Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Remember a few weeks back that I said that I’d plonked all these little e-mails onto a blog (now living at Foreign Perspectives)? Well, I was looking at the stats this evening and I’ve managed to pick up 1000 readers since then!!

Fame at last. Wendy reckons we should go for the “fortune” and try to make some money out of it.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

A first… it’s warmer in Belfast than it is here!!

A good time to get going on the backlog of administration that built up over the summer. Once we hit the start of July nothing got done that didn’t have to get done right away, net effect of which is that I’ve just completed the accounts for June and am about half way through the July accounts. All being well, I’ll have caught up with things in a week or two.

We have our first ebay client with us at the moment. Didn’t make too much on the room charge but they had a meal last night which has brought the income from them well up. We haven’t really sussed out the ebay sales yet but are optimistic that we’ll do OK with it once we get a good formula sorted. So far the score is: first attempt at full price, lots of interest, two pathetic bids, no sale; second attempt around half price with breakfast included, less interest (further into October explains that I think), one sale (that’s the guys that are here now); third attempt also around half price but ex-breakfast, some interest but no sale yet (the listing is still current); fourth attempt with no accommodation charge (yes, John, FREE!!) but compulsory meal purchases, quite a lot of early interest (also a current listing).

Anyway, must head off as we need to get some more serious clothing… the t-shirt and shorts aren’t really up to the current weather.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

I’ll start with the itinerary as I’ll be getting going on that next Tuesday:
– Tuesday pm, get the plane in Perpignan and finish up in Belfast in the late evening
– Wednesday am, meeting in town in the morning then open a few carpetbagging accounts for our latest addition and get a few things in town
Siobhan: I could probably catch up with you sometime that day
– Thursday, French exam; we usually get away from that relatively early as they do the oral part in the afternoon
– Friday am, probably working my way down Wendy’s shopping list; pm probably calling in to see the folk in Rosepark
guys: remind me to leave £40 for Eric!!
– Saturday, “at liberty” as they say in the travel trade but more than likely filled up with calling to see folk
– Sunday lunchtime, on the plane to Barcelona to try out Jet2, getting there early evening and back here around teatime

With the departure of our last house hunter on Tuesday a week ago, we were planning on switching to “winter mode” ie getting stuck into the backlog of things that we’ve not had a chance to do since June. We had even made a start on writing out our “to do” list for the winter months. And then we got some more bookings for October which has since started to fill up quite nicely.

We finally picked up a booking from the hotel website that we’re on. I’d really high hopes of that but we’ve been on it since late August and so far only the one booking (though it is for a week). Now that we’ve actually picked up a booking via the hotel site, we found out that they’d a duff room description for our main type of booking room (what did they think a “double shared bathroom shared” was? They’re fixing that now so we should start to get more bookings from them over the winter and, all being well, lots more in the summer. The other little problem that they had was that they’d recorded us as having no rooms available which certainly doesn’t help the reservations. Anyway, we’re getting the room type sorted, have updated the availability and changed a couple of rooms over to “instant booking” from “on request” which collectively should bring in a whole bunch more people.

They’re actually our eighth house-hunter since about mid-July which is a fair old number considering that we’re only one of the hotels in the area. Of those, three have already bought houses in the three villages closest to us, two more are in the process of buying a little further afield and one is in “area hunting” so won’t be buying for a year or so. As you can imagine, all this activity is lifting the house prices and I read last week that the prices in Languedoc-Roussillon went up 28% in the last year, mainly due to the English. Still, we did see quite a reasonable house for sale in Estagel for EUR 50 000 the other week so it’s still possible to pick up a bargain. Funnily enough, only one of those folk booked as a result of our ad in French Property News and seeing as they only stayed two days, we may as well not have bothered with it.

We had SNOW last week!! OK, more sleet than proper snow but even so, it’s not really something that you expect in the south of France in September, is it?

