Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

Two years ago as I was promoting my free listings sites I received an interesting e-mail which demanded to know how I could possibly run the sites without charging for them.

In fact, it turned out to be from someone who was running a similar site which charged around £50/year for very similar listings to my own sites. That site happened to be up for sale and for a time I was quite interested in aquiring it but for various reasons that never came to pass.

One interesting point from that was that the profitability of his site was quite comparable to my own once you adjusted for the different number of entries on our respective sites. In fact, it appeared that the “free” model that I was using would actually be much more profitable than the charging model that he was using had simply taken over his database of expired subscriptions and put them on my own site as live “free” entries.

How can that be? Simply because I place adverts on my site whereas he didn’t and, of course, since my listings are “free” people go onto the site and never leave whereas he was in a treadmill each year to attract new entries to replace those that had decided not to renew. In fact, that lack of turnover means that my own sites will overtake the size of any comparable subscription based site sooner or later.

So are my sites free? I certainly don’t charge people for listings (though, for psychological reasons I quote a notional price). Yet I obviously get income from them so somebody is clearly paying.

In the real world there are usually limits to “free” services like this. The UK National Health Service has all kinds of problems in running “free” as people have a tendency to expect there to be no limits to what they should do, ignoring the fact that clearly the service isn’t free as it’s paid for in taxes. Yet, on the Internet, these limits don’t seem to apply: if I ever get to the point of having, say, 50000 entries on the sites it would cost little more to run than if I had 5000 entries.

Free, or rather ad-supported, seems to be the future for services on the Internet but I’m sure that many old-school types will continue to regard these with suspicion when compared to equivalent services which charge.

It’s back to school today for James which means that we’ve to start getting up at a fixed time yet again.

One of the oddities about this business is that there are no regular hours at all. During the summer we generally need to be up no later than 7.30am each day and often need to stay around the office until after 11pm each night. Once we get outside the peak period though there starts to be periods of a day or two when we’ve nobody in and can lay in a while and over the winter you often get stretches of a week or more at a time when you can take it easy.

Well, perhaps “take it easy” isn’t the right description as we use those times sans guests to get various bits of maintenance done, to catch up with the administration and move more into our little empire of online activities. Still, ’tis nice not to have both the early start and late finish for a while even if it is a little muddied by school days.

When you run a booking service, you get a strange perspective of the holiday booking habits of people which is generally at odds with what you’d think people would really do.

For instance, our B&B sites pick up a lot of traffic from around April through to August each year and outside that they’ve relatively low numbers of visitors. That’s understandable really as most B&B bookings are for just a few days at a time at most and you wouldn’t expect people to book short term holidays a long time in advance.

It’s quite different for the self-catering sites though. For them the booking season started just before Christmas and we’re getting so much traffic on the sites at the moment that it looks like we’ll need to upgrade the bandwidth next week. In fact, the traffic is pretty much as high as it was in the peak of the summer season!

We’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the latest versions of both these satnav systems over the last couple of weeks ie the sensibly priced Tomtom One v3 and the Garmin Nuvi 250W.

On a first comparison, the Tomtom seems the better of the two in that the menus offer a lot more options compared to the Garmin model. However, the majority of those extra options are to do with things like changing the voice and various non-navigation related features. There’s also a range of display related options letting you add the current speed, max speed, time remaining and so on where the Garmin just shows your speed and projected arrival time and next turn. OK, so you’ll play around with all those extra options but realistically the arrival time (or the time remaining) plus your next turn is all you actually need and, in general, that’s the theme for the Garmin: it gives you the information that you need without all the extraneous information that the Tomtom provides.

One key difference though is that the Tomtoms don’t have a memory card slot whereas the Garmin do. With the increasing range of maps available these days and all the extra detail that comes out with each new version that’s a builtin obselence on the part of the Tomtom which is going to cost you dear sooner or later. For example, if you get the Tomtom One single-country version you’ll find that you’re stuck with the map that’s preloaded because the machine hasn’t got enough memory to load any other countries. In the equivalently priced Garmin you have an SD slot which would let you load maps of a continent if you wanted to. If you buy Tomtom UK and would like to add the European maps for the holidays, you can’t.

Incidently, on the map pricing front, it’s probably better to spend the extra £30 upfront to get the European maps rather than run with the UK only ones. The European maps, of course, include the UK. If you’re going for the Tomtom, you have to make this decision at the outset but you could add a memory card for the extra maps in the Garmin.

Overall, I prefer the current Tomtom software but that lack of a memory card means that you’ll be throwing it away in a few years when the maps grow too large when paying £5 or so will get you a very large memory card these days and upgrade your Garmin to hold much larger maps.

Last year we had quite a noticeable dip in traffic on the sites from November onwards but this year we’d simply a small dip over part of the Christmas period.

In fact, it would seem that people have been booking much, much earlier for 2008 than they did the previous year. We’ve had pretty much level traffic on the sites from August right through to now with, as I say, a small dip over part of Christmas.

Part of that is probably due to us starting our marketing programme for the sites in November but even so we still had pretty much summer level traffic on the sites before we started which is pretty unusual as the B&B site traffic usually drops like a stone after August and the self-catering traffic drops up to a month earlier than that.

In fact, the traffic is up so much that I suspect that I’m going to have to upgrade the hosting package for the sites as soon as Easter when ordinarily the upgrade that I did in December would have seen me through at least a year.