Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

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a room, bought a new chair, even added a plant it doesn’t take long before the photo of a room becomes completely out of date.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.

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.