Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Bookings’ Category

Got a phone call early this morning in slightly dodgy French from a Spaniard in Barcelona saying that they’d like a double room for this evening. No problem really, as the French had all left this morning and we’d only a few people in this evening. They even got someone to call back in slightly less dodgy French to confirm that the reservation had been made and that they’d be here around 4pm.

Bit of an awkward time really as they were to be running the bulls through the streets of Millas around then and we’ve been meaning to go to see that for the last two years. Still, it wouldn’t take long to get them checked in and the bulls were sure to be late anyway (well, it is France after all!).

4pm arrived and we saw a whole lot of cars parked across the road from us. Nothing really unusual in that; a lot of people stop there to check the map or whatever. However, a whole lot of people headed over. It wasn’t one double room they wanted: it was NINE!! We gotta get another floor added to this place someday to cope with such things. Couldn’t keep all of them ourselves but we were able to put enough of them up at the auberge round the corner to satisfy everyone.

Seems like ages since the last Mas Camps News!

What’s been happening?

Well, we had our first holiday since we got here. More on that if you read the blog entries from April. Although we just went to Turkey to see the solar eclipse, we’d like to go back as the trip was far too short. Might even drive it next time as we had some Turkish guests a month or so back who did exactly that. However, they recommend taking the ferry from Italy to Greece rather than driving through Croatia etc. as they reckon that route is a bit dangerous.

The pattern of reservations has been quite different from last year. Very, very little in February and March but once we hit Easter, the occupancy was way up. Almost triple the number of people this June as we had last year. July was slightly higher but completely with “ordinary” guests as we didn’t have the equivalent of the two massive bookings we had last year. Different from last year too is that September already has a fair number of bookings.

And we’ve launched a few more websites. With the quiet period in February, I was able to move Our Inns and Our Gites into PHP and MySQL which has reduced considerably the amount of effort required to put properties online. Not only that but I’ve taken the opportunity to add a number of enhancements and permit people to add a whole lot more information.

Once all the information was in the database (major nightmare!), I made a start on the much more commercially targetted Our Holiday Rental Homes and Our Bed and Breakfasts. Can’t really see them doing well in the search engines this holiday season but the older sites are doing very well. Both Chambre-d’Hote and Our Gites (listing B&B and self-catering properties in France respectively) regularly appear in the top 10 on google searches.

Last, but not least, I thought that I’d move the blog into my own domain. Still haven’t sussed out the full route, but expect to see it arriving at Foreign Perspectives shortly.

Yes, folks it is now one year since we arrived here. Well, one year and a bit as we arrived at 7pm local time.

A year ago, we’d no reservations in the book and didn’t know that our first customers would be turning up in a few days time. Now we’ve a smattering of reservations right through to September. A year ago we managed one nights occupancy over Easter; this year 38.

A year ago, we’d hardly any furniture for our own rooms. And we still haven’t!

A year ago, we’d just missed appearing on Living the Dream. Now we don’t know yet if we’ll be in the No Going Back series.

A year ago, I was getting into the shorts & sandles “uniform” that I’d keep up ’til November. Yup, just broke out the “uniform” a few days ago… 32C in the shade this afternoon and I’m a bit sunburnt.

A year ago, I was pretty sure that I’d fail the French diploma. Now I’ve got Dip French after my name and am making a respectable start on the Dip Spanish.

A year ago, ‘yall said you’d be here… and none of you have arrived yet! No, Dorothy, I haven’t forgotten your reservation in September.

A year ago, we didn’t know how quickly we could get to the clinic. We found out on August 29th when John decided that he’d had enough. Or was it Wendy?

A year ago, we thought we were crazy to have bought a hotel in France. Now we’re even crazier and have started looking for the next place!

A year ago, we were wondering if the French bureaucracy was as bad as everyone made it out to be. Now we know that it’s even worse than that.

A year ago, we didn’t know that we’d be having to make over 300 beds over the following 12 months. Now we’re looking forward to making over 500 in the next 12 months.

