Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Yes, folks, we appear to be within sight of the promised land of a French Child Benefit (Allocation Familiale) payment. At last, courtesy of a phone number that Colin acquired, we have prised a little note out of the Child Benefit people back in Belfast to the effect that they stopped paying us on July 12th. We’re looking at getting on for 3000‚€ of back payments.

We had a little trip up to see the people at the Auberge du Balestie near Carcassonne. They took over last June so, in theory, we’re running a few months ahead of them. In some ways we are, for they’ve not really gotten into getting listings on reservation systems yet whereas we’re running out of new places that we can be listed on. On the other hand, their restaurant is miles ahead of us and we’ll likely adopt a few aspects of it that we’re quite taken with over the coming months. Basically it reflects a different emphasis: at the moment we are essentially an accommodation provider that has a restaurant, whilst they are a restaurant that has some accommodation.

Our website is way ahead of them, of course, but then that reflects the fact that we’re not paying for the web development and have therefore ended up with a website of a scale more befitting something with several hundred rooms than our somewhat more modest establishment. In fact, we’ve yet to see a hotel, no matter how large, that has a website remotely approaching ours: no doubt you guys will email me straight back with one though!

Technically, we have (or had: we’ve yet to nail that fact down!) two stars whilst they didn’t inherit any from the previous owner. It’s difficult to say what our respective rating would be at the moment as we’ve both been upgrading things since we took over. Their restaurant is clearly better than ours in terms of appearance and ambiance whilst we’ve been luckier with our rooms. In practice the differences will be gradually diminishing over the coming months as they’re presently upgrading their rooms whilst we’re intending to up the ante with our restaurant so it’s anybody’s guess what the rating would ultimately be.

It looks like it will be useful for us to get together now and again as they’re coming at the hotel business from a different starting point and we’re looking forward to their critique of our setup on the return visit.

On the website, I’ve just finished a complete refresh this evening so if ‘yall all have a look I’d appreciate comments on the new style. Not radically different from last month but it is quite a change if you’ve not looked at it for a few months. Notable additions are that we’re now up to six languages on the hotel and transport pages (the hotel pages are very basic for Catalan, German and Italian at the moment but will improve); there are page navigation buttons on the english, french and spanish hotel pages; there are site navigation buttons across all of the english, french and spanish pages; the “book now” button features on the english, french and spanish hotel pages; and I’ve added google ads to all but the english hotel page. I’d particularly appreciate comments on the placement of the “reservations” button.

Tomorrow we’re off to see about getting the front wheels aligned and to book the car in to get the radiator sorted. I don’t know why, but they won’t do any work on the car without seeing the log book (carte grise) so I’ll have to hunt that out this evening.

Dug out a translation someone did of part of our little brochure a while back and now we have the main pages in SIX languages. Impressive, or what?

Well, the list of flags sure looks impressive to me. Sadly, three of the languages are fairly basic (German, Italian and the new one, Catalan) but we actually get hits on them. All being well, the google link on each will produce a few more cents income (from a standing start less than a week ago, we’re up all of 40c so far).

We’re all catching the cold off James now :((

John has an absolute mountain of prescriptions to get over the bronchitis. Back in the UK, you’d be talking a cough bottle. Here, we kick off with physiotherapy to loosen up the stuff in his lungs (he definitely didn’t like that), a couple of bottles of medicine and a steam thingy. It’s not really speeding it up as compared to the cough bottle approach though.

Remember those TVs that we bought in Spain back in late December? Well, contrary to what it said on the in-store sign and indeed the menu system on the TVs themselves, they don’t support SECAM which is the TV standard used in France. Anyway, that meant a trip back to Media Markt (a German outfit) in Girona to get a refund. Apart from the massive queue at the refund counter (largely taken up with returning the same make of TV as we’d bought), it was a doddle. I even got to try out my Spanish.

Girona is close enough to Barcelona that we just kept going and did this weeks shopping in Badalona (a suburb of Barcelona). It’s a bit rundown in comparison to Baricentro where we went last time so we’ll hardly be back. Mataro seems a much nicer looking place and is even closer to Girona (and easier to get to). So why don’t we do our shopping in Girona itself? Well, they haven’t a terribly good selection of shops (at least we haven’t found any). We’d also like to get a bit more familiar with Barcelona.

I thought that it was time I upped the ante with the web design software as I was running off the end of Frontpage Expess. I’d heard good things about Dreamweaver so that was first port of call. But then I saw the price: £370!! That seemed a bit much seeing as Frontpage weighs in at £140 but it gets better as my student status results in a price for Frontpage of £40 which is a bit of a bargain. Anyway, I spent the last few days getting it into Frontpage format and the latest version is getting uploaded as I write this.

