Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

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.

It seems like a very, very long time ago that I thought I’d best get myself fluent in French if I ever wanted to live in France.

Some years after that initial thought, I started French with the Open University and three years later found myself the very proud owner of a Diploma in French. That should have been the end of that, but…. by that time we’d started picking up a fair number of Spanish guests so I thought I’d restart my long forgotten Spanish.

‘Tis now three years since I did that and the final exam for the Diploma in Spanish is next Monday.

Now that I’ve gotten this far, it turns out that one more course is enough to get me a BA (Hons) in Modern Languages which is definitely something I never ever thought there’d even be the remotest possibility of adding to my name. That “one more course” happens to be a level two English course which, all being well, I’ll be starting next February.

It still hasn’t fully sunk in that I have a Diploma in French and I get the certificate out now and again even now in case it was all a dream!

What next after the English though?

Well, as it happens, I’ll have an overhang of one course at that point (assuming that I pass the Spanish next week and the English next year). So, one more English course gets me a Diploma in English. That in turn leaves an overhang of one course towards the next degree…..

As I near the end of the Spanish course, one thing after another is getting finished off.

Yesterday, it was the end of the books that I reached. It seems like only yesterday when I was starting the first one yet it was right at the start of January!

Tonight, was the final get-together of our little online Spanish group. We’ve been getting together off and on for the last three years and ’twas the final meeting this evening so the headset has had its final use…. unless I take the head staggers and sign up for the German or perhaps the Italian course, of course…

Next week sees the exam so there’ll be something of a gap in the posts from me from later this week ’til at least Wednesday of next week.