Just got our car back from the garage. It packed in on the way to Spain on Monday so we’ve been walking everywhere this week. All being well, we’ll be attempting the run to Spain again on Monday.

Now that we’ve hit the anniversary, we are getting going on selling the house in Holywood. So, if you want an immaculate, spacious two bedroom house with newly fitted luxury bathroom, cabled for BT, NTL and Sky, near to all local amenities and with excellent transport links, you know where to look.

At the third attempt, we managed to sell a two night break on ebay. Just £35 including breakfast which is less than we’d like but since it’s more than zero we’re still ahead. We’ve added another version for £29 without breakfast so we’ll see how that goes. What we’d really like to do is to add multiple rooms but our rating on ebay isn’t high enough to do that yet (and probably won’t be for several months at this rate). Still, in principle a reasonable way to shift rooms out of season.

We had a bit of a rush of blood to the head yesterday and thought that we’d run up our first little tour with activitybreaks.com . It’s a dutyfree Christmas shopping trip with two nights here and a day in Andorra for shopping, all for the bargain price of EUR 356 for two. There is a LOT of information that you need to enter onto their site for a tour so after we’d finished we thought it looked a little light and we’re off to Andorra later this week to do a trial run and research some options whilst we’re there. We also need something for the final day as finishing it after breakfast makes it look rather empty. At the moment, we’re thinking of adding either a mini-version of our proposed wine tour (ie just the one vineyard) or possibly a tour of Perpignan (there’s a Catalan Christmas festival on in December). Any thoughts folks?

Remember the prefecture saying that we can’t have a Carte de Séjour without a long stay visa? Well, ignoring the problem seems to have made that requirement go away as we got a letter from the office of migration (OMI) this morning saying that Wendy can have her CDS on payment of the fiscal stamp of ‚€220. They also made an appointment for her to have a medical test next week. Unfortunately, both of those requirements breach European law so we’ve a letter off to tell them that. Still, at least them accepting that she’s entitled to a CDS is a step forward.

Bonsoir encore:

I’ve missed the 12th but it’s the 14th today so Estagel will be coming alive with parades, riots, etc. shortly. Well, a parade and more than likely everyone will be too pissed to riot as there’s free plonk once the parade is over.

Had our first bunch of total **** arrive last week. Got a call from England early in the week to reserve rooms for two families who were driving down to a villa in Spain for a couple of weeks. We’re around the half-way mark between Calais and Alicante so we’ve had a few similar groups before. Anyway, these **** booked rooms, evening meals and breakfasts for eight: with such relatively large numbers, you need to buy a fair bit extra of the fresh food, of course. They were stopping off around Tours which is something like seven hours non-stop drive to here and, as they were intending to set off around 0830, we figured that it would be at least 7pm before they turned up: well, you’ve gotta have some rest stops, don’t you? Not these ****. Nope, they turned up around 5pm (ie pretty knackered due to no stopping). They left again at 5.20. The **** had decided that they may as well drive on to Alicante so our bin had a big heap of stuff added to it right away.

Anyway, net effect is that we decided that it’s time we started taking deposits from people so there’s now a little button on the website to let folk pay me money as of yesterday on the english page. Haven’t worked out how to do it in French yet.

Actually, they are the only English folk that we’ve had stopping (OK, only for 20 mins). Our marketing is bound to be better in English than it is in French, yet something like 2/3rds of the people staying so far have been French (sadly, they’ve only spent about 1/2 of the total money: have to see about increasing their expenditure).

Techie question time again: Remember the ADSL wireless connection? Well, it turns out that there were three problems with it. For a start, it’s pretty hot here and the gear was running somewhat higher than the recommended operating temperature: adding a fan has cooled everything down nicely. Second, the wireless link was hanging after an hour or so: applying the Netgear patch has sorted that one. However, it now has a peculiar problem: it tries to dial all the time but only connects when I leave the normal phone off the hook (just discovered that last night). This seems to be 100% consistent. Is there anything I can do, or is it a problem for France Telecom?