Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

The number of entries from the United Kingdom on our listings sites has been growing quite rapidly over the last few months so it seemed an appropriate time to start work on a country-specific domain to represent them.

Therefore, we’ve just started running with Great British Bed and Breakfasts and Great British Self-Catering which hold all our UK properties.

One big advantage that we’ve already found is that using the new domains means that the statistics are separated out for the UK for the first time. Early days yet, of course, but it looks like the UK sites were getting a lot more traffic than we had thought they were getting which is good going since we hadn’t specifically promoted them.

On the promotion front, now that we have separate domains for the UK we can run promotion exercises on them too which we’d not been able to do before. In theory, that should mean that these new sites will become very significant for us over the course of the coming year or so.

People seem to be moving online in droves in search of holiday accommodation if the stats on my own accommodation listings sites are anything to go by.

Whilst ordinarily, I expect to have to upgrade the hosting for the collection of sites once a year, I’ve already had to upgrade it three times since Christmas such is the rush of people looking around for summer holiday accommodation. The increase in traffic from December looks like coming out around eight fold which is a major jump by any standards.

Whilst financially it’s no problem in that hosting costs have dropped like a stone in recent years, technically it’s heralding a problem that may arise this summer, somewhat ahead of my expectations. That problem is that I’ve only one more upgrade that I can do before I have to move from a shared hosting plan to a VPS hosting plan that essentially provides me with my own virtual server (actually shared by around four others).

Plus points of that upgrade are that it will give me the extra bandwidth that I’ll be needing by then and that the websites should run a lot faster but on the downside it costs about five times the price of the service that I’ll be using just prior to it.

As we’re edging into the main booking season for the summer, the number of travel advertisements is increasing quite dramatically as you’ve probably noticed.

Although the world is obviously pretty much the same as it was last year, the emphasis on particular holiday destinations seems to change from year to year. So far this year, the emphasis seems to be split between Costa Rica, Canada and Carribbean cruises which are three very different options.

At first glance Costa Rica seems to be primarily an ecotourism destination with rain forests, exotic animals and so on. However, whilst making a point of ecotourism the tourist infrastructure in other areas has been built up substantially in recent years and you now have a very complete offering under most types of tourist activities.

Canada is, for the moment, concentrating on luxury ski vacations both around British Columbia at the west and Quebec in the east. Luxury seems to be the common theme for both sides of Canada with a lot of emphasis on personal service and fantastic meals.

The Carribbean cruises being pushed this year are also generally at the luxury end of the market but emphasising the discounts available from a number of cruise lines. Very substantial discounts too in some cases, notably from SilverSea which is very much a personal service cruise line.

Of course, where they want you to go will probably change as we move further into the year. For one thing, the Canadian ski resorts will be dropping out from around April/May as the snow starts to melt although those areas are very attractive in the summer too.

When it’s cold and dreary at home it seems that many people get going on their summer holiday plans if the stats on our various listings sites are anything to go by.

In December, there’s just too much focus on the Christmas period of course what with shopping and the sheer volume of work that goes into sorting out the Christmas celebrations for most people. So, for the most part people begin their holiday planning for the upcoming summer in the first or second week of January and thereby snap up the bargains.

We’re already seeing a big jump upwards in the searches arriving on the self-catering booking sites reflecting that holiday planning activity and have seen some bookings already for the peak summer period so some of the better places have already been booked. Actually, the very best places tend to get booked not too long after the previous summer!

Anyway, if you’ve not yet started on sorting out the plans for your summer holiday, it would be best to get going on that now to give yourself the widest possible selection of places to choose from.

Let’s suppose our hypothetical time traveller was by chance able to make a really concrete prediction about what was going to happen say, next Tuesday, and it didn’t happen.

That would prove that he wasn’t from the future after all, wouldn’t it?

It’s not quite so simple as that. If he predicted that World War 3 was going to happen next Tuesday then you’re definitely dealing with a hoaxer. Major events like that which would have a considerable lead-up to them would be fairly definitive evidence that it was a hoaxer that you were talking to. On the other hand, if World War 3 was actually going to happen next Tuesday then chances are that you’d know about it too: such things rarely happen without a lot of preceeding events pointing to them happening well in advance of the event itself.

But what about more minor things? Sports results are a big iffy. For example, if you were to place large bets on the basis of what your “time traveller” said then that could by itself affect the outcome of the game.

And, that’s the problem really. Large scale events would have lots of preceeding smaller events leading up to them and thereby be largely predictable by many people whereas smaller scale events could be influenced by the very fact of the time traveller telling you about them.