Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

One odd thing in this Internet age is that it’s becoming more and more common for people to phone up for a booking rather than doing it online.

Now, we always expected that from the French as, until fairly recently, they just didn’t trust the Internet and certainly didn’t trust it with their debit card details. However, recently it’s becoming rather common among the English and Spanish. Why, I don’t know, but there you are.

In summertime it’s something of a nuisance as it can be quite difficult to reconcile phone bookings with online availability without ending up with double bookings. In fact, we often need to confirm that rooms remain available before saying OK to people on the phone as bookings come in at a fair rate at peak times in the Summer.

Whilst we had loads of housebuyers staying with us in 2004 and 2005, 2006 saw none of them at all.

Who knows why? The UK interest rates weren’t much higher than they were the year before nor did there seem to be a big difference in the UK house prices.

It’s the same this year too ie no big difference. Yet, we’re just into the main house-hunting season (usually October to March) and already we’ve had three separate house-buying families call in with us. Whether this is the sign of a major buying spree is a good question but at least it’s a sign of the start of a movement in the French market.

OK, so you’ve got a lovely B&B, brilliant location and beautifully decorated but what about attracting some guests?

That’s usually the step that fells most B&B owners as they generally get into the business by accident, figuring that if they have a lovely place then loads of people will come to stay.

Unfortunately, it rarely works like that and before long they start looking around for places to advertise this “heaven on earth” that they’ve created. Sadly, some of the owners leave that step far too late: you should get going on your marketing efforts as early as possible, even if it means that you are advertising the place before it’s ready and need to add “ready next Easter” or whatever.

As usual, we’re getting going on our own marketing for the new year fairly soon. In addition to the annual upgrade of our family of listings sites (OurInns) we’re rolling out two new initiatives in that area: Whole Earth Guide already and soon Inns4U. All are free listings sites so if you have a B&B or self-catering (vacation rental) place now’s a good time to add yourself here.

Once we get about half-way through October, our Winter development programme usually starts to get into its stride.

For this year, we have a whole host of things on the to-do list:

1. A general tidy-up of the original version of the inns family of sites. First-off on this front is a major spring-clean of the UK listings before we start firing our marketing e-mails off. We’ve recently added the Inns4U domain which may take over as the primary domain for these sites although it’ll likely be a very gradual changeover.
2. The upgrade of the new-generation sites over at OurBedAndBreakfasts.com will be continuing in tandem with the expansion of our Whole Earth Guide.
3. The Whole Earth Guide will be expanding quite rapidly, initially concentrating on the areas already covered by the inns listings. Once we get enough content onto Whole Earth, we’re planning on incorporating content from it into the other listings sites which should help the ranking of those too.
4. More blogs will be coming onstream over the next few months. We’ve changed over to Cultured Views and have been working on both An Age of Magic and On a Postcard on and off over the Summer.

Somehow I think that’ll keep us pretty busy this side of Christmas!

This is our first “day off” for a while so we’re at a bit of a loss as to what to do!

Funnily enough, it feels very much like a Saturday so far, though why that is, I just don’t know.

We had our usual “Saturday morning” lay-in so everything is running later than usual. Somehow we’ve gotten to lunchtime already yet we’ve not done any of our usual morning things yet!

As we’ve been a bit lazy, we’ve all the rooms in the place to make up sometime between today and tomorrow morning so that’ll keep us out of trouble once we get going on it.

Wendy’s next in line for the computer (we’ll have two from next week: no more queuing!!!) so I’m off to have another look at the Spanish.