Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

As I build up Whole Earth Guide I’m researching what’s to see and do at each place that I get to.

What’s very surprising about this is that already the site is starting to rank fairly well for some of the places that I’ve already covered and also that there’s next to no information available online for some quite spectacular places.

So, today it was Cordoba which has loads and loads of history and quite fantastic places to see courtesy of that history. Yet, when I looked, virtually no information online about it in any depth.

How come? Simple really. Cordoba airport isn’t a discount airline destination airport yet so to go there you need to go somewhere like Seville or Malaga and drive inland.

It’s definitely worth that drive though.

Since we’d to go back to the Halifax in Spain, we thought that we’d stay in a hotel in Barcelona rather than doing a round trip of about six hours driving.

Good idea in principle as the hotel would have cost around the same as the petrol and tolls and we’d have had a full day in Barcelona too which would have been nice.

However, we didn’t allow for the combination of somewhat elevated prices (despite the hotel being almost empty) and the very poor signposting in the city. Anyway, we tried the Ibis which used to be around EUR 60 but is now EUR 90 so we thought we’d try the Campanile near Baricentro instead.

We’ve been planning on staying in that Campanile for ages as it’s just beside a shopping centre which needs a full day to do it properly plus the Campanile are brilliant for families. Not so this one. Despite their child policy allowing children under 12 to stay free, they said that they’d only rooms for two and we’d have to take an extra one for the kids. Actually, now that we’ve looked at their website in fact they DO have rooms for three. They were available too as the carpark was virtually empty but that in itself is no real surprise as it took us nearly an hour of driving past the place on the motorways which surround it before we happened across the single (unmarked) exit required to get into the hotel.

They must make a fortune on no-shows! If I could buy a small house in that estate I’d be tempted to list it as a 300 bedroom hotel on the basis that virtually nobody is able to get to it.

By far the vast majority of our guests enjoy staying here but in the French holiday season we always get a few who go out of their way to find fault and always save up those faults to report them to us in the morning.

They’re always French because that’s how the French seem to go about demanding a reduction in the bill as they don’t believe that they should pay the extra required in the summer.

It’s easy to pick these ones out as they barely speak to you as you’re checking them in and showing them to the room. Whilst the French almost always take breakfast, these ones don’t as that’s another thing which makes the room too expensive.

Then, in the morning, they pick on one or two things which weren’t 100% right for them, demand a reduction and then threaten to report you to all and sundry. It’s always in that sequence too: they demand the reduction THEN they say they’ll report you to all in sundry ie it’s very much blackmail.

Thankfully they’re few and far between but we just received a particularly obnoxious variety of the species a few days ago. He actually found one thing that really was wrong with the room although as it was something which could be fixed in under 5 seconds he clearly couldn’t tell us about it when he arrived or he’d not have anything to complain about so instead he let a dripping cistern keep him awake all night.

He had a particularly interesting line of argument with the cistern. Seemingly he thought that a dripping cistern was enough to have the Prefecture close us down. That certainly would have an interesting effect if they did that because they’d need to close down just about every hotel in the world if that was enough reason to close a place.

As usual, he was rude and offensive, becoming more and more so as he realised that we weren’t going to give him a reduction in the price and he even continued in this vein as he left with assorted rude and offensive gestures as he left (narrowly missing a tree as he was steering with one hand).

Oh well, at least the summer season is pretty much over so that should be the last such example of the species we get until next year.

Whilst in our first year, we had quite a number of driveby bookings, over the last two years we’ve had virtually none.

Until recently that is. Why, I don’t know, but the number of driveby bookings has started to rise quite sharply. Separately, but probably related to that, we’ve started to get a rapidly rising number of almost last minute bookings via various websites (recently they turned up within 10 minutes of booking online so they must have booked whilst driving!).

Such has been the drop in drivebys that we’ve pretty much gotten out of the way of them and ended up with quite a rush last night when a group of six German musicians turned up looking for rooms.

One confusing thing this year is that we’re still pretty full this week and even had to close down availability for a couple of days already. Ordinarily, when the French have gone home from their holidays last Saturday, there’s a week of a lull in activity before the Visa pour L’Image photojournalism festival starts but for the next couple of days we’re pretty much full.

Even odder is that it’s during a time when the weather is just dreadful which generally keeps down the numbers of guests staying with us.

What is a major nuisance is that they’re all booking just a couple of days at most in advance. That has the effect that we don’t know if there’ll be a lull at all because we could easily find that the end of the week we’re full.

Still, it helps the bank balance no end!