Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

The transition from “Summer Mode” when you’re completely full pretty much all the time, to “Winter Mode” when there’s almost always a room or two free happens very suddenly.

As in most things, the French assume that hotel reservations work the way that they worked in France 50 years ago.

Of course, they rarely use the internet to make their reservations (although, to be fair, that is changing) and generally phone. In fact, it’s not unknown to receive a letter asking for a reservation and expecting a reply by letter too. Out of the peak seasons, that’s not too bad but we just ignore any letters received like that during the peak season as we just can’t afford to hold a room on the off-chance that they may actually confirm the reservation a week or two later.

The use of debit/credit card numbers as a guarantee is virtually unknown to them and they almost always ask to pay a deposit by cheque. Their lack of experience of using their card to guarantee a room means that it’s quite common for them to think that they’ve paid for the room when they make a reservation online and have quoted their card number which often requires considerable explanation at checkout time.

One major cause of friction is that they assume that it’s fine to cancel a reservation at anytime without charge. Everywhere else in the world, you need to cancel a hotel reservation before the arrival time you quoted and often 24 hours or more before that. Here, they assume that if they’ve not stayed in the room, then it’s OK. After all, the room isn’t costing the hotel anything, is it? It might not be costing anything, but when we get cancellations well into the evening, we’ve often turned people away because with a card number guaranteeing the room we are obliged to hold the room. This year for instance we had two days when we were completely full and turning away numerous people yet had hardly anyone who actually stayed!

Abroad, it’s even worse for them though. By and large, the French only have debit cards and severely limited ones at that. Whereas in the UK the cash withdrawal limit on a debit or cash card is around £250 (EUR 500) per DAY, in France the standard limit is EUR 300 per WEEK. Not only that but whilst you could, in principle, buy a house on a debit card in the UK, there is a spending limit of, usually, EUR 3000 per month on French debit cards (which is why they continue to use so many cheques). For most purposes, that’s OK. However, consider someone booking into a hotel in the UK. The first think that is done is that the card is run through for an authorisation of, usually, £100 per day (ie about EUR 150), even if the hotel actually only costs about £50 a night. So, a French person can stay a maximum of 20 days in UK hotels and, of course, that’s before you consider spending elsewhere.

This is why France is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t pre-authorise payments.

So, no, the French don’t understand hotel reservations work unless they’re in France with a hotel that only operates in France.

These days when people buy a holiday accommodation property one of the first things that they think of is their website. That’s no bad thing although many people think that their website is all the marketing that they need. Still, it’s a start.

However, where a lot of people go wrong is that once they’ve produced their website, they think that’s it. It’s not as if it needs maintenance like the building obviously does, is it?

Well, yes, it does need maintenance. Oh, it will continue to work for many years but it’ll get more and more dated as time goes on which is never good. If you don’t think that’s true, pick any website that’s been around for a while and look at what it was like even 5 years ago never mind 10 using the Way Back Machine [www.archive.org]. I think you’ll find that any successful website has changed substantially over that period of time.

I’ll touch on the various aspects of our 2007 update over the coming months but one aspect that is critical is the photography. Some people consider that they should get a professional photographer in to take their photos and that will get you the best photos of your place on the day they come to take them. The key point there is that they are the best photos “on the day”; why settle for that if you’re living there and can wait until the light is perfect, there are no clouds in the sky, etc.? Saying that you don’t have a suitable camera is no excuse as good digital cameras are available from £100 these days whereas a professional photographer could charge you anything up to £500. More importantly than the money saved is that if you are taking the photos, you can update them for no extra cost and it’s not long before you need to update them by the time you consider that you’ve repainted a room, bought a new chair, even added a plant it doesn’t take long before the photo of a room becomes completely out of date.

Anyway, we’ve started updating our property photos yet again and have moved to a new viewpoint for this year. The top photo is the one we’ve been using for about 18 months or so, the lower one is close to what we’re going to run with for the coming year (I forgot to get all the shutters open this morning, so have to retake it tomorrow morning).

The place seems quite different in the second photo, doesn’t it? Yet virtually nothing has changed on the outside of the building (we’ve been concentrating on the inside).

Arnold

Seems like ages since the last Mas Camps News!

What’s been happening?

Well, we had our first holiday since we got here. More on that if you read the blog entries from April. Although we just went to Turkey to see the solar eclipse, we’d like to go back as the trip was far too short. Might even drive it next time as we had some Turkish guests a month or so back who did exactly that. However, they recommend taking the ferry from Italy to Greece rather than driving through Croatia etc. as they reckon that route is a bit dangerous.

The pattern of reservations has been quite different from last year. Very, very little in February and March but once we hit Easter, the occupancy was way up. Almost triple the number of people this June as we had last year. July was slightly higher but completely with “ordinary” guests as we didn’t have the equivalent of the two massive bookings we had last year. Different from last year too is that September already has a fair number of bookings.

And we’ve launched a few more websites. With the quiet period in February, I was able to move Our Inns and Our Gites into PHP and MySQL which has reduced considerably the amount of effort required to put properties online. Not only that but I’ve taken the opportunity to add a number of enhancements and permit people to add a whole lot more information.

Once all the information was in the database (major nightmare!), I made a start on the much more commercially targetted Our Holiday Rental Homes and Our Bed and Breakfasts. Can’t really see them doing well in the search engines this holiday season but the older sites are doing very well. Both Chambre-d’Hote and Our Gites (listing B&B and self-catering properties in France respectively) regularly appear in the top 10 on google searches.

Last, but not least, I thought that I’d move the blog into my own domain. Still haven’t sussed out the full route, but expect to see it arriving at Foreign Perspectives shortly.

Even though we’re supposedly in the high season, there are still gaps of a few days without guests at the moment which is just as well as it’s been very hot this year and we’re all a little exhausted with the heat.

Surprisingly, I’ve been able to keep going with web developments up to now and have started the process of launching Our Bed and Breakfasts.com now rather than waiting ’til September. The intention is that it will be a fully commercial site in terms of look and feel but initially it will feed off the OurInns database as indeed will the revamped Our Vacation Rental Homes.com site (initially a clone of Our Holiday Rental Homes). Whether or not I’ll be able to attract paying customers to the sites is another question of course but the stats that I started collecting for the sites in June should help the argument.

I’m also hoping to start integrating property sales into the database which could be the key to making the whole venture profitable in the longer term. Short term, it should increase the size of the site which in turn will increase the number of hits for the holiday listings.

After moving the sites back to 1and1, the adsense income (and presumably the hits) is back up to the normal of a few dollars a day. I’ve still not worked out why Marcus has around twice that but I suspect that it’s something to do with the placement and layout of the adverts so I’m going to have to explore that fairly soon.