Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

In these days when virtually everyone books their accommodation online it’s particularly important to read the small-print regarding cancelling your trip or simply not turning up at all at your accommodation.

If you simply don’t turn up almost all hotels will charge you for the first night of your stay but some resort style hotels will charge you for the entire stay. In both cases this is a non-refundable charge.

However, you don’t necessarily need to pay it. In most cases, if you call the hotel a day in advance of your stay you’ll generally not have to pay anything further. Even cancelling the same day can sometimes save you money. For example, although we can charge for a noshow unless the reservation is cancelled a day in advance, in reality we waive this if we can get someone else for the room following the cancellation. Incidentally, it’s really not necessary for you to make up some excuse to explain your cancellation: hotels have heard them all before and it’ll make no difference as to whether or not they charge you.

Do watch any deposit payments that you’ve made though as in many instances these are kept by the reservation system that you used and are usually not refundable. If you find a hotel listed on a reservation system it’s usually worthwhile to contact them directly as this will save you the booking fee and you may get a discount too.

You might think that these “noshow” charges are just profiteering on the part of the hotel. They aren’t. Whenever you make a guaranteed reservation online the hotel is obliged to keep the room for you even if other people turn up asking for a room. In some cases we have turned away as many as a dozen couples looking for a room because our last room was subject to a guaranteed reservation only to find out that the people who’d booked it never turned up.

And a final plea… read the description of the hotel and particularly its location. Hotels are usually listed by “resort” which means that all hotels within about 25 miles of a city will come up as being attached to that city. This means that hotels well into the country are listed as associated with cities. Cancelling because you discover that a hotel you expected to be in the city centre is actually in the country doesn’t save a “noshow” charge if you only discover that when you arrive in the city.

The first time I came across ELQ (Equivalent and Lower Qualifications) was a year or two back when it was mentioned in one of the rare rallying cry type emails that come out from the Open University. What’s it all about? Well, basically the government are intending to drastically reduce funding to universities for those students who are studying for a qualification that is equal to or lower than one that they’ve already got. For example, if you already have a BA or BSc degree then if you sign up for another BA or BSc degree, even if it’s in a totally different subject, then you come under the ELQ rule.

In practical terms, the number of ELQ students is fairly low in most mainstream universities but it’s quite a different matter for the OU where many people start on a different degree for leisure purposes (the proportion of retired students is pretty high on some courses), to change career or to acquire a degree in a more relevant subject to their existing job. Thus, something that would largely have affected the night classes run by mainstream universities is going to affect the main business of the OU. Ironically it would appear that an excellent institution created by the Labour party way back in 1969 may well be killed off by the Labour party of 2009.

So how significant is this reduction in funding? Well, that’s the problem: nobody really knows for sure. Yes, there’s a figure for the reduction but the snag is that the reduction in funding is being met by an increase in course fees and nobody knows what impact that will have on the uptake of courses by students.

Plucking some figures out of the air might give some idea of the impact though. At the moment the OU charges around £10 per point degree courses thus overall a 360 point honours degree costs about £3,600 or around £600 a year on average spread over the typical six years of their courses. Depending on the subject that you do residential schools may increase that to more like £4,600 so say £800/year on average.

However, were the university to double those fees which some would say seems likely, what would happen? Would people find it so easy to justify £1,600 a year over six years? The snag is that it’s not quite so simple as that because there are a lot of quite major universities around the world offering distance learning in similar ranges of courses. Whilst an overall cost for a degree of under £5,000 is quite a bargain generally, that’s not the case were the overall cost to be twice that.

Already discussions are ongoing in the university as to what to do. For example, the science faculty seems likely to drop all but one of its named degrees and is looking for ways to drastically cut the cost of running the residential schools. Whereas right now you can do degrees in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, life sciences and natural sciences in the future there might only be the option to do just “science” albeit with at least some of the currently existing degree programmes continuing to exist as strands within that. Although as they say most of those named degrees were only introduced in 2003 taking them out just six years later seems rather a rapid move on the part of the OU. I’m quite sure that I’m not the only one of their students who ruminated over doing a degree with them for a number of years before actually getting around to it.

Now whilst they argue that they need to drop the residential courses because they don’t make any money on them, they’re in this situation largely because they separated out the residential courses from the courses to which they were originally linked. For example, S103 included a residential whereas S104, its replacement, has SXR103 as a separate residential course. Thanks to the way that most companies sponsoring students on courses work the non-compulsory nature of SXR103 means that fewer people will get funding to go on it.

That’s just the science faculty too. Other faculties attract more hobby students and could see substantial number of courses needing to be dropped if the prices go up too much. For example, how would the various history courses fare at double their current cost? Yes, many of them sound fascinating (and are on my own short list) but realistically I’d have thought that they’re more likely to be done by the retired hobby student population (who tend to get much better marks than the rest of us) and so could be more price sensitive than other more employment oriented courses.

