Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

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 🙂

We’re starting to get a fair number of hits on our Dutch pages which is a good sign, though generally speaking the Dutch tend to search in English. It was a doddle to get the pages translated (I’m sure the Dutch is dreadful though!) and I’m planning on doing the same exercise for Portuguese over the next week or so (so far we’ve had nobody from Portugal at all so perhaps this will pull in a few punters). It’s certainly a bit weird to have our dutch transport page listed as number one when you search for “ryanair girona” in google.nl !

I’m still plugging away with the winery/vineyard site, aiming to add a couple of photos a month of their activities during the year. The direct hits on both pages are starting to mount up as the pages get larger and the ranking is definitely up there: search for “winery perpignan” and it’s the top listed site! We’re wondering when we’ll get the first order via the site (they’re already getting phone calls originating from it).

Now that this year’s website refresh is nearing completion, I thought that I’d put a toe in the water and see if I can pull in any webdesign business from other people, so as of last week, Crystal Consultancy made its debut. It’ll only be a winter-time activity though as we get too many customers from about June to September to be able to do anything other than the hotel. Amazingly, there are only 31 webdesigners listed for the whole of France so we’ll likely pull in a few punters (that’s down to most people only using automated submission to the search engines so I’m sure the real number is much higher). The site’s live now and should be listed by google within the next couple of days with yahoo following a few weeks later.

The Spanish course is going fine so far. I try to do it each morning before doing anything else. If nothing else, the Spanish from years ago seems to be coming back to me in bits & pieces.

We had a run to Herault (near Montpellier) during the week to see our new accountant. She’s pointed out another bunch of mistakes that our soon to be former accountant had made over the course of the year. A “just in passing” remark of hers highlighted just how bad he was: he managed to register us in a way that wouldn’t have let us employ part-time staff which is the only way we’d have probably been employing people. On a much more serious note, due to him having done nothing at all following the initial meeting in February (in spite of him having quite a long “to-do” list), the mortgage cannot be treated as a business expense. We’re not sure of the full implications of this as it only sunk in after we’d left but I think that it means that every single mortgage payment we’ve made over the last year will count as income and therefore be subject to tax; if that’s right it will inflate the cost of the mortgage by something like 50%. The only way around that would seem to be to reregister the ownership of the place in the French equivalent of “Mas Camps Ltd” but then that’s going to run up something like EUR 20,000 in notary fees (well, mostly transfer tax).

Anyway, we’ve sent a note off to the soon to be former accountant informing him that due to the mistakes he has made, we no longer require his services and will be calling to collect our file from him on Monday afternoon. I suspect that we’ll be seeing him in court at some point to recoup the money that has been lost as a consequence of his incompetence.

The weather here seems to be starting to get back to normal. It was raining quite a lot over the last week but when it isn’t it’s very warm: definitely t-shirt weather and verging on shorts weather. Going by what the neighbours were saying the other day, this month is a bit hit & miss weather-wise but next month sees a more consistent improvement.

We’re going to have another go for the TVs this week. There’s an offer on at the moment which’ll let us pick them up for 69‚€ so we’re going to pick up five or possibly six of them (although I think that we’ll pick up one or two as a trial first). At the moment, two of the rooms are wired for French/Spanish TV and we have the bits & pieces to put satellite TV in one other room. However, we know that we can extend satellite TV to one other room quite easily. The gite and room 5 are problems though and we think that we’ll have to cable them up specially due to the thickness of the walls.

I’m toying with the idea of branching out into website design and a few other related things for the Winter months (assuming that I can get a few punters with cash burning a hole in their pockets).

Anyway, what do ‘yall think of Crystal Consultancy ? Would you buy a used website from these people?

Any thoughts on the level of charges? (or indeed comments generally: this is definitely mark #1)