The banks here are really dreadful to what we’re used to. In all ways: the maximum withdrawal limit is around £300 per WEEK vs the £250-£500 per DAY in the UK; they’ve got monthly spending limits on debit cards; they charge for debit cards and the few sort-of credit cards are a) charged for b) have MAXIMUM limits lower than the minimum limits on some UK cards and c) have interest rates getting on for twice the UK rates (the mortgage rates are higher too: so much for lower euro-zone interest!). Way back at the end of June we thought we’d settle in with local accounts so opened accounts with Credit Agricole. The cards arrived in a few weeks but we still haven’t seen any sign of the chequebooks. Anyway, on Thursday a little letter arrived from CA saying that I’d to sort out my EUR 50 overdrawn by Monday or they were blocking all transactions on my accounts. Well, that was that. Off we went to close it and give them a piece of our minds. For a start, the account was to have a EUR 1000 overdraft limit (Wendy’s account came with EUR 450, none apparently for me) and seeing as I needed the chequebook before I could use the account, the entire EUR 50 was all bank charges. Didn’t go down well with CA in St Paul. For a start our “relationship manager” wasn’t there; I said “close it anyway, and the savings account too”. I don’t think people go in and close accounts too often. Anyway, less than 20 mins later we got a call from M Martin (our relationship manager) asking what was the problem. He’s assured us that the chequebook will be with us by Wednesday. We got the impression that he’d told the **** who sent out the letter to wise up: blocking the accounts of somebody who pays several thousand euro a month to the bank for a mortgage when he’s overdrawn by EUR 50 is not a good move.

Oh yeah, the “to do” list… Well, this is what we have so far:

1. Move into print advertising.
We are already listed in “GeoGuide Languedoc-Roussillon” courtesy of the previous owner but will be adding at least one more guidebook (well, a series as we’re shooting for an international listing). The French “guidebooks” are truly dreadful as they are just advertising with next to no editorial but it’s handy from our point of view as we can just pay so many euros and get ourselves in. Most likely we will go with Petit Futé although GeoGuide and Routard are both in the frame. Petit Futé would be around £500 but that’s for three years and also enters us in four or five international equivalent guides as well; we’ve not checked out the prices for the other two although I imagine that they pale into insignificance with the £500 for cheznous. Actually, French Property News isn’t far behind with it’s £60 a month (and so far only one two night booking for £120 expenditure!).

2. Get going on maintenance
We’re planning on restarting our “live in a room for a night” programme with a view to sussing out what needs done to each room. The biggest problem is the gite which, although it’s the newest “room”, looks incredibly basic in comparison to the rest of the hotel. We don’t really book it much as an apartment so in parallel with sprucing it up a bit, we’re hoping to create a little suite by adding a door between two of the rooms. That will also give us a lot more flexibility in coping with larger groups: we had to turn away several groups of four during August when the gite was full; in principle it will also let us book the gite as a gite rather than as a hotel room although we did very well over the summer just booking it as a hotel room.

3. Visit the neighbours
We just started doing this when the bookings took a jump; the plan is to work our way around the various vineyards, say “hi”, and maybe expand our wine list for the restaurant by buying a box or two at each place. We’ll be using these visits to try and build up a group of vineyards for our proposed wine tours.

4. Build up the guide
Our regional guide at www.mascamps.com/region/en.htm isn’t bad but I’d like to beef it up some more as we get a lot of hits via it and also because it should encourage people to stay a bit longer. We’ve the easy places done already so this will probably mean quite a bit of travelling around and combing the local tourist offices for information. I’m also hoping to make the event list (www.mascamps.com/event/en.htm) a whole lot more comprehensive although that will be far from easy as they are simply dreadful at promoting any kind of event or festival over here.

5. Tidy up the “house”
The hotel was and is tidy but the house side of the place needs a LOT of work. We could do with some furniture for a start and we could do with sorting out a lot of new lightbulbs as it’s getting to be too dark now.

6. Get the admin sorted
This has been sidelined for several months now so it’ll take me a while to catch up with it all. We also need to get ourselves properly sorted in respect of the French authorities with the stuff that I talked about earlier. It probably wouldn’t do any harm to track down our drinks license.

7. Build up the activities list
We’re hoping to have a reasonable number of activity-breaks built up over the coming months. So far, we’ve used the “specials” facility on the hostel booking site but we’re hoping to add those more directly onto our own website and also on an activities booking system. We haven’t had a lot of direct success with these but have made quite a bit of money through people seeing the “special” and booking direct with us (we don’t have to pay commission that way). At the moment we’ve several variants of our “Ryanair seat sale” package online to cover the whole period of their seat sale up to February but it’ll be another week or so before that appears on google so we’ve not had any takers as yet.

8. Website development
The next “big thing” will be the arrival of the vineyard pages, probably with the initial version online by late October. I’ve been taking more photos for that during the week. I’d liked to have had it live before Michel goes to the wine fair but that’s not too likely as I believe that’s early October. Oh, he (and possibly us) might be on French TV by the time you read this. Seems that his “separator thingy” for the grapes is the only one in the region and the local paper (the Independant) was here on Thursday to do an article on it. The harvest pages will be the first to go live as the sheer volume of text in them should get us a reasonable ranking in google. Haven’t really given much thought to the structure of his bit of the site yet but there will, in due course, be a www.mascamps.com/cave/en.htm page corresponding to the existing www.mascamps.com/hotel/en.htm page. Once his pages are up and running, we might run up a totally new www.mascamps.com/en.htm page to act as a gateway into both halves of the website but ’tis early days for that.