Supposedly none of this affects us students registered for the courses with addresses in Northern Ireland. Not yet, anyway. I imagine that it’s none too ethical but presumably the OU could just supply all students with an NI forwarding address and thus continue to claim the full funding. I wonder if anyone’s floated that suggestion yet?

Although you’d expect that most holiday accommodation would be completely full over the majority of the peak summer that’s not always the case.

For instance, whilst we’re expecting to be close to full capacity over the period, in fact we had several days last week when we were completely empty. How come? Well, what happens is that the place fills up completely at the weekend relatively early in the year which in turn means that people who are looking for a longer holiday often can’t get booked in if it crosses the weekend.

Now, in principle, we could block out a few rooms over the weekends for those longer holidays but then that’s taking the risk that those blocked out rooms wouldn’t fill at all. In practical terms it’s quite difficult to do that blocking out anyway as many online reservation sites don’t allow for that to be done, or at least not in a way that saves those rooms for longer bookings.

Thanks to the free wifi service offered in McDonalds it seems to be attracting an increasing number of itinerant bloggers.

Almost every time we’ve been in lately (and, yes, we’re one of that band of McD bloggers whilst we wait for our ADSL connection) we’ve seen someone whipping out the laptop in a relatively quiet part of the restaurant. Thus far, our record is four separate surfers but I’m sure that’s a record that’ll soon be broken.

It’s not really surprising that they’re attracting these folk: after all that word “free” is quite a pull. What is more surprising though is that the majority of these people are lugging around full size laptops rather than running with the likes of my trusty Aspire One. After all, at under £200 for quite a usable machine it’s not out of the question to buy one pretty much just for the holidays and these days you can even get them “free” with some broadband packages.

Is it a worthwhile marketing strategy for McD though? Well, in that the restaurants obviously need a connection of some sort for their credit card machines it’s largely a no-cost service for them so there’d appear to be no downside in offering it. Moreover, few of the itinerant surfers leave without buying something so it would appear to be all upside for McD at the moment. Whether that would continue to be the case were significant numbers of surfers to start using the stores is another matter. It certainly works fine if there are a handful of people using the service but if there were, say, 10 or more then a) the seats are going to be taken up and b) the service is going to slow down. Still, at the moment, it seems like a great idea.

When they’re booking a place for their holidays people often make assumptions about what that place will be like not so much from the description (which few seem to read) but rather from the place that they’re booking it through.

For instance, we’re in that hazy middle ground between B&B and hotel which means that we’re listed on a wider range of sites than a place that fell exclusively into either category would be. As a rule those coming to us from the hotel listings tend to expect a level of services that we simply can’t meet at busy times when we’ve found that some expect a level of staffing more appropriate to a 50 bedroom place than our own humble 10 room place. So, for example, we’ve found that some people can’t understand that we’ve only one internet terminal when “hotels” always have three or four. Well, 50 bedroom hotels might well have three or four but since we’ve only 1/5th of that number of rooms we obviously have to scale other things down too. On the other hand, those coming to us via a B&B listing sometimes have the expectation of encountering a cute country cottage which we aren’t and don’t claim to be either.

However, perhaps the most peculiar expectation we encountered came from one couple who were looking for a “country retreat”. It took us a while to work out what they were looking for but apparently it came from an Australian listing that we have which is one of many created by asking us one set of questions and producing a listing that answers an entirely different set of questions. In this case one of their questions was “is there a nudist colony nearby” to which the answer is “yes”. However, on their site our answer means that we’re listed as being a “nudist retreat” which we’re definitely not. It seems that “country retreat” is one of those ways of referring to nudist retreats, hence the confusion from that particular couple!

Thanks to the way that listing sites group properties by “resort” (usually the nearest large town) it’s quite important to check just where your holiday property actually is. For instance, we’re generally listed as being attached to Perpignan yet we’re actually 25km outside it. That’s not a problem if you’re coming in a car as it’s only 20 minutes drive but clearly more of an issue if you’re relying on public transport to get around. There’s not really a lot that holiday properties can do about that on the whole as if listings sites simply listed only the properties within a town then it would be next to impossible to find accommodation outside a town. After all, would you know the name of all the little villages within 10 miles or so of your home town? Even if you did, would you have the patience to look up each one in turn in search of accommodation?

To avoid making assumptions that don’t fit with the reality it’s best to have a good read of the description of your holiday accommodation. Most owners spend a fair bit of time to get their description as accurate as they can as it’s obviously much better to have people coming who want to stay in the type of place you have. Despite that it sometimes seems that potential guests don’t even read the first line and go purely on price then complain that, for example, a place billed as being in the country isn’t in the city (yes, we’ve had that).