Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

We’ve been here over two years now and have been meaning to take a trip on the Train Jaune (Yellow Train) for most of that time. Well, yesterday we finally got around to it.

The first half of the trip to Latour de Carol is, as you’d expect, through the mountain passes of the Pyrenees but after that it levels out into more normal scenery and finishes the run in the very disappointing Latour train station. In years gone by this must have been a major terminus when you look at the sheer size of the station but there’s little to show for all that past glory now so most people seem to take the first train back.

The whole route is very popular with hikers and the train needed to stop at almost all of the courtesy stops on the return journey to pick up parties of walkers.

The train has the ubiquitous open-top carriage but it doesn’t seem overly practical to me as three hours out in the sunshine of southern France adds up to a serious case of sunburn. To get the typical photos of the train crossing aqueducts etc. you need to be in either the first carriage or the last one. The “standard” photo of it is taken from the roadside between Villefranche and the first stop at Olette.

Although most people seem to take the train from the “start” of the line in Villefranche, a much better day-trip would be to start from Latour de Carol instead as Villefranche seems to be the only stop on the line where there is a lively and interesting town just beside the train station.

You can only book the train on the day which at least gives a reasonable chance of getting on the trip if you arrive early enough. It’s 32‚€ for the trip.

Our next adventure will be to take the Red Train though it doesn’t seem to be as interesting as there are none of the mountain gorges to pass through and besides you can drive along the entire route.

This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.

Happy Halloween!

October was relatively quiet on the hotel front ’til this weekend which is a holiday in both France & Spain so we were completely full from Friday to Sunday night.

I’ve been tidying up the various websites that we run and improving their search rankings. The combination of improvements on the main hotel page (www.mascamps.com) has given us a 10 fold increase in the number of hits so far. The equivalent changes are in the works for www.ourinns.org which is already moving up the rankings and we’re making about $50 a month now on the advertising on it and the related www.chambre-dhote.org (in French) and the self-catering equivalent, www.ourgites.org .

Separately from those developments, I thought I’d see if we could more directly make a few bob on the transport arrangements people make and registered www.perpignanflightsandcarhire.com which is starting to get a sensible search engine ranking though it’s got a long way to go. If you’re booking any travel yourself, you’ll find the cheapest car hire in the Perpignan area (no, reallY: I checked them all) and, I think, in Europe, worldwide flights on discount and normal airlines, the Heathrow & Stansted express tickets and even ferries. We’ve already made about half the start-up costs of this in commissions which is pretty good going I think.

More as somewhere to hang our affiliate links than anything else at present, we’ve also got www.personallychosen.com which has quite an assortment of things on it. All the above travel things but also some financial links and even La Senza. In due course, we’re planning to use it to sell some of the photos that we’ve taken for the website as prints and for a few other items that people have asked us about. Basically, it’s intended to be our main non-mascamps website. If you buy any stuff online, let me know where from and I’ll see if we can get a link for it (if you ask nicely, I will probably split the commission with you).

Started experimenting again with e-bay which is a dead cheap way to advertise. Costs just 15p for 10 days which has picked up around 40 views on average although no direct sales. We’re not that bothered about the direct sales this tiME: last year we had one, slightly lossmaking, direct sale but pulled in getting on for EUR 1000 in indirect bookings over the following 9 months attracted by our ebay ads.

Another hectic month of marketing is the excuse for the long delay since the last issue. All being well, we’re nearly the end of the work that was thrown off as a consequence of the marketing blitz about a month ago and can sit back and wait for all the reservations to flow in.

Leaving out a heap of minor additions to our listings we added the following list of major places in the last month:

– ActiveHotels…. who do “own label” front ends to their system so you’ve probably used them in the past;
– Bookings… who seem to pop up all over the place;
– Expedia… well, you know these guys;
– Gullivers Travel… who are the people behind loads and loads of different reservation systems from Ryanair Hotels to Octopus Travel;
– Hotels.com … who feed the databases of all kinds of listing sites; and
– TravelExtras… the new people supplying FlyBE’s accommodation.