9. Website promotion
I’ll be restarting my “Sunday Searches” again to find free/cheapo places to promote the site. Have to see how to go about promoting the vineyard section as well. You would be amazed at how many different places you can pick up in two or three hours searching. You’d also be amazed at how many websites charge astronomical amounts of money for incredibly naff listings. We actually only paid for one site listing this year (all of £30) which has given us a really impressive looking entry with them (www.greatbedandbreakfast.com), lots of enquiries and no paying customers. At the other end of the scale, £200 on www.cheznous.com has, so far, given us one hit, no enquiries and no bookings. We’re actually going with cheznous again but this time we’ll be in their printed brochure (another £500!) which should hit the streets around Christmas (that’ll be their last chance).

Where are our customers coming from anyway? Well, it’s hard to say as the mix has changed significantly since April. April/May/June most customers were driveby (though the most profitable was via the website), early July was a mix of phone and driveby and August/September have been almost evenly split between phone, website and Ryanair (with virtually no drivebys). For the coming months, it looks like we’ll be mainly getting people from the Ryanair site though we’ve been getting significant numbers of enquiries via the website and should be having our very first repeat booking in December. In practical terms, we work on the assumption that the bulk of the phone reservations are effectively customers of the previous owner which means that for this summer we’ve had getting on for triple the customers that he would have had and that doesn’t seem too far off the mark as we know we had more reservations than both of the local competitors put together from mid-July through to the end of August (that’s the entire period for which we had their figures). If we can manage to keep that up we should do pretty well if next year is more normal (this year was dreadful for hotels all over France) and, of course, we are still increasing the number of places that list us.

10. Sort out our registration
In an ideal world, we’d like to be listed as a “hotel restaurant” but we’re not sure if that’s possible in one jump so we will be making enquiries to see what we’d need to do to acquire that listing. The plus side is that we could then legitimately run the restaurant but on the downside we would, over time, need to redo a lot of our existing registrations: cheznous wouldn’t take us anymore for a start (OK, so that would save £500 a year). We’d also need to change the Ryanair entry to move onto their hotel pages which may or may not be a good idea: we’ve only had one booking from our proper hotel listing (on www.venere.com) yet got our first booking from the B&B/guesthouse/hostel listing the day after it went live and have done very well with it ever since.

11. Have a look at Spanish
I’ve already got the pre-course course for the OU Spanish diploma but need to have a look at that to see whether or not I could realistically start the diploma in February. We get quite a lot of Spanish guests so it would be useful. On the other hand, we get next to no Germans so perhaps I need a German language website? Hard to say, as I’ve already got a German version of the Ryanair mini-site and we’ve yet to get anyone booking through it (a friend of a friend translated it for me).

Anyway, most head on to get ready for the Danish folk who should be here in another hour or two. They always quote 6pm arrival times but it just ain’t feasible to get from Denmark to here in a day and arrive that early. I reckon 8pm will be closer to the mark.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

A little birdy tells me that you guys can’t believe the admin hassles that are part of daily life over here. You ain’t heard the half of it!

It’s rare for a week to go by without us receiving some mail from the French authorities. Turns out that once you’re registered for business in France, that registration is picked up by an endless stream of government and quasi-government outfits who just take the registration at face value and proceed accordingly as though the world outside France didn’t exist.

For instance, the pension scheme… Whilst pensions are generally regarded as a “good thing”, the French version is an accident waiting to happen. Sorry, one that’s already happened, they’re just ignoring it. As far as I know, all French pension schemes operate on the “pay as you go” system which means that the pensions of the people currently retired are paid by the people currently working and there is no savings element to it. Net effect of this is that, as a result of the ageing population, pretty well all of these schemes will go belly-up within the next 20 years or so (it varies by country: Germany & Italy already have problems, Ireland may be OK as it’s got a generally younger population). That being the case, I really don’t want to be flushing my money down the pan by paying into such schemes and I also know that because a) I already have a pension scheme in the UK (which I can still pay into) and b) the european freedom of movement legislation, they can’t compell me to join the French schemes. But then this is France, so when I just ignored the requests for information about my membership of a French scheme (because none of their letters asked for any information that actually existed), they just signed me up anyway and sent me a bill. They did this by recorded delivery letter which, in France, means you’ve to cancel it by recorded delivery letter (another EUR 4 down the pan). Thought that was OK in July but there’s another scheme that just sent a bill (with no prior notice) in August, at least not by recorded delivery so it was cheap enough to tell them to clear off.

