Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

As I’m sure you noticed, all kinds of shops were stacked high with various satellite navigation units last year now that the prices have fallen into the “impulse buy” area.

The impact of that is now being felt locally in a big way in terms of the sheer number of cars going along roads that were never intended for the level of traffic that they get now. What’s also apparent is that the effect of so many people using GPS on their holidays is changing the places where they are staying.

Interestingly, in our area the effect seems to have been to send people along the old highways rather than the new ones. Since the construction of the new motorways, the majority of traffic has gone along them but now people appear to be returning to the old routes and finding that many of the hotels that formerly lived on the passing trade have long since closed down.

We’re at the very end of one of those old routes ourselves and are finding that each morning is starting with a series of panic phonecalls from various hotel owners further along the route looking for accommodation for their departing guests (or, in some cases, overflow from double bookings). For example, this morning we’d several separate calls from different hotels in a town about 45 minutes drive from us. Along that route you’ll pass around half a dozen hotels that have closed down over the years since the motorway was built which gives some idea of the traffic that this road used to have. Unfortunately, with the construction of the motorway, development of our road stopped and therefore it’s not really up to the volume of traffic that it’s starting to get (ie missing passing places and so on).

As part of the planning for the extra traffic that’s been building up (largely courtesy of GPS I suspect), they’re building a bypass for the village just beside us. However, I wonder if it would be a lot more economic to pay TomTom et al to remove the village from the routes it plans? Certainly, it’s never going to be economic to build a bypass for all the little villages that are going to be affected by GPS routing.

One thing never to neglect when you’re living abroad is the cost of changing money from one currency to another yet virtually nobody considers it.

The costs can be quite substantial too. A friend of mine who was living in Brussels once casually remarked that he just used the Halifax as he did at home, lifting EUR 20 or EUR 30 whenever he needed it. He was more than a little takenaback when I pointed out that by doing that he was paying around 10% of his entire salary in bank charges. Yes, that much.

We’ve had quite a run of Brits living in Spain stopping with us on their way to/from the UK this year and I was very surprised to find that only one of them used the Nationwide credit card. Yet, that’s the only one that offers free exchange from sterling to other currencies (and all of the people concerned were living on a UK based income).

The other alternative for euro-zone countries is the Halifax which operates as Banco Halifax in Spain. They offer free transfers from UK based Halifax (and Bank of Scotland) accounts to Halifax in Spain. Although they don’t currently operate elsewhere in Europe, the Spanish outfit is quite sufficient for those in eurozone countries as you can, of course, use the supplied debit card outside Spain for purchases (it’s a bit expensive for ATM withdrawals outside Spain).

Very handy and the whole thing operates in English.

One thing that you can always depend on is that the Spanish will arrival after everyone else and, usually, expect to be able to eat out in a restaurant no matter how late it is.

Quite why they’re so late is anyone’s guess as they usually have the least distance to travel, normally at most a couple of hours from Barcelona. Naturally, they expect to be able to eat quite late as that’s how things work in Spain but it’s quite a different matter in France where locally the restaurants usually won’t serve you after 8.30pm. That’s something of a problem in that the Spanish normally don’t even think about going out for their evening meal until 10pm by which time they’re limited to McDonalds.

Quite why we’ve so many Spanish arrivals this year I don’t know but it’s probably for similar reasons to our large German contingent ie high euro plus expensive “discount” flights meaning that the advantage is towards people who are going to drive here. August is a peak holiday season in Spain but in years gone by all the gaps that they’ve been booking this year have already been filled by the brits.

Of course, the big question is what’ll happen at the notional end of the holiday season here which falls this year on August 23rd? Historically, we’ve been fairly full with UK guests in the final week of the month but, as I say, there’s not so many coming from there this year (funnily enough those that have come have stayed for longer than the average of previous years).

If you cast your mind back to the early part of the year you might remember that we picked up a really big booking from a German family in February. So large that what started off as a couple of rooms for a few days ended up totalling 30 nights worth of accommodation over the course of a week or so.

The snag was that they never responded to any of our e-mails so it wasn’t until they arrived that we found out they were here to go to a wedding and spending the extra time to get aquainted with the French half of the family who live locally. The downside of that for us was that we only picked up the money for the rooms as they didn’t even take breakfast whilst they were here so we’ve had a relatively restful week.

For them, the lack of response meant that they weren’t even aware that our booking conditions for groups are quite different from those for individual rooms until they checked out this morning. For normal bookings we only charge for the rooms when people leave and if they cancel at least 24 hours in advance they don’t have to pay anything. For groups, we charge the full balance for the rooms a week before they arrive and it’s not refundable unless we can rebook the rooms.

So, we’re sitting with the place half-empty in the peak of summer at the moment. Although we’ll almost certainly rebook some of the rooms it doesn’t seem too likely that we’ll rebook the whole lot as we only found out this morning that they were leaving four days early which is just a few days before the main French holiday of August (the 15th) ie most people coming to the region on holiday will already have booked their accommodation and therefore there’s a fair chance that we’ll remain relatively empty for the next few days.

I’m sure that if we’re honest, many people would say they’d skip on car insurance if it wasn’t compulsory.

However, there are times when it’s a pretty handy thing to have. Consider one of our guests last night….

What happened is that his car caught fire as he was driving along the motorway in France yesterday afternoon. That’s not really something that you expect to happen, is it? Anyway, the towing would have been several hundred euro, the transport to his hotel over EUR 100, the hotel another EUR 80 or so and it looks like the repairs will cost well over EUR 1000. Oh, and then there’s the not so insignificant matter that he’ll probably end up having to fly home and then back to collect the car as this is a holiday week and so it probably won’t be repaired for at least another week.

OK, a none too likely scenario for most of us I’m sure but it shows just how quickly the bills can mount up.