Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

I find that after a while the focus of our blogs tends to drift off from the original idea and so, sometimes, it’s useful to change the domain name to reflect the new focus of the topics in it.

So far, that’s resulted in this particular blog living in three different guises over the course of almost four years. Mark one wasn’t a blog per se in that it was basically a mailing list that I used to keep everyone back home up to date on what we were getting up to. A couple of years later, when the mailing list became a bit unmanageable it moved into its original blog format although the content remained pretty much the same. Then last year we thought that it was time to revitalise the whole thing and put it on the Foreign Perspectives domain.

Now, its Wendy’s turn. To begin with she kicked off her blog on her own domain but didn’t really get into it for the first few months. She has now though and usually has three or four posts a day before you even count sponsored ones. Anyway, it was time to get it onto a proper domain which is Cultured Views. Of course, the snag now is that we have loads of places that we need to tell about that change of domain and there’s the issue of seeing about getting the pagerank moved over too.

Since she has a proper domain now, ’tis time to think about promoting it and we’re hoping to get going on that over the next couple of days.

Interestingly, one of our most successful website launches is our very new Whole Earth Guide. For reasons which totally escape me, our article on opening a bank account in America has proved to be an immediate success for the site and consequently we’ll be extending the expat banking section of the site over the coming months.

Although it’s outside the main holiday season, we’re still fairly full but not quite in the same pattern as is usual for this time of year.

We generally get quite a respectable level of occupancy during September but ordinarily it’s a pattern of lots in the first week followed by a reasonably even spread over the rest of the month. In common with the changing pattern of bookings this year, September is also quite different.

So, this month we haven’t got the usual even spread but instead have a series of clumps of bookings. For instance, we were almost completely full on Sunday night (an odd night to be full) yet Monday night saw just one couple in residence.

As usual, we’ve no idea of what the rest of the year will turn out to be like as people are continuing with their trend of making reservations just a week or two in advance.

We usually have quite a mix of nationalities and particularly so when we’re full yet we’ve been completely full for a few days now and everyone is from the UK.

You might think that’s very peculiar in that there isn’t any UK holiday on at the moment. Where are the French for instance? Well, the French don’t come very much outside their main holiday season which generally means that we wouldn’t expect to get the next French guest ’til we get into October.

Quite where everyone else is, I don’t know.

Now and again we get asked that and it’s far from an easy question to answer as we don’t know anything about the people asking it.

For example, we get lots of walkers and cyclists staying with us. They usually don’t need a car but sometimes they do in that they want to walk in a number of number of different types of scenery.

Depending on where you want to go, you can do quite well with public transport or, alternatively, see nothing at all of interest to you.

If you’d like to go to the beach, it’s quite easy from here on the bus for instance. However, if you want to see the castles then you’re going to need a car unless you’re fairly fit and can cycle or walk to them.

So, if you want a sensible answer, don’t just ask us if you need a car: tell us what things you want to see, whether you like walking or cycling, and so on so that we can give you the correct answer.

Usually the guests thin out a little by this time of year but we’re getting something of a return towards full occupancy for the next few weeks this year.

How come? Well, one key aspect of it is a series of upgrades and promotions that we made to the accommodation website over the last year which have together had the effect that we get a great deal more ownsite bookings than we did previously.

Also, some of the sites that we’re listed with have clearly been beavering away with their own promotion activities. One notable groups of sites in this regard is activehotels.com which was bought by booking.com last year resulting in a very substantial jump in the number of reservations from the combined group and they in turn were bought by priceline.com in the last 12 months or so which has resulted in us being listed on an even larger group of sites and thereby bumped up the reservations yet again.

What’s the strategy for the coming year though?

As usual, we’ll be reviewing the website as there’s always something that can be improved or even simply updated. Beyond that, I’ve built up something of a backlog of sites that we could be listed on so I’ll be working through those from October onwards.

On ‘tother side of the fence so to speak, we have a number of developments on the listing sites pencilled in. They too were considerably more successful over the past year than they had been previously again due to a series of site promotion exercises and some site improvements. We’re moving the focus to our new-generation sites this year of which the key development engine will probably be Whole Earth Guide although as that uses the template of the other new-generation sites, all those in that group will be affected.

Quite noticeable already is that Whole Earth already has over 700 incoming links despite only being around for just over a month. Once we start promotion of it properly, that number should jump quite dramatically and so too should the number of site visitors.