Essentially their problems stem from a) they like their documentation in France b) most of what they want in terms of documentation simply doesn’t exist outside France and c) they don’t really recognise that there is a world outside France.

The no-mans ground that I’m in with the Crown Servant status is getting to be more complicated by the day. We’ve now got our applications in for both Child Tax Credit and Child Benefit for John as there’s a cut-off date for claims on both. I figure it’s best to whack in the claims on the off-chance that we might be eligible as I’d be seriously annoyed if it eventually turned out that we were eligible and missed out. As usual, we appear to be breaking new ground on this one. The query with the Inland Revenue in Lisburn has gone up to the Inspector now and he doesn’t know the answer as nobody has pointed out before that all the Civil Servants on career breaks are actually still employed by their Department. More to the point, anyone abroad would appear to have Crown Servant status which has a whole lot of knock-on consequences. I, of course, make things even more complicated because I’m still getting paid as well. I suspect the whole thing is an effect of how I think they created “career breaks” within the rules in the first place ie as basically very extended periods of unpaid leave (I reckon that because of that, they probably shouldn’t be issuing P45s to people going on career breaks).

Back in France, the social security people have been merrily ignoring my letter to them way back in August to say that I may not be in their system at all. Well, they finally acknowledged it this morning but they have kept sending the bills. Natually, their letter asks for documents that don’t exist. But, hey, what’s new? Anyway, the reply will help my written French no end.

On the health front, we have only just received Wendy’s health card. The hospital rang yesterday to say that they wanted us there pronto with it to pay the bill (or rather so that they can claim it back). Snag is, that it’s in the name “Wendy Stewart” and the health people reckon that the hospital won’t be able to accept it so they’re re-issuing it (another couple of weeks). Still, we’re off to hand it to the hospital tomorrow.

So far, we’ve just started up the restaurant on a not-too-serious basis over the summer and have completely ignored any registration required for restaurants although we are planning to become a bit more legal over the next few months. We are properly registered to serve food, but as a table d’hotes so strictly speaking we should only be serving food to people who stay with us although you’d think that somebody would have inspected our kitchen before now. We’ve also been flogging wine in the shop now and again and it seems that, although we are licensed to flog anything up to and including hard liquor in the restaurant (we gather that we can even run a bar although we know diddly about that so we aren’t bothering), we don’t have any kind of license to flog it in the shop. The previous owner didn’t either but then he was mainly flogging his own wine which I gather is a bit different.

We’d yet another family staying who were looking to buy a house here (number 7 I think). I just read this morning that the property prices here have gone up 28% in the last year as a consequence of all the English moving in. So if you’re thinking of buying, get the chequebook out soon!

I see that Jackie has finally completed the tunnel. There’s gonna be nobody left that knows me at this rate!

Can’t remember if I said, but we’re running up a website for the Mas Camps vineyard (I think it’ll be the first one for any vineyard in the region). We’ve been busy taking the harvest photos over the last week or so for it. The vineyard owner will be writing the descriptions in French once we get the harvest out of the way and we’ll be adding a bunch more pages over the coming months to complete the vineyard version of the hotel pages. As usual, we’ll be running with a bilingual site (possibly trilingual a bit later) but this time, the French will be fairly good and the English will be rubbish (well, what do I know about grapes?). However, you can peruse the initial photos at www.mascamps.com/cave/en.htm now. We might even venture out into the online sales in due course once we get our act together. It’s hard to judge how much it’ll bump up his sales but if it’s anything like the hotel business, just having the site will increase his sales by getting on for 50%.

And last, but not least, the OU exam is fast approaching. October 7th at 10am in Stranmillis to be precise. Anyway, I’m off to sunny Belfast on the 5th. Wendy’s shopping list is getting longer by the day so I’ve not booked the flight back yet. So far, we need soap (the local Makro never seems to have any; stop all those jokes about the French!!), HP Sauce, assorted makeup, magazines (if you’re ever coming over, bring lots of mags!), big Spanish (and possibly German) dictionary, pork sausages from Sainsbury… I’m hoping to call into Rosepark at some stage while I’m over before y’all go to pastures new.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Last time we left John S in the dust when we were listed as THE CHEAPEST accomodation in Perpignan.

