Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Listings’ Category

Whilst free B&B and vacation rental sites come and go, now there’s a new innovation in this market: a site that pays you!

The Our Inns family of sites which lists B&Bs in Europe and self-catering vacation rentals worldwide now pays £1 per new property that you recommend which subsequently lists with them. Once you’re signed up with them yourself (free), you can recommend further B&B or hotel or self-catering properties and get paid £1 (or 1.50‚€ or $2) for each one. All that’s required to collect on these is to quote a simple link on your website or e-mail, or even on a postcard.

Although introduced on a trial basis, it’s expected that these payments will continue indefinitely.

All payments will be via paypal but even that’s a free signup.

The issue of sites posting guest reviews of accommodation has been picked up by Karen over at Europe A La Carte.

Most of the debate to date is on the issue of hotel owners posting bogus and glowing reviews on the likes of Trip Advisor but I suspect that they are few and far between. Looking at it from the other side of the fence so to speak, there are equally problems of negative comments by guests who have never even stayed or who, when something goes wrong, blame everything on the hotel.

Consider a few of the examples that we have seen over the last year.

1. “…in the middle of nowhere…” . It’s certainly quite true that the hotel was in the countryside and not in the city. The guests in question hadn’t even bothered to read the first line of the description which quite clearly states that yet they blamed the hotel for not being in the city-centre location that they really wanted.

2. “…the hairdryer in the room had quite a smell when used…”. They were using the room heater to dry their hair and the smell was their own hair being burnt.

3. “…they didn’t know when we were arriving…”. Not surprising in that the reservation system they’d used doesn’t ask them that question and therefore the hotel don’t know when to expect guests that have used it.

4. “…all the restaurants were closed when they said they’d be open….”. From a guest who hadn’t changed the time on their watch when they arrived in France with the effect that every time they turned up at “1pm” for lunch the restaurants were closed as it was actually 2pm.

5.”…the reception staff weren’t French…”. Try booking into a London hotel and finding any English staff!

Many review sites make checks that the guests have actually stayed there but Trip Advisor appears to take anything that comes with no checks at all. We’ve seen “interesting” reviews by people who clearly have never stepped inside the door or, if they have, must have been high on something given the list of things they saw which didn’t exist in reality. We’re not talking debateable issues like whether or not the place has been dusted but things like broken windows which clearly aren’t broken.

The review facilities run by the likes of Booking.com are in a different league. To my mind, the problem with them is that they generally don’t offer a facility for hotel management to comment on the reviews made. Since they also clearly have an interest in getting people into their hotels, the tendency is to allow management to have the negative comments deleted. Now, this gets rid of the idiotic comments as above but it also potentially allows unscrupulous hotels to artificially bump up their ratings by getting rid of the really negative comments (although, one hopes, that a genuinely bad hotel wouldn’t get away with that). Probably the most extreme example of this is HostelWorld (used by Ryanair and very popular) where the management can select which reviews and ratings they’d like to appear (they can’t edit them) so, naturally, it’s possible to manipulate your rating and some places would appear to do that thereby getting a rating of close to 100% vs a more reasonable 70-80%.

So, yes, let’s see if we can get rid of the bogus reviews but let’s not limit it to those of owners/managers who are inflating their rating but also the overlly negative reviews of unreasonable guests who blame everything that goes wrong on everyone else.

How to do that is the big question though. Anyone can create a hotmail account and get a review onto many sites without any confirmation that they’ve actually been a guest there. It’s clearly not viable for the majority of Internet sites to actually visit the hotels being commented on yet some kind of cross-check is definitely required and, at the moment, many sites don’t appear to even read the comments before they put them on.

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.

Almost the first thing that people do once they move to France is to look for something else to do. Many people come over with the thought that the income from a few gites will support them into their old age but, sadly, it’s not quite so simple as that. Self-catering just doesn’t seem to be capable of providing enough money to fully support a family and B&B can’t be totally relied on either.So, people branch out. Many of the gite people find that there’s quite a bit of spare time during the week and often start doing odd-jobs for other expats around the area. Others find the allure of the computer a great attraction and once they’ve polished up their website for the nth time they start considering other internet ventures.

Just before the peak season last year we thought that we’d try a mailshot to promote our listings sites and fired off a few hundred e-mails.We offer a listing broadly comparable to that from sites that charge around £100 and up and attract a reasonable number of bookings for those listed too which isn’t surprising as we get around 1500 visitors to the site per day at the moment, more than several sites charging around £50 get. However, the word “free” actually put people off and we even received a number of e-mails accusing of being behind some dasterdly and dishonest scheme.So we added an option of paying £29.