Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Mas Camps News’ Category

We’re just back from our first proper holiday since we took over running Mas Camps in April 2004. It was strange to actually close up for the first time as we’ve been open non-stop since the day we arrived. Not that it made much difference in the takings as the riots in France seem to have put just about everyone off coming here this year: a year ago when we booked the holiday we thought that we’d have been losing quite a lot of guests by being closed in March/April but in reality it was probably only one or two at best.

Still, Easter is just around the corner and we are rapidly filling up with Spanish guests as usual. Not quite full yet, but there’s still another week of booking time to go.

Following the week in Turkey, we spent a few days in Amsterdam which is a bit of a nightmare in a car but a very walkable city with lots to see. This time (our first proper visit) we just strolled around the canals and visited Anne Frank’s house so we’ve a lot to see next time.

Next stop was the first World War battlefield memorials around the Somme in northern France. The memorials are much larger than I’d expected them to be.

We’d hoped to spend some time in Rouen but the riots forced a change in plans and we ended up in a lovely little hotel in Evreux instead. This time of year, most chain hotels in France are full so it forces an exploration of the smaller hotels around the countryside which generally turns up a charming, and cheaper, alternative to the standardisation of the likes of IBIS.

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’re just back from our first proper holiday since we took over running Mas Camps in April 2004.

It was strange to actually close up for the first time as we’ve been open non-stop since the day we arrived.

Not that it made much difference in the takings as the riots in France seem to have put just about everyone off coming here this year: a year ago when we booked the holiday we thought that we’d have been losing quite a lot of guests by being closed in March/April but in reality it was probably only one or two at best. Still, Easter is just around the corner and we are rapidly filling up with Spanish guests as usual.

Not quite full yet, but there’s still another week of booking time to go. Following the week in Turkey, we spent a few days in Amsterdam which is a bit of a nightmare in a car but a very walkable city with lots to see. This time (our first proper visit) we just strolled around the canals and visited Anne Frank’s house so we’ve a lot to see next time. Next stop was the first World War battlefield memorials around the Somme in northern France. The memorials are much larger than I’d expected them to be.

We’d hoped to spend some time in Rouen but the riots forced a change in plans and we ended up in a lovely little hotel in Evreux instead. This time of year, most chain hotels in France are full so it forces an exploration of the smaller hotels around the countryside which generally turns up a charming, and cheaper, alternative to the standardisation of the likes of IBIS.

Whew. I thought that I’d checked most of the reservations whilst we were in Turkey but there were over 20 new ones sitting for me to go through today.

This year the mix of reservations has changed considerably from previous years with most coming via our own website rather than via reservation systems. We make more money that way (no commission to pay to the systems) but they’re a lot more work.

We’re still pretty exhausted from the trip so haven’t really gotten into the swing of things yet. I made a small start on the assignment for the Spanish course but will have to really get into it tomorrow as it’s due for Wednesday.

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.