That was Monday. Tuesday, we figured it would be at least a couple of weeks before we got any bookings from them and may as well go up to Gracay to get the pillows, soap, mail, etc. from William Gowdy. Gracay’s not an awful lot south of Paris and takes about eight hours of driving to get to so that was an overnighter.

William’s settling in pretty well and has acquired a car. He’s not got a landline yet so no internet access but he does have a mobile; if you want to call him let me know and I can pass on the number. Gracay is a nice little village; shame it’s so far from here or we’d be calling in now and again. He’s also getting his first visitor on Tuesday this week who will also be my first visitor as the whole lot of them are going camping in the south of France so will be camping in the field that I don’t know what to do with across the road. Have to see about getting the lawn mower out to tidy it up a bit for his tent.

We called in with him on the Wednesday morning and filled the trailer up with the stuff that he’d brought over. Between one thing and another we didn’t get away ’til almost lunchtime. Incidently, the road down (the A75) is brilliant and toll free but has one or two stretches that haven’t been completed, notably the big bridge at Millau just to the north of Beziers which you may have heard of. That road is part of the Paris-Barcelona european highway which should bring us a whole lot more visitors when it’s completed. William tells me that it was just filled with UK registered cars yesterday which is a good sign.

The late start meant that we didn’t get to here ’til after 11pm. I generally check the mail in the morning and evening “just in case” and it was just as well I did that on the Wednesday night as we’d seven separate bookings awaiting us and one for the Thursday! It certainly looks like the Ryanair/FlyBE site is a good one to be on: up to now we had the problem that the tourists coming off the planes had already booked somewhere to stay. Since the cheap Ryanair/FlyBE flights are booked a few months ahead we figure that we’ve probably missed a heap of people who would ordinarily have stayed here but there’s nothing we can do about that. We might pick up some of them later though as all the other accomodation listed on the site seems to be fully booked right through August.

That site is quite an expensive way to book accomodation as it follows the Ryanair model ie give us your money and we’ll keep it regardless oh, and give us a couple of quid to cover our costs in taking your money. So, you need to pay a booking fee of £3 plus 10% of the accomodation price to the booking company. Since 10% of the accomodation is about £3 in our case it means they’re billing you getting on for 20% of the cost of the booking if you’re only booking the one night. However, from my perspective it seems quite good as, so far, they’ve tended to book the rooms that I wasn’t bothering to list elsewhere (ie the two non-ensuite ones) and, so far, I’ve cleaned up on the meals & airport pickups so their charge is much less than 10% of my income from the bookings. The only downside is that their reservations are “guaranteed” which means that if we get a booking from them we have to honour it which in turn means that we need to keep our reservation calendar up to date all the time. We can still take drivebys though as they’ve set us up as needing 24 hours notice of a reservation so if a room is empty tonight we know we can let people have it.

To further complicate our lives, we’ve registered on another guaranteed booking site today. Just in case we’d get double bookings, we’ve had to reduce the number of rooms a bit but I figure that two sites like that is about the limit that we could juggle. As it is, we can’t put the gite on the second site as we’ve only one of them although it’s pretty much booked up throughout August now anyway.

Oh, and then there’s the small matter of our own direct reservations! We’re only taking guaranteed ones for those too now (via Paypal, as suggested by JW) and have had our first couple of those for August. We’ve also had our first couple of “no shows” in the last week as a result of which, we’re going to start taking deposits from people who call in to make a booking too and will be checking with the bank as to how we go about making the French equivalent of “customer not present” transactions for the telephone reservations.

As you’ve probably gathered, I spend a fair chunk of time finding ways of getting this place listed, preferably free (though I have paid £30 for the greatbedandbreakfast.com site which I’ve already recouped in bookings from it). I’m also branching out a bit in other areas so, all being well, we will be able to accept American Express cards fairly soon and the restaurant will be becoming a Ticket Restaurant and taking “Déjeuner Cheques” (the French equivalent of Luncheon Vouchers). I’m still looking round for the accomodation equivalent of LVs but, so far, have only come across “Cheques Logis”. Roger: suggestions welcome here!

A question: since France Telecom are charging me a fortune to rent the coin payphone in our lobby, I’m looking for alternatives. Any suggestions folks? And, no, removing the facility isn’t a realistic option. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it is, we have a total of less than ‚€4 in coins in it (and that’s including ‚€1 from the previous owner) yet are forking out ‚€70-odd a month to rent the thing.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.