Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

You always get a lot of peculiar phone calls around this time of year.

“I just booked a room on your website. Can you tell me if it has a bathroom?”. Well, no we couldn’t because they had quite literally just booked the room and it can take a few hours before we get the confirmation email or fax….. about 70% of the French who book online make phone calls within 5 minutes of making the booking to confirm that we’ve received it.

“I’m on your website right now. It says that there’s a room available. I want a room with a bathroom.”. Yes, it’s EUR 57. “No, it isn’t it says that it’s EUR 49”. That’s for the room with a shared bathroom, the room you want is EUR 57. “Can’t I have it for EUR 49?”. Well, no, but you can have the room with a shared bathroom for EUR 49. “But, I want an ensuite room”. Yes, that’s EUR 57….. We get a LOT of conversations like that one!

“I’m on your website right now. Can I book over the phone?” Yes, I just need a credit card and expiry date. “I’m paying by Cheques Vacances”. That’s OK, I still need a credit card number to guarantee the room. “I’m paying by Cheques Vacances I don’t need to give you a credit card number.” Yes, you do, we need it to guarantee the room…. after 10 mins of this he cancelled the booking that he hadn’t made.

“We’re here for the room.” Have you a reservation? “No, but we checked online a few days ago and you had rooms available today.” Yes, but we’re full today. Did you make a reservation?…. Surprisingly we’ve been getting a number of people lately who’ve just checked availability a few days earlier and assume that we won’t get bookings after they check.

A new development this year is that people are starting to book online whilst they’re on the way. Then they phone to check that we’ve received the reservation about a minute after they logout. Very confusing as the latest lot arrived about 10 minutes later.

One of the best things about the paid posts is that there are a fair number of them that I’d be writing anyway in due course. ‘Tis easy enough to pick these ones out as they’re a lot longer, more complete and get a photo or two.

I’ve even had someone offer to pay for one after I’d written it!

Now, the big question is how I can get people to sponsor the other websites directly….

Although our Whole Earth Guide is only two days old, we’ve already pulled in some cash from adsense on the site which is a good start seeing as it has very little content at the moment.

We’re aiming to add several new articles to the site a week over the Summer and hoping to step that up over the coming Winter not to mention site improvements that will be ongoing over that period. At the moment, it’s limited to articles on specific places or attractions such as our piece on the Rambla area of Barcelona but we’ll be adding the facility to hold articles on regions and countries in due course.

In parallel with this, we’re enhancing the new versions of our B&B and self-catering listings sites and will be cross-linking those with the Whole Earth Guide in due course (and indeed with our other listings sites).

If you’re very keen, you can even add your own article (about 300-400 words plus a photo) via the link at Our Inns (just select “Whole Earth Guide” as the property type) you can add a link to your own site from an article, but put it in the comments as I’ll need to edit it in for you.

As you may know, I’ve been experimenting with the hosting location of several of my websites over the last few months and indeed years.

To begin with I hosted mascamps.com in America basically because that’s where my earlier websites lived and it was handy to just add the new one to the existing account. Anyway, about a year after we got here the various Our Inns had started off on 1and1.co.uk basically because it was handier to have multiple domains in one account but only pay for one webspace account.

Anyway, come 2006 and I needed to upgrade the account to run the database version of the Inns sites. That meant, on 1and1, a move from £25/year to £10/month so I started shopping round and ended up plumping for godaddy in the USA. Snag was that almost immediately after the move, the site traffic started dropping. In fact it ended up dropping 90% before I figured that perhaps £10/month wasn’t too bad after all and, guess what?, well the traffic went up x10 in the two weeks following the move back to the UK!

So, of course, over the year or so after that I gradually moved everything to 1and1 UK. Well, I say “UK” but in fact it’s actually in Germany.

Soooo, come this year I started wondering about hosting in the UK properly. Up ’til quite recently that’s been quite expensive as I need a sort-of “reseller” account in that I need to be able to use the one webspace but have lots of domains pointing to it. However, now it’s dropped to around £20/year (eukhost.com) so time for another experiment.

OK, not so spectacular this time but a jump of around 100% in site traffic does seem worthwhile so over the coming winter I’ll be moving the rest of the sites over and thereby a) getting a lot more traffic and b) saving a fortune compared to 1and1.

What I’ve not done until now is to try out a .co.uk domain for sites largely aimed at the UK market. That’s in the process of changing as I’m putting Whole Earth Guide on a .co.uk domain to see how it goes. Snag is that I’ve not really got a truly comparable domain to check the performance against.

As you can see we’ve started offering the option to buy prints of the photographs from this site and others that we run.

However, as soon as we started doing that we hit the problem that the resolution of our camera ain’t good enough to produce the largest prints and indeed isn’t high enough for the images to be accepted by some services.

Related to that we’re now looking for more images for our Whole Earth Guide and it seems to make sense to do something about the camera for that too (we’re hoping that we can supply the majority of the photographs for that from our own picture library).

Which is where we hit our dilema. We have a massive library of slide photographs and could continue to take those using the Nikon F3 but would need a slide scanner to be able to use them properly. That would run to £500 or more.

Alternatively we could buy something like the Nikon D40x (also £500+) and use that to build the library for the future.

At the moment I don’t know which way to go. Ideally, of course, we’d buy both but there isn’t enough money in the site development kitty to do that.