Archive for the ‘Bookings’ Category
Posted in 
Still trickling in
August 20th, 2007 | 
Author: One confusing thing this year is that we’re still pretty full this week and even had to close down availability for a couple of days already. Ordinarily, when the French have gone home from their holidays last Saturday, there’s a week of a lull in activity before the Visa pour L’Image photojournalism festival starts but for the next couple of days we’re pretty much full.
Even odder is that it’s during a time when the weather is just dreadful which generally keeps down the numbers of guests staying with us.
What is a major nuisance is that they’re all booking just a couple of days at most in advance. That has the effect that we don’t know if there’ll be a lull at all because we could easily find that the end of the week we’re full.
Still, it helps the bank balance no end!
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.The bookings get later and later
Last year we thought the bookings were pretty late – just a few days ahead in many cases – but it’s much, much worse this year. In fact it’s increasingly common that people will book and come not only the same day but even as little as a few hours later.
Now, I can understand people booking in the morning and arriving later that day. After all, peoples’ plans change. But whereas in years gone by you’d have had driveby bookings in fairly large numbers at times, nowadays it seems as though that driveby market has moved online.
That means that we in turn need to tighten up our systems as we used to assume that the bookings for the day were in when we checked our e-mail in the mornings but it’s no longer unknown that we’ll get someone turn up after 10pm with a booking form that we’ve not yet seen because we’ve not picked up our e-mail since teatime.
I’m sure too that it can be a little confusing when a driveby does knock at the door and you have to check the computer first to see if you still have room for them.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.How safe is it to quote your bank account details to strangers?
Many of the B&B and particularly gite owners accept payments by bank transfer to their account. What amazes me is that they never consider that it’s something of a risk to give your bank account details to a complete stranger and even more so when it’s a series of complete strangers.
If you think about this for a while you’ll realise that your bank account details are printed on your cheques but that’s not quite the same as you give cheques to people or organisations that you know. There is a safe way to do this though. Just quote a savings account number and, if you’re really paranoid about it, open a savings account in a bank that you don’t normally deal with.
Every time that I raise this issue, someone quotes their bank manager as having said that it’s perfectly safe to hand out your details in this way and that it’s impossible to take money out using only those details. Haven’t these people even heard of direct debits? After all, a direct debit uses exactly the same information as you quote to receive money. Now, I’m not suggesting that a fraudster is going to set up a direct debit and then withdraw money from your account using it but there are a number of very similar ways to do that. For example, if you care to give me YOUR bank details, I could set up a one-off transfer by simply looking up the address of your bank and faxing them the instructions to do that. You might think that wouldn’t work as they check the signatures, but actually they only check a small percentage of the signatures so it almost certainly would work. Then people say that it must be safe because the electicity company quotes their details for payments so how come someone hasn’t cleaned them out by now? They haven’t because they quote the number of their collection account and collection accounts reject electronic withdrawals.
Since a small business doesn’t have the option of a collection account the safest thing to do is to quote a savings account number as you can’t withdraw money electronically from a savings account.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.Internet booking scams
Once you have your website properly set up on the Internet and listed in the search engines, you can expect to start receiving scam bookings. In fact, if you aren’t receiving them it’s an indication that you haven’t got your site listed properly.There are many variations on the scam theme these days but they have a number of characteristics in common, namely that the spelling & grammar are bad, the e-mail address is one of the free yahoo or hotmail ones and that the booking is for an usually large number of rooms. However, we’ve also received genuine bookings that meet all three criteria so sometimes you need to check a little further before you reject such a booking.Other common themes are that the main source of them is Nigeria, they’re usually from a “Christian organisation” and that they want you to bill them extra and buy mobile phones or rent cars with the excess. Sometimes, they will even quote a credit card number which works but you’ll find that in due course the card turns out to be stolen and the bank take the money charged off you.
Whilst old-timers at the holiday rental business will tell you that they can spot these straight away, when I ran a genuine example past them they rejected that too because it was for 10 rooms, it was from janine79@yahoo.com and the grammar was bad yet we banked a fair amount of money from this one last year. It did take a couple of e-mails and a search for the acting company they quoted to convince me that it was real though.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.What time is it?
We just received a long letter of complaint from a guest via one of the places we’re listed with.
Most booking sites send contact details for the guests when the booking is received but this one doesn’t and in fact all we get is an arrival date and a name.
When this couple arrived they started by complaining that I didn’t know the flight arrival times to Girona airport. Actually, we do. They’re from about 7am to midnight every day and we even check actual arrival times for guests as there have been considerable delays of late. Still, they didn’t accept my explanation that we’d not been told of their arrival time so added that to the complaint letter. We’re still at a bit of a loss as to how anyone would have told us though as they booked the flight separately from the accommodation so the place they booked us through didn’t know when they were arriving either.
But then it gets a bit surreal. They’d asked me after checking in about eating that night and I’d said that they’d have needed to eat in Spain as all French restaurants stop serving around 8.30pm and after that it’s McDonalds or nothing. Quite a big part of their complaint was that I didn’t give them any information about eating out that night. Of course, that’s because they couldn’t eat out that night as it was about 9.30pm by the time they arrived. However, as they’d not adjusted their watches they figured that it was only a little after 8pm.
It’s even worse than that though as they somehow managed to stay most of a week in France without adjusting their watches so had quite a run of difficulties over that time, most of which they seemed to be blaming on us. When they came down at 11am for breakfast, it had been cleared away (that being 10am for them, of course), when they went for lunch at 2pm (1pm for them), the restaurants were closed, etc. Actually, they STILL haven’t realised that they were running an hour behind the rest of France despite having to run for the plane as they arrived just as the checkin for their flight closed.
Slightly more comical was their complaint about the antiquated hairdryer being a bit smelly. In fact, it was the room heater that they were using and the smell was the burning of their own hair.
So when you get off a flight, do check what the local time is.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
