Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Bookings’ Category

Whenever you’ve a peak of bookings, you’re sure to have a peak of cancellations too.

Today for instance is a public holiday here which means, among other things, that the buses aren’t running. So, right on cue, we received a call this afternoon from someone who can’t reach us today. Since the cancellation conditions state that you need to cancel one day in advance, this would normally mean that we’d be billing him for the room tonight but we managed to pick up another booking for his room so he gets off without paying.

As there’s also a bank holiday on Monday, we’re pretty full at the moment and have just found out that the above guest doesn’t have any transport of his own and that a part of four walkers is coming to stay on Saturday night. That leaves us with five people checking out on Sunday who we now know don’t have any transport until Tuesday as there won’t be any buses or taxis on either Sunday or Monday.

I suspect that both lots may want (well, need) to stay another couple of days.

Whilst there seems to be a vast number of WordPress themes around in reality many of them are simple variations of a single theme.

Consider for example the theme I’m developing over at SevaTeem. I’ve started using early versions of it on various blogs to see how it flies. If you didn’t know that, you might think that the theme at A Time of Magic was completely different but in fact the only differences from that currently on SevaTeem are that the text is white instead of black and the background is different.

All being well, I’ll be releasing the theme to the world in a few weeks time so you’ll be able to play around with it yourself and perhaps create variants that even I wouldn’t recognise.

One of the regular nightmares that seems to get worse every year is the business of getting away for the bank holiday weekends.

We all know that the roads will be full, the airports chaotic and the ferry queue backed up yet for just about every bank holiday weekend you see the queues everywhere. From the other side of the fence it’s just as bad: we could do with another floor added on to the building at peak periods yet the bookings drop away just as quickly right after the bank holiday and we’re rattling round a big building.

Although you’d think that people would be glad to get a place to stay at such times, in fact we usually get an equally large jump in no-shows. Just this weekend we had a family who’d booked almost half the building between them yet neither cancelled nor turned up. Had they cancelled, we’d have filled the rooms easily enough yet they didn’t so we had to keep the rooms available for them.

One thing to watch in these days where almost all reservations are guaranteed by a credit card is that if you don’t cancel, you’ll get charged at least for the first night and increasingly often for your entire stay.

At last I have sorted out the problems that the RSS feed for the blog was having.

Yet again, it was down to problems with the character set. This time around I thought I’d go back to basics and work from the validation errors that the feed was having to correct the problems directly in the XML file that WordPress produces when you export a blog.

That fixed all but a handful of the odd characters and I’ve just corrected the final couple through WordPress itself so for the first time in ages I’ve a nice clean RSS feed which I’m hoping will remain clean and operational for quite some time to come.

Although the big names are always present, there seems to be an almost constant launching of new sites offering sponsored post opportunities these days.

This is brilliant in the sense that nearly all of them give you one post to do about themselves for an above average sum. Typically you’ll get $10 to write a post of a few hundred words about the sponsored listings site but I’ve had as high as $55.

In several cases, that has been the only post that I’ve written for a site. That’s not because I’m totally mercenary and take only the payment to write about them and then ignore them, but because several of the sites have never had another opportunity available for me to write about. OK, eventually perhaps some of them might do, but realistically I’m not going to continue to look at a site that never has anything for me when I can spend that time looking at other sites which do provide a stream of opportunities.

The e-mail sites are very hard to judge on this score. They tend not to ask you to write about them but offer you a trial post to do. In one case, I picked up $75 from such a site and I’ve never heard from them again. I can live with that in that I have $75 in my bank account which wouldn’t otherwise have been there but I wonder what happened to them.

Are there getting to be just too many such sites around for the amount of advertising that they can collectively deliver?