreign Perspectives

People seem to think that it’s always dry and hot way down here in the south but even in August it rains. As in other places in the world, seemingly always on public holidays, so naturally since August 15th is the major French holiday it’s raining today.

Since it’s the French holiday season, we’re pretty much completely full and therefore get some bookings from people who want one type of room but because it’s not available, book something completely different. This morning for instance one of the places we list with called to say that they’d received a booking from an Italian family who’d booked one of our non-ensuite rooms and then amended the booking to say that they’d be bringing along their five year old too. When a family books our ensuite double and then adds a child that’s OK but it just ain’t possible to put three people in the non-ensuites.

So what’s happened with the booking? Well, we’ve just received it and it only lists two people with no mention of the child so they’ve probably told the booking site that they’d not bother bringing the child. I think it’s safe to say that the three of them will be turning up on Thursday though but we won’t be able to fit them in.

We also get people booking who’d rather be staying somewhere else which is a bit of a pain for us and for them. On the whole, we’d rather have people staying who actually wanted to be in our quiet place in the vineyards with the views of mountains and Queribus in the distance. We also find that it’s a whole lot easier to deal with people who appreciate this type of area and range of attractions which is why we go to some length to describe everything as completely as possible. Not everyone reads that of course and we get a trickle of people who actually wanted to be in a city but managed to book somewhere with a description that says in the first sentence it’s 20 minutes outside Perpignan. Sometimes that’s OK and they appreciate the change but sometimes it isn’t and we’ve had several recently who just hated the area and consequently gave us a terrible review criticising us for being in the countryside and not having nightclubs nearby. The worst, so far, was an english lady who seemed to only know one word: “disgusting”! She booked a twin room (the only one still available) then complained that it wasn’t a double, complained that we weren’t at the beach, complained that the room wasn’t ready (despite arriving before checkin time), complained that it was overpriced (despite being under half the price of the place she’d stayed in the night before),…. and then stormed off, attempting to damage our property by firing stones from her screeching tyres. Funnily enough we were able to rebook the room and, despite her insulting and aggressive attitude followed our policy of refunding the charge less the costs we incurred (though we were sorely tempted not to!). So instead of a total ******* staying we had a very nice French family who’ll probably be back someday.

Arnold