Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

One of the problems that you have when travelling these days is that every time you go, the airport security seems tighter than it was the time before.

Twice recently I’ve ended up spending almost 30 minutes in security. That’s not 30 minutes queuing to go through mind you, that’s 30 minutes whilst they go through the case after it’s scanned.

How come? Well, if you’ve more than a couple of electronic items in your case the guy looking at the screen doesn’t know what to make of it all so the assumption is that you’re carrying a bomb. Therefore, they go through all the electronic items and swab them, swab the inside of the case then run a little test on the swab they’ve taken to see if it’s picked up any traces of explosives. Then they scan the whole lot again.

Both times, they’ve not allowed for any extra time to do such a thing so even though I went to security when called (and you can’t usually go earlier than that), I just about made it to the gate before the plane left.

Quite what they’d do if, say, I had heart trouble and was carrying some nitroglycerine I don’t know.

Wendy’s been busy whilst I was away and we now have a whole bunch of new cities represented on Whole Earth Guide.

There’s several in the UK and Ireland, a first in Hungary, the bigger cities in Italy and a few in Switzerland too now.

As usual, we’re aiming these guides as specifically tourist guides primarily for short break holidays and we’re aiming to cover the top tourist cities in Europe before the summer season if we can manage to keep at it.

Over the last couple of years we’ve watched our very own French gite listings site slowly but surely climb the ranks in the search engines.

Now that it’s a middling size site, roughly comparable to the likes of VisitFrance in size it’s great to see that it’s sitting right there in the middle of all the fully commercial sites and, moreover, often towards the top of that list.

What’s confusing though is quite simply: why? After all, several of those commercial sites are spending quite serious amounts of money in promoting their site whilst we spend very little comparatively speaking. We know for a fact that at least one of the middle ranking sites (which we rank much better than) was spending around £3000 per year on marketing up to a year or so ago.

Confusing too is how come we’re not innundated with applications to list on our site in that we charge a maximum of £29 whilst comparable sites are charging around the £100 mark and, for that matter, we even offer a “free forever” listing too whereas others limit their free period to six months.

As it’s the third Monday in January today, it’s Martin Luther Day.

Well, more or less, as America is, as we all know, a country that’s built from a whole bunch of separate countries (ie states) and therefore it doesn’t have a standard name in all 50 states and indeed wasn’t a holiday in them all until 2000.

Although it doesn’t really mean anything outside America, it does have a knock-on effect worldwide in that various Internet outfits close down since they’re based in America. In fact, we didn’t even know that it was a holiday ’til we started wondering why there were so few sponsored posts available today.

Not that we’re complaining as it would appear a lot of folk doing sponsored posts have also taken the day off so we’ve picked up several juicy ones whilst they’ve been away.

One of the more interesting things that came up when I was in discussions about buying a commercial holiday accommodation listings site a year or so ago was the level of turnover in the properties listed on it.

Would you believe that the renewal rate of property listings is around 50-70%? Think about it: that means that there is pretty much a complete change in content of the listings sites every two or three years.

The turnover is presumably at the higher end of the range of the scale for smaller sites (say around 500 entries) but even then that means that they need to attract around 250 new entries per year merely to replace those that don’t renew which in turn means around 25, 000 e-mails to do that for the small sites (assuming a 1% return on marketing). For a large country-specific site (say around 2000 entries), the dropout % is lower but the absolute number of dropouts is higher at around 700 thus requiring something like 70,000 e-mails (assuming a 1% return on marketing).

Those stats are particularly interesting to me in that my own dropout rate is made up of those getting out of the business and is therefore somewhat lower at around 1%. This in turn means that, slowly but surely, I will become one of the larger listings sites. I’ve already caught up with the scale of that listings site that I was going to buy and hope to finish the year with around twice the number that they had when I was looking at them.

With that extra scale comes extra hits on the site and I’ve needed to upgrade the hosting package I use three times since Christmas as a consequence of that jump in size since Christmas a year ago. This, of course, means extra bookings for all those listed on the sites too.