We’re now starting to panic about the effect of managing all the bookings that those listings should generate. Last August we were on one similar system which gave us about 11% occupancy by itself so, in theory, the above lot should add something like 60% to that on a like for like comparison ie a total of 70% or so occupancy before you even count the other listings we have, our own website and people just dropping in.

Wendy has told me not to even think about any more listings ’til we see if we can cope with those we’ve already got!

It is going to be pretty time consuming to keep on top of the whole lot as in addition to the above major ones we also have RatesToGo which has started to bring in a fair number of bookings and Venere who are pretty consistent over the year. We’re also expecting to get considerably more bookings directly from the website now that we’ve add the “book now” facility.

If I had the time, I’d be inclined to run a book on which will pull in the most business. My money is on WebReservations (our original and, so far, best system) because it’s syndicated all over the place but I imagine that Expedia/Hotels.com will not be far behind. I don’t think that TravelExtras will feature highly because they’re very new and we don’t get a lot of FlyBE business anyway. Third place will probably be a three way tie between ActiveHotels, Bookings and Gullivers.

Any thoughts yourselves? What systems do YOU use to book your accommodation?

The car has been causing us all kinds of grief over the last month so we’ve decided that it’s time to get a new one. If nothing else, it will greatly simplify our life as we won’t need to go through all the hassle of having to get the Toyota through the French car importation process. Interestingly, the car prices seem to be much the same as in the UK with the main difference being that they use a euro symbol here instead of the pound sign ie they are considerably cheaper. Funnily enough the second hand car prices are almost the same as the new car prices, or at least the French tend to ask for much the same.

Anyway, we’re looking for a diesel (preferably automatic), 5 door. We’re probably going to use this as our second car in due course so EUR 10,000 to EUR 15,000 is the budget. Sort-of like the Volkswagen Polo or perhaps the Mercedes A. Suggestions welcome!

We had yet another long phone call from the TV company who said that they like our story so perhaps we’ll have to make a decision as to whether or not to appear. At present they are looking to do one or perhaps two places in considerably more detail than they’d originally intended so Mayhem at the Mas may yet appear on a screen near you next January!

Can’t believe that it’s been a month since our last issue!

It’s been rather a busy time with several major developments to report.

We’re on loads and loads of new reservation and listing sites courtesy of a pretty intensive few weeks of hunting around for new places and getting our details loaded onto them. Net effect of that is that the bookings are rolling in at a fair old rate and we are pretty much fully booked over the Easter weekend and have a nice trickle of reservations most days although most people seem to just book a couple of weeks ahead which is a bit disconcerting.

www.ourinns.org has finally made its appearance on the search engines and is in the first two or three on a range of searches which isn’t bad. We’re even getting hits from it ourselves! At the moment, it remains a select band of properties but the coverage is gradually increasing as word spreads. If nothing else, the stream of new entries is at the right speed for me to be able to cope with it.

Last, but possibly not least, I may have to change the title of the blog (“Living in France without a TV crew”) in the not too distant future. We had a call from Ricochet (producers of the Chaos in the Castle and No Going Back series) last week. They’re hoping to do a new series featuring small brit-owned hotels around Europe and it looks like we are on the shortlist for the French entry. We’ve firmly sitting on the fence as to whether or not it’s a good idea. On the one hand, we’d get loads of publicity and would get the benefit of having a top hotelier telling us how to run the place properly. On ‘tother, we would get an absolute mountain of junk mail (500 e-mails after each show with 10,000 webhits after each show is typical) and the top hotelier & film crew arrive in mid-summer when we will have barely enough time to do the hotel work never mind making a TV programme. Any thoughts on which side of the fench we should jump if/when they call to ask us to sign the contract?

I was hunting around on Thursday for places to list ourselves (Thursday is marketing day in our new schedule) and ran across a little thread in one of the B&B owners forums to the effect that there’s no decent places to list ourselves.

Anyway, discussions ran on for a bit and as all and sundry thought it was a good idea, OurInns has just been launched.

Coverage is incredibly patchy at the moment seeing as we’re just starting but we hope to have a fairly full coverage of France long before the summer season gets going.

And, who knows, I might make a few bob with it along the way 🙂