Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

I’m generally a message in a bottle kind of person as far as political activism goes rather than being that proactive with firing off letters to all and sundry as Wendy tends to do.

However, I thought that I’d drop the new Open University vice-chancellor, Martin Bean, a line about my thoughts on some rather undesireable side-effects of the ELQ fiasco. Specifically, the dropping of all but one of the science summer schools and the associated dropping of all the crop of named science degrees.

The summer schools have been a fixture of many Open University degrees from the very start. They’re the time when one feels like a “real” student for a week. They’re the time when one has the chance to get together with a whole heap of fellow students for all kinds of activities (ranging from serious study to, sometimes, the less high-minded student activities). They’re the time that one sees the Open University in the flesh.

The snag is that whilst up until a number of years ago the summer schools were an integral part of the regular courses, they were almost all separated off five or ten years ago as courses were rewritten. Thus whilst the original S100 science foundation course included a summer school, the updated S104 doesn’t and instead there’s a separate course made up entirely of the former summer school. That has the consequence that the summer school is now optional and therefore almost impossible to get a sponsor to pay for it and so many fewer people do the summer schools these days.

To add to the problems, the current proposal is to implement these changes over the next couple of years. That would be fast enough in a normal university where degrees typically span three or at most four years. In “OU-time”, it’s incredibly rapid as degrees can take anything from six to as many as eleven years even without breaks between courses. Thus even people who are well through their degree can be affected. One of those on the forum who’s almost at the end of her degree has already been forced into doing one of the summer schools a year or two “too soon” because it seems unlikely that the final summer school that she needs will be replaced after it expires. She’s one of the lucky ones: many of those at the start of their degrees will find that they can’t complete the degree they were aiming for as the required summer schools (and perhaps other courses) will long since have been cancelled by the time they’d be doing them.

Anyway, Martin tells me that he will be raising the issue fairly soon. I’m sure that this issue and other ELQ related ones will make his time an “interesting” one.

I was going to say that I was surprised to receive a personal reply from him the day after I sent my little missive but actually I’m not. It’s just what one would expect from the Open University vice chancellor and it’s good to see that he’s already taken the “open” part onboard.

It’s been over a year since our last enquiry re participating in a documentary so we were overdue for this one.

Thus far we’ve been getting enquiries from the various “moving to France” TV series producers but this time it’s in connection with the possibility of us setting up a B&B back in Northern Ireland.

As with the French series, there are surprisingly few people who meet the criteria for the series. For our first one for instance, we met all the criteria but weren’t able to move in January so missed the time slot for the filming.

Once we get into August the number of guests starts to rise quite rapidly and with that rise comes an even larger rise in the work associated with it.

Surely the work rises in proportion to the number of guests? You’d think that it would but it rises much more than that thanks to a number of factors. First, the number of overnight stays increases quite dramatically so it’s commonplace to find that one is completely full on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night with a completely different set of people in place of the smaller number staying several days at a time earlier in the year.

Next there’s the rapid rise in problem guests. In August just about all the accommodation for miles around is full and in particular the beach accommodation is almost all full for the bulk of the month. Thus we get a lot of people who really wanted to stay at the beach but find that they can’t and are staying in a place in the country instead. Moreover, prices are higher in August generally and dramatically so in the case of beach resorts. Whilst most people accept this situation, a small minority don’t and frequently end up taking up a lot more of our time than is reasonable.

Finally, we find that pretty much all of our slack time of earlier in the year is taken up by the much larger number of guests and the work associated with them. Thus we end up spending the whole morning and right through lunch getting the place reset for the next guests, we’ve lots more restocking trips for supplies, and so on.

Overall this means that in many cases even much of the “essential” admin doesn’t get done… don’t expect us to reply to emails too quickly over this period!

Not so long ago, drive-by guests made up a substantial proportion of our bookings but with the combination of a rapid rise in the profile of online reservation systems and mobile internet the drive-by is very much a dying breed.

Over time this trend seems sure to have a substantial impact on the “ideal” locations for hotels. After all, when drive-by guests are less important there’s not so much need to build your hotel right on the highway as used to be the case. Nowadays, it’s much more important to be findable by a satnav system so we’re quite fortunate in being a place on most of the systems in current use.

The other notable effect is that, on the whole, you don’t need nearly so many signs to your place as you used to. Locally it’s quite noticeable that those hotels with the most signs tend to have the least number of guests. That’s down to their concentration on signage to the expense of an Internet presence.

As we move through August the number of people in the place has been steadily increasing and, of course, we’ve had the usual spikes in occupancy at the weekends.

Unfortunately those weekend spikes have become even more pronounced this year. That causes us severe complications in terms of the logistics of getting the rooms sorted out as we end up using nearly all of the bedlinen over two or three days worth of over-night stays.

The reason behind those spikes is quite simply the Saturday change-over day for the self-catering accommodation in Spain where many of those people are heading to or coming back from (hence the three day spike). Packing all that change-over work must be even more of a nightmare for the villas further south than it is for us and it seems crazy that almost everyone sticks to the same change-over day which causes everyone upstream of them problems too and bumps up the flight and ferry costs on those days too not to mention causing a major backlog of traffic at the border.

Surely it would make more sense for everyone to stagger the change-over days?