Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Just as France is huge, so too are some of the regions within it with the Languedoc-Roussillon area spanning a vast area stretching along the Mediterranean to Provence in the east.

Even we who should know better often think of “the Languedoc” as being countryside with a few hills yet we know that there are proper mountains less than an hour west of us (OK, not in the Languedoc). Similarly, we shouldn’t really expect to be surrounded by castles outside our own little corner of Languedoc-Roussillon. In fact, we’ve hardly explored the eastern edges of the region and have rarely passed Montpellier for that matter.

What’s quite striking is the difference in scenery that you get in travelling as little as 90 minutes from here. Last week, we had a little trip along the coast and came across the lovely Lake Saligou near Clermont L’Herault set in almost alpine scenery. I’m sure that it’s over-run with tourists in the Summer but we had the whole place pretty much to ourselves on a beautiful Spring afternoon.

This is part of our guide to the Pyrenees.

The issue of sites posting guest reviews of accommodation has been picked up by Karen over at Europe A La Carte.

Most of the debate to date is on the issue of hotel owners posting bogus and glowing reviews on the likes of Trip Advisor but I suspect that they are few and far between. Looking at it from the other side of the fence so to speak, there are equally problems of negative comments by guests who have never even stayed or who, when something goes wrong, blame everything on the hotel.

Consider a few of the examples that we have seen over the last year.

1. “…in the middle of nowhere…” . It’s certainly quite true that the hotel was in the countryside and not in the city. The guests in question hadn’t even bothered to read the first line of the description which quite clearly states that yet they blamed the hotel for not being in the city-centre location that they really wanted.

2. “…the hairdryer in the room had quite a smell when used…”. They were using the room heater to dry their hair and the smell was their own hair being burnt.

3. “…they didn’t know when we were arriving…”. Not surprising in that the reservation system they’d used doesn’t ask them that question and therefore the hotel don’t know when to expect guests that have used it.

4. “…all the restaurants were closed when they said they’d be open….”. From a guest who hadn’t changed the time on their watch when they arrived in France with the effect that every time they turned up at “1pm” for lunch the restaurants were closed as it was actually 2pm.

5.”…the reception staff weren’t French…”. Try booking into a London hotel and finding any English staff!

Many review sites make checks that the guests have actually stayed there but Trip Advisor appears to take anything that comes with no checks at all. We’ve seen “interesting” reviews by people who clearly have never stepped inside the door or, if they have, must have been high on something given the list of things they saw which didn’t exist in reality. We’re not talking debateable issues like whether or not the place has been dusted but things like broken windows which clearly aren’t broken.

The review facilities run by the likes of Booking.com are in a different league. To my mind, the problem with them is that they generally don’t offer a facility for hotel management to comment on the reviews made. Since they also clearly have an interest in getting people into their hotels, the tendency is to allow management to have the negative comments deleted. Now, this gets rid of the idiotic comments as above but it also potentially allows unscrupulous hotels to artificially bump up their ratings by getting rid of the really negative comments (although, one hopes, that a genuinely bad hotel wouldn’t get away with that). Probably the most extreme example of this is HostelWorld (used by Ryanair and very popular) where the management can select which reviews and ratings they’d like to appear (they can’t edit them) so, naturally, it’s possible to manipulate your rating and some places would appear to do that thereby getting a rating of close to 100% vs a more reasonable 70-80%.

So, yes, let’s see if we can get rid of the bogus reviews but let’s not limit it to those of owners/managers who are inflating their rating but also the overlly negative reviews of unreasonable guests who blame everything that goes wrong on everyone else.

How to do that is the big question though. Anyone can create a hotmail account and get a review onto many sites without any confirmation that they’ve actually been a guest there. It’s clearly not viable for the majority of Internet sites to actually visit the hotels being commented on yet some kind of cross-check is definitely required and, at the moment, many sites don’t appear to even read the comments before they put them on.

Many of the B&B and particularly gite owners accept payments by bank transfer to their account. What amazes me is that they never consider that it’s something of a risk to give your bank account details to a complete stranger and even more so when it’s a series of complete strangers.

If you think about this for a while you’ll realise that your bank account details are printed on your cheques but that’s not quite the same as you give cheques to people or organisations that you know. There is a safe way to do this though. Just quote a savings account number and, if you’re really paranoid about it, open a savings account in a bank that you don’t normally deal with.

Initially we just included our blog on the marketing lists for our other sites but quite quickly found out that a lot of places list blogs in a peculiar way or don’t list them at all so we’ve been looking around for other ways to get our blog known.The business of blogging is relatively new and so a lot of places aren’t quite sure what to do with them. Many site directories are set up on the basis that the sites on them are fairly static but that’s one thing that’s definitely not the case with active blogs. They also have the characteristic of being local news in many cases and whilst I’m sure it’ll be quite a while before we get mentioned on a news bulletin we are actually listed on one service which in turn feeds into Reuters, USA Today and FoxNews.