Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Bookings’ Category

Although it’s outside the main holiday season, we’re still fairly full but not quite in the same pattern as is usual for this time of year.

We generally get quite a respectable level of occupancy during September but ordinarily it’s a pattern of lots in the first week followed by a reasonably even spread over the rest of the month. In common with the changing pattern of bookings this year, September is also quite different.

So, this month we haven’t got the usual even spread but instead have a series of clumps of bookings. For instance, we were almost completely full on Sunday night (an odd night to be full) yet Monday night saw just one couple in residence.

As usual, we’ve no idea of what the rest of the year will turn out to be like as people are continuing with their trend of making reservations just a week or two in advance.

We usually have quite a mix of nationalities and particularly so when we’re full yet we’ve been completely full for a few days now and everyone is from the UK.

You might think that’s very peculiar in that there isn’t any UK holiday on at the moment. Where are the French for instance? Well, the French don’t come very much outside their main holiday season which generally means that we wouldn’t expect to get the next French guest ’til we get into October.

Quite where everyone else is, I don’t know.

Now and again we get asked that and it’s far from an easy question to answer as we don’t know anything about the people asking it.

For example, we get lots of walkers and cyclists staying with us. They usually don’t need a car but sometimes they do in that they want to walk in a number of number of different types of scenery.

Depending on where you want to go, you can do quite well with public transport or, alternatively, see nothing at all of interest to you.

If you’d like to go to the beach, it’s quite easy from here on the bus for instance. However, if you want to see the castles then you’re going to need a car unless you’re fairly fit and can cycle or walk to them.

So, if you want a sensible answer, don’t just ask us if you need a car: tell us what things you want to see, whether you like walking or cycling, and so on so that we can give you the correct answer.

Usually the guests thin out a little by this time of year but we’re getting something of a return towards full occupancy for the next few weeks this year.

How come? Well, one key aspect of it is a series of upgrades and promotions that we made to the accommodation website over the last year which have together had the effect that we get a great deal more ownsite bookings than we did previously.

Also, some of the sites that we’re listed with have clearly been beavering away with their own promotion activities. One notable groups of sites in this regard is activehotels.com which was bought by booking.com last year resulting in a very substantial jump in the number of reservations from the combined group and they in turn were bought by priceline.com in the last 12 months or so which has resulted in us being listed on an even larger group of sites and thereby bumped up the reservations yet again.

What’s the strategy for the coming year though?

As usual, we’ll be reviewing the website as there’s always something that can be improved or even simply updated. Beyond that, I’ve built up something of a backlog of sites that we could be listed on so I’ll be working through those from October onwards.

On ‘tother side of the fence so to speak, we have a number of developments on the listing sites pencilled in. They too were considerably more successful over the past year than they had been previously again due to a series of site promotion exercises and some site improvements. We’re moving the focus to our new-generation sites this year of which the key development engine will probably be Whole Earth Guide although as that uses the template of the other new-generation sites, all those in that group will be affected.

Quite noticeable already is that Whole Earth already has over 700 incoming links despite only being around for just over a month. Once we start promotion of it properly, that number should jump quite dramatically and so too should the number of site visitors.

The profile of guests that we receive changes quite dramatically throughout the year but it’s September that tends to provide the most enjoyable mix for us.

July and August always seems filled with people racing from A to B and, on the whole, just using us as a waypoint in their travels. In the very peak periods we get a lot of the overflow from the beach resorts which means that there are a fair number of people staying with us who really wanted to be at the beach and this therefore represents the peak of our problem guests too.

Early September sees a dramatic change in the profile. For a start, that coincides with the Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival and we generally get some journalists staying with us then which always makes for a more interesting time. By mid-September we usually get some people staying for quite a long time using us as a base to explore the region. As we’ve fewer people staying at this time, we get to interact much more with those that are with us which makes for a more enjoyable time: we’ve already had the traditional storyteller from last week and this week it’s a historian who’s been filling in loads of gaps in our knowledge of the history of this area.