Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

If you’re like most people I’m sure you’ve hardly gotten beyond thinking that you’ll either get a few hundred from the travel agent or perhaps just use a card when you get there.

In the first case, you’ll end up spending a small fortune un-necessarily and in the second you could be stuck without any money. In both cases, it’s worth putting a little thought into it and to help you make the best choices I’m putting together a little series on it over the next week or so.

In times gone by, getting inflation down was always considered to be a “good thing” and it still is but the problem is that the underlying reasons for inflation these days are quite different from those a few years ago.

Nowadays, inflation is largely driven by the oil price either directly through increasing the cost of your own petrol or indirectly through increasing transport costs generally. More to the point though is that it isn’t driven by the banks handing out money as they used to as anyone who has tried to get credit lately will tell you.

Yet, the Bank of England persist in using interest rates as their seemingly only means of driving down inflation. It isn’t working and it won’t work because it’s not bank lending that’s keeping inflation up (as is clear by the “credit crunch” that we’re all experiencing): it’s the oil price. Even if they took interest rates to 50%, inflation would still remain high.

What those high rates are doing though is killing the economy; they’re certainly not killing the inflation.

That’s the rather peculiar comment of some Germans who stayed with us.

Since German is a distant relative to the English language, English is much easier to speak for them than French and therefore we always start off in English with any German guests (learning German is close to the top of our “to do” list at the moment). Once we recognise where guests come from we try to speak to them in the most appropriate language at our command and we’re very confused by the comment of these non-French speaking Germans that stayed with us a few weeks ago.

OK, sometimes people like to practice their French on us but these people admited to not speaking any French!

Whenever you’ve a peak of bookings, you’re sure to have a peak of cancellations too.

Today for instance is a public holiday here which means, among other things, that the buses aren’t running. So, right on cue, we received a call this afternoon from someone who can’t reach us today. Since the cancellation conditions state that you need to cancel one day in advance, this would normally mean that we’d be billing him for the room tonight but we managed to pick up another booking for his room so he gets off without paying.

As there’s also a bank holiday on Monday, we’re pretty full at the moment and have just found out that the above guest doesn’t have any transport of his own and that a part of four walkers is coming to stay on Saturday night. That leaves us with five people checking out on Sunday who we now know don’t have any transport until Tuesday as there won’t be any buses or taxis on either Sunday or Monday.

I suspect that both lots may want (well, need) to stay another couple of days.

Whilst there seems to be a vast number of WordPress themes around in reality many of them are simple variations of a single theme.

Consider for example the theme I’m developing over at SevaTeem. I’ve started using early versions of it on various blogs to see how it flies. If you didn’t know that, you might think that the theme at A Time of Magic was completely different but in fact the only differences from that currently on SevaTeem are that the text is white instead of black and the background is different.

All being well, I’ll be releasing the theme to the world in a few weeks time so you’ll be able to play around with it yourself and perhaps create variants that even I wouldn’t recognise.