Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Bookings’ Category

As we edge into the Autumn, it’s the season for receiving reservations made for the sole aim of getting a Schengen visa.

They’re easy to spot. They’re made by South Africans and Chinese, are for 10 to 20 days at a time and don’t reply to our confirmation e-mail that gives information about the region.

A lot of people think that this doesn’t cost us any money. Not so. We had a 20 day booking in July which resulted in us rejecting a number of other bookings yet it was cancelled just a couple of days before they were due to arrive. Net effect was that we lost several hundred euros of bookings.

Since we’re quite small, it doesn’t take a whole lot of such bookings to “fill” us up. In fact, we’d have been virtually full this coming weekend courtesy of three such bookings yet two have already cancelled and we’re not too confident about the third.

So, what we started doing a few weeks back was to offer these people two options: 1) we charge them the full balance immediately and it’s not refundable and 2) we cancel the booking and inform the authorities. The first cancellation has just arrived. She was none too pleased that we’d billed her several hundred euros yet we gave her the option of paying or cancelling nearly three weeks ago and, as expected, received no response. After all, if she let us cancel her booking and inform the authorities she’d not have gotten her visa, would have been tagged as someone who makes fraudulent visa applications and may it may have affected her right of residence in the UK.

We’re just beginning to get our heads above water and wondering how we did (no time for that in mid-Summer!).

June was down a little as could be expected as I was off in Belfast for almost all of it which meant that we needed to leave our availability a little bit more loose than we would do normally ie we couldn’t list more rooms than we actually have as we normally do over the Summer. If you’re doing that, you really need to be on top of the bookings as they come in and close down availability on systems as you fill up.

July was also down a little as I wasn’t back ’til the end of the first week so same problem as June. Also we had the first “visa booking” of the year: 20 days in a row and cancelled just a few days in advance. As a consequence of that, we’ve tightened up considerably on potential “visa bookings”. When we get one, we give them two options: 1) pay the full balance and we help you get the visa or 2) we cancel the booking and inform the French embassy. We’re currently sitting with two of these; we fully expect the South African to cancel in that she’s made no acknowledgement of any of our e-mails. Hard to say about the guy from Barbados as he has been very keen to pay the balance.

We’d fewer Visa pour l’Image bookings than expected but then we were quite full over that week with other people so didn’t really have the availability for any more people.

So far, it’s very hard to say how the rest of the year will turn out. We’ve nothing for November or December which isn’t unusual but the bookings for October are also fairly low for this time of year.

The pattern of bookings from the Spanish is quite different from all the other nationalities that stay with us.

For everyone else, the bookings are spread right through the year, albeit with a lot more people coming over the Summer peak. However, with the Spanish there are a series of periods of one or two days when all of a sudden we’re almost completely full with bookings from Spain.

We thought we’d gotten used to the general pattern of these bookings last year ie lots around January 5th, the week before Easter and one other weekend but this year we’re getting a lot more of these clumps. Why? We’re not completely sure but it looks like one of the sites that we list with has bumped up their promotion in Spanish markets.

By far the vast majority of our guests enjoy staying here but in the French holiday season we always get a few who go out of their way to find fault and always save up those faults to report them to us in the morning.

They’re always French because that’s how the French seem to go about demanding a reduction in the bill as they don’t believe that they should pay the extra required in the summer.

It’s easy to pick these ones out as they barely speak to you as you’re checking them in and showing them to the room. Whilst the French almost always take breakfast, these ones don’t as that’s another thing which makes the room too expensive.

Then, in the morning, they pick on one or two things which weren’t 100% right for them, demand a reduction and then threaten to report you to all and sundry. It’s always in that sequence too: they demand the reduction THEN they say they’ll report you to all in sundry ie it’s very much blackmail.

Thankfully they’re few and far between but we just received a particularly obnoxious variety of the species a few days ago. He actually found one thing that really was wrong with the room although as it was something which could be fixed in under 5 seconds he clearly couldn’t tell us about it when he arrived or he’d not have anything to complain about so instead he let a dripping cistern keep him awake all night.

He had a particularly interesting line of argument with the cistern. Seemingly he thought that a dripping cistern was enough to have the Prefecture close us down. That certainly would have an interesting effect if they did that because they’d need to close down just about every hotel in the world if that was enough reason to close a place.

As usual, he was rude and offensive, becoming more and more so as he realised that we weren’t going to give him a reduction in the price and he even continued in this vein as he left with assorted rude and offensive gestures as he left (narrowly missing a tree as he was steering with one hand).

Oh well, at least the summer season is pretty much over so that should be the last such example of the species we get until next year.

Whilst in our first year, we had quite a number of driveby bookings, over the last two years we’ve had virtually none.

Until recently that is. Why, I don’t know, but the number of driveby bookings has started to rise quite sharply. Separately, but probably related to that, we’ve started to get a rapidly rising number of almost last minute bookings via various websites (recently they turned up within 10 minutes of booking online so they must have booked whilst driving!).

Such has been the drop in drivebys that we’ve pretty much gotten out of the way of them and ended up with quite a rush last night when a group of six German musicians turned up looking for rooms.