Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

I’ve been plugging away at the weekends with my new WordPress template over at SevaTeem for the last month or so and interestingly it’s starting to get hits from people looking how to do things like add extra sidebars and whatnot.

Whilst it’ll be a while before it’s ready to roll out to the world at large I’ve started using it on a couple of blogs to see how it flies in real-life. Personally Chosen uses an early version of the template with a very plain look. Slightly more along the lines of what the finished template might look like is the new Our Inns blog although there’s still work to be done as you’ll see if you glance at the SevaTeem blog itself.

What’s surprised me is that there really isn’t an awful lot of work required to create your very own WordPress theme and whilst I figure I’ve a few more weeks work to tidy things up, the theme is good enough to let me use it on a few sites already.

One of the regular nightmares that seems to get worse every year is the business of getting away for the bank holiday weekends.

We all know that the roads will be full, the airports chaotic and the ferry queue backed up yet for just about every bank holiday weekend you see the queues everywhere. From the other side of the fence it’s just as bad: we could do with another floor added on to the building at peak periods yet the bookings drop away just as quickly right after the bank holiday and we’re rattling round a big building.

Although you’d think that people would be glad to get a place to stay at such times, in fact we usually get an equally large jump in no-shows. Just this weekend we had a family who’d booked almost half the building between them yet neither cancelled nor turned up. Had they cancelled, we’d have filled the rooms easily enough yet they didn’t so we had to keep the rooms available for them.

One thing to watch in these days where almost all reservations are guaranteed by a credit card is that if you don’t cancel, you’ll get charged at least for the first night and increasingly often for your entire stay.

When the Brits are moving to France their first thought, usually, is to set themselves up in the gite business.

It certainly sounds like the ideal lifestyle choice. You only need to work one day a week and you don’t have to see the guests at all apart from when they arrive and when they leave. For B&B you’d have to deal with the guests every day and that would be an awful hassle, wouldn’t it?

What’s frequently forgotten about in this equation is that a typical gite will have around six or seven rooms whereas a B&B room has only two (counting the bathroom in both cases). So you’re looking at around three to four times the amount of work cleaning up a gite compared to a single B&B room (although most gites specify that it’s left in a clean condition you’ll still need to check it and wash all the sheets etc.).

Don’t forget about that business of washing the sheets & towels, maintenance, etc.: a gite business is never a one day a week job.

The other difference that’s usually not even considered is the profitability. We have a small four person gite and when rented out as a gite, the income is around EUR 50 per day. When the same space (less the kitchen and dining room) is rented out as a B&B room then the income is EUR 100 per day and if we do an evening meal as well it’s more like EUR 200 per day.

To be fair, that separation of you from the guests is valuable for a number of people but it’s possible to buy a B&B place that allows you to lock the door and keep the guests from mingling with the private section of your house.

As you know, we’ve been plugging away with sponsored posts on various blogs over the last year or so.

The money can be quite good sometimes (we picked up $250 on a single post a month ago for example) but most of the time it’s around the $10 to $30 mark. Not that we’re complaining but once you’ve been paid for the article, that’s the last income that you get for it.

So, what we’re having a go at now is a fresh attack on the affiliate links through Personally Chosen which we’ve not really looked at for a few years.

In practical terms, we’re planning it as a series of product reviews much as we do for the sponsored posts but with the difference that there’s no upfront payout but, hopefully, an ongoing income from them. If we can get it right, there’s certainly big money in it as some affiliate signups pay over $50.

Just as there never seems to be a single bus around, so too it seems to be with house buyers.

With the market having slowed down considerably in the UK, selling in markets that are dependent on that market is also pretty slow. However, that seems to be changing as we’ve now had three quite serious house views in the space of two weeks.

Now, if only we can persuade one to part with a large cheque…