Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Still no car which is a major bummer. It’s supposed to be here next week.

We’ve now arrived in the big time with our listing on expedia. I only worked out how we got onto it last week. It seems that in the course of one of my marketing onslaughts earlier in the year I followed up who does the hotels for AirFrance and it’s an outfit I’d never heard of called WWTE who are actually expedia/hotels.com. Interestingly, if we’d applied to expedia directly, they’d have turned us down as we’d need to have 30 rooms but apply via WWTE and this restriction isn’t applied.

I’d forgotten all about hotelconnect who used to be the people behind FlyBE’s hotels but were dumped earlier in the year. Anyway, they actually call out to see you so our application has effectively been lying around for months. The guy turned up during the week and reckons that we’ll be on around mid-July. Although they don’t look after any airline flying into Perpignan, I think we’ll do quite well from their listing as they do most of their sales through travel agents which is an area we’d always wanted to get into. Also, they reckon that another airline is about to start flights into Perpignan and they’re looking for more hotels to service that.

We’ve finally started to get bookings from bookings.net . Just a couple so far but it’s a start.

Due to a slight lull before the summer kicks in I’ve finally managed to make a proper start on getting the winery/vineyard website. It’s not online yet but mark 1 should be within a week or two. We’ll probably move into online sales not too long after that as they already do mail order next door (only to France though).

Yet another “all building” booking rolled in last night. A travelling theatre group (“la Compagnie Les Affranchis”) is staying for a couple of nights (see http://www.ccas.fr/tcult/spectacle.php?ref=156).

Another hectic month of marketing is the excuse for the long delay since the last issue. All being well, we’re nearly the end of the work that was thrown off as a consequence of the marketing blitz about a month ago and can sit back and wait for all the reservations to flow in.

Leaving out a heap of minor additions to our listings we added the following list of major places in the last month:

– ActiveHotels…. who do “own label” front ends to their system so you’ve probably used them in the past;
– Bookings… who seem to pop up all over the place;
– Expedia… well, you know these guys;
– Gullivers Travel… who are the people behind loads and loads of different reservation systems from Ryanair Hotels to Octopus Travel;
– Hotels.com … who feed the databases of all kinds of listing sites; and
– TravelExtras… the new people supplying FlyBE’s accommodation.

We’re now starting to panic about the effect of managing all the bookings that those listings should generate. Last August we were on one similar system which gave us about 11% occupancy by itself so, in theory, the above lot should add something like 60% to that on a like for like comparison ie a total of 70% or so occupancy before you even count the other listings we have, our own website and people just dropping in.

Wendy has told me not to even think about any more listings ’til we see if we can cope with those we’ve already got!

It is going to be pretty time consuming to keep on top of the whole lot as in addition to the above major ones we also have RatesToGo which has started to bring in a fair number of bookings and Venere who are pretty consistent over the year. We’re also expecting to get considerably more bookings directly from the website now that we’ve add the “book now” facility.

If I had the time, I’d be inclined to run a book on which will pull in the most business. My money is on WebReservations (our original and, so far, best system) because it’s syndicated all over the place but I imagine that Expedia/Hotels.com will not be far behind. I don’t think that TravelExtras will feature highly because they’re very new and we don’t get a lot of FlyBE business anyway. Third place will probably be a three way tie between ActiveHotels, Bookings and Gullivers.

Any thoughts yourselves? What systems do YOU use to book your accommodation?

The car has been causing us all kinds of grief over the last month so we’ve decided that it’s time to get a new one. If nothing else, it will greatly simplify our life as we won’t need to go through all the hassle of having to get the Toyota through the French car importation process. Interestingly, the car prices seem to be much the same as in the UK with the main difference being that they use a euro symbol here instead of the pound sign ie they are considerably cheaper. Funnily enough the second hand car prices are almost the same as the new car prices, or at least the French tend to ask for much the same.

Anyway, we’re looking for a diesel (preferably automatic), 5 door. We’re probably going to use this as our second car in due course so EUR 10,000 to EUR 15,000 is the budget. Sort-of like the Volkswagen Polo or perhaps the Mercedes A. Suggestions welcome!

We had yet another long phone call from the TV company who said that they like our story so perhaps we’ll have to make a decision as to whether or not to appear. At present they are looking to do one or perhaps two places in considerably more detail than they’d originally intended so Mayhem at the Mas may yet appear on a screen near you next January!

Yes, folks it is now one year since we arrived here. Well, one year and a bit as we arrived at 7pm local time.

A year ago, we’d no reservations in the book and didn’t know that our first customers would be turning up in a few days time. Now we’ve a smattering of reservations right through to September. A year ago we managed one nights occupancy over Easter; this year 38.

A year ago, we’d hardly any furniture for our own rooms. And we still haven’t!

A year ago, we’d just missed appearing on Living the Dream. Now we don’t know yet if we’ll be in the No Going Back series.

A year ago, I was getting into the shorts & sandles “uniform” that I’d keep up ’til November. Yup, just broke out the “uniform” a few days ago… 32C in the shade this afternoon and I’m a bit sunburnt.

A year ago, I was pretty sure that I’d fail the French diploma. Now I’ve got Dip French after my name and am making a respectable start on the Dip Spanish.

A year ago, ‘yall said you’d be here… and none of you have arrived yet! No, Dorothy, I haven’t forgotten your reservation in September.

A year ago, we didn’t know how quickly we could get to the clinic. We found out on August 29th when John decided that he’d had enough. Or was it Wendy?

A year ago, we thought we were crazy to have bought a hotel in France. Now we’re even crazier and have started looking for the next place!

A year ago, we were wondering if the French bureaucracy was as bad as everyone made it out to be. Now we know that it’s even worse than that.

A year ago, we didn’t know that we’d be having to make over 300 beds over the following 12 months. Now we’re looking forward to making over 500 in the next 12 months.

Just got our car back from the garage. It packed in on the way to Spain on Monday so we’ve been walking everywhere this week. All being well, we’ll be attempting the run to Spain again on Monday.

Now that we’ve hit the anniversary, we are getting going on selling the house in Holywood. So, if you want an immaculate, spacious two bedroom house with newly fitted luxury bathroom, cabled for BT, NTL and Sky, near to all local amenities and with excellent transport links, you know where to look.

Well, finally, I have found a way of getting the pages into a semblance of Dutch.

Unfortunately, this has the immediate consequence that I now definitely need to do something about the language bar as it’s taking over the pages. The longer term knock-on effect is that sooner or later I’m liable to get an e-mail in Dutch. We’ve already had this problem with the Spanish pages: just got an Austrian writing in slightly iffy Spanish enquiring about the apartment so I had to reply in my even iffier Spanish.

Dug out a translation someone did of part of our little brochure a while back and now we have the main pages in SIX languages. Impressive, or what?

Well, the list of flags sure looks impressive to me. Sadly, three of the languages are fairly basic (German, Italian and the new one, Catalan) but we actually get hits on them. All being well, the google link on each will produce a few more cents income (from a standing start less than a week ago, we’re up all of 40c so far).