Whilst that mini-update was in progress, I realised that I could add a few more languages by sprucing up the mini-descriptions on the Ryanair site (themselves courtesy of a friend of a friend who translated the mini-English version into German and Italian for me). Anyway, we now have a very impressive series of little flags on the pages: German, English, French, Spanish and Italian. Sadly, just on the main hotel page and the transport pages but they’re the important ones. Incidently, re the other languages, French was a total waste of time as French people seem to search in English. I’ll probably get the regional guide up to date in French but I’m not too bothered about that now. Even though the translation is dreadful, we actually get quite a few hits on the Spanish site and the other day it was the top ranked Spanish language site on Pyrenees Orientale tourism!

Don’t know how useful the German version is/will be but we do get a fair number from the Italian listing on Ryanair so perhaps plonking that on our own website will get a few more euros in the bank. So far, we’ve not had any German Ryanair folk but then 2004 year was a bit of an off year for German tourism.

Oh, yeah, the weird French couple. They are our main regular guests, arriving in our third week in April and having been here several times since. Wendy was sure that they were going to skip without paying originally! We get about EUR 150 from them every time but they’re a bit of a nuisance as they carry a mountain of stuff, completely rearrange the room and always want filtered coffee first thing in the morning.

Have to see about getting a few more telly’s now. The plan is that initially we’ll run with five. One room is already wired up for French TV and the room just next to it will be very easy to wire up in a similar way so we’re intending that that will be the French side of the building. We’re hoping to roll out UK TV for the three rooms on the other side of the building but we’ll need to get a bigger satellite dish first as the signal strength just isn’t up to running more than one TV at the moment (I’m toying with the idea of trying out a signal booster first).

The other week, it was the septic tank causing us problems, now it’s the turn of the well….

We own two water sources: a spring which was used up to two owners ago and a well which the last guy switched over to. It saves us having to pay the equivalent of the water rates but it’s not “free” as we need to maintain the pumping equipment etc. Normally, it’s fine apart from very busy days in the summer and also in september when the winery are using lots and lots of water; at those times, all that needs doing is to make sure the storage tank is full in the morning which we do by flicking the pump off and on (don’t know why, but it switches off after a while and before the tank is full).

Anyway, things were going fine ’til 2 or 3 days ago when every night we ran completely out of water (the first time ever!) and had to do the flicking thing. That time actually co-incided with the arrival of the grand-daughter of the guy who owned the place two owners ago (she’s the last person living who supposedly knows how the system works!). We thought that perhaps we’d turned a tap that she pointed out as we were walking round but we think we’ve undid all that we did then and still no water: it looks like we’ve emptied the well!

We’re in the process of getting ourselves onto our first American site: www.ownerdirect.com . Hopefully, it’s not typical of the American sites as they wanted so much information entered that it took hours to type it all in and we’ve still a couple of detailed things to do like measuring up the rooms. It’s another one of those guaranteed reservation places too so we’ll have to add it to our list of places for the January update (at the moment, we’ve listed more rooms in total than we actually have which is OK for the winter but, all being well, wouldn’t be OK for the summer so the plan is to sit down in January and make sure that the total is no more than our actual number of rooms).

While we were looking round for our 1-800 number, we found out that you can call American 800 numbers from abroad if you replace the 800 by 880 eg you can call us from outside the US by dialling 00 1 880 571 6392.

We’re starting to make a bit of progress with the backlog of administration and it’s looking like in another week or so we’ll be up to date.

Yesterday was “toilet day”. We have a growing collection of toilets that aren’t operational for a variety of reasons so we thought that we’d blitz them. Net effect is that the two at the back of the dining room are ready to go though we need to put a new seat on one of them, the room 10 cistern is filling up normally, and the two outside toilets just need a bit of cleaning to get them going. The only serious one now is the one in the lobby which is still blocked up after the latest stupid guest flushed something down it and clogged it up (no, not that!).

We reckon that we need a new car for next year as the RAV4 isn’t really up to carrying the people and stuff. Sooo, we’ve started thinking about what we need and have come up with the following little list of essentials:
– 4wd, because we hope to do tours into the ski areas in due course;
– 6 or 7 seater, because we’re starting to do a lot more airport shuttle runs than expected and also because we want to do little tours;
– diesel, because it’s costing us a fortune in petrol.

We’d like automatic too ‘cos Wendy can’t drive manuals and ‘cos I’m to lazy to drive them.

I was thinking that a long wheelbase Landrover would do the biz but I gather that they’re awful to drive so that’s put me off them. In the frame for consideration at the moment are the Mitsubishi Shogun (called Montero here) and the Nissan Patrol.

Does anybody have any thoughts on those (or indeed other cars we should be looking at)?

Dunno what happened, but we’re up to over 120 readers a day of Mas Camps News!!