Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Bookings’ Category

We received a reservation a week or so back for two rooms for today. Not unusual really but it was from one of the many places that don’t tell us when people might be arriving.

Now, November is a fairly quiet month for us and they were the only people due in today.

It’s Wednesday so no school trip which meant that we were in right up to 5pm. That’s when we’d to nip out to the shop for some things but we were back by around 5.20pm.

Guess what? Yup, that’s when they arrived, wrote a note to say there were here and left!

Naturally, they couldn’t understand why we weren’t there to greet them but then we’d no idea of when they were coming nor how they were getting to us as they didn’t reply to the e-mail we sent them asking that.

We’ve got our Danish group back again this evening.

It’s an interesting aspect of the development of our bookings that we are starting to get picked out by tour groups this year. This’ll be the fifth time that the Danish tour leader will have been here on one of her New Age tours taking in this region. It seems to be quite a popular area for that type of tour, this particular one having a Mary Magdelene theme.

Anyway, that’ll keep us pretty busy this evening as they want meals through to lunchtime tomorrow.

One odd thing in this Internet age is that it’s becoming more and more common for people to phone up for a booking rather than doing it online.

Now, we always expected that from the French as, until fairly recently, they just didn’t trust the Internet and certainly didn’t trust it with their debit card details. However, recently it’s becoming rather common among the English and Spanish. Why, I don’t know, but there you are.

In summertime it’s something of a nuisance as it can be quite difficult to reconcile phone bookings with online availability without ending up with double bookings. In fact, we often need to confirm that rooms remain available before saying OK to people on the phone as bookings come in at a fair rate at peak times in the Summer.

It seems like forever since we had a whole day off so we’re thankful that there’s nobody in tomorrow and neither is it a school day so we get to lay in.

For me it’s a sort-of work day though as I’m down to only four days to go before the Spanish exam (the final one for the course). Still, at least that’s starting to come together and I can talk with the best of them about the society in Spain in the early part of the 20th century. At least, I can in Spanish…. as usual I can do some stuff in Spanish that I can’t in English.

Have to see about getting my case packed too as I’ve to fly out on Friday morning.

The pattern of bookings this year has been rather peculiar right from the start and seems to be continuing in the same vein.

Last night for instance, we had only one couple in although we really should have two but ‘tother one was one of our “visa application bookings” so we weren’t really expecting him to arrive.

Tonight, not only are we full, but everyone is taking meals too.

What October will be like, we’ve really no idea at the moment as the majority of people are booking just a few days to a couple of weeks ahead these days which means we generally have no idea how a given month will turn out ’til we’re well into it.