Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

It’s back to school today for James which means that we’ve to start getting up at a fixed time yet again.

One of the oddities about this business is that there are no regular hours at all. During the summer we generally need to be up no later than 7.30am each day and often need to stay around the office until after 11pm each night. Once we get outside the peak period though there starts to be periods of a day or two when we’ve nobody in and can lay in a while and over the winter you often get stretches of a week or more at a time when you can take it easy.

Well, perhaps “take it easy” isn’t the right description as we use those times sans guests to get various bits of maintenance done, to catch up with the administration and move more into our little empire of online activities. Still, ’tis nice not to have both the early start and late finish for a while even if it is a little muddied by school days.

When you run a booking service, you get a strange perspective of the holiday booking habits of people which is generally at odds with what you’d think people would really do.

For instance, our B&B sites pick up a lot of traffic from around April through to August each year and outside that they’ve relatively low numbers of visitors. That’s understandable really as most B&B bookings are for just a few days at a time at most and you wouldn’t expect people to book short term holidays a long time in advance.

It’s quite different for the self-catering sites though. For them the booking season started just before Christmas and we’re getting so much traffic on the sites at the moment that it looks like we’ll need to upgrade the bandwidth next week. In fact, the traffic is pretty much as high as it was in the peak of the summer season!

Last year we had quite a noticeable dip in traffic on the sites from November onwards but this year we’d simply a small dip over part of the Christmas period.

In fact, it would seem that people have been booking much, much earlier for 2008 than they did the previous year. We’ve had pretty much level traffic on the sites from August right through to now with, as I say, a small dip over part of Christmas.

Part of that is probably due to us starting our marketing programme for the sites in November but even so we still had pretty much summer level traffic on the sites before we started which is pretty unusual as the B&B site traffic usually drops like a stone after August and the self-catering traffic drops up to a month earlier than that.

In fact, the traffic is up so much that I suspect that I’m going to have to upgrade the hosting package for the sites as soon as Easter when ordinarily the upgrade that I did in December would have seen me through at least a year.

Although you can find that it’s arond the 700‚€ a week mark to rent a villa regardless of the season, many Spanish owners offer dramatic reductions in the price for long term rentals over the winter months.

For example, if you take a month long break in southern Spain, you can get quite a substantial villa for around the 600‚€ per month mark. Now, granted that doesn’t include food but it does include heating (which you’ll not need) and for a villa you’re effectively living there rather than in your own home ie you’ll be preparing most of your own meals rather than eating out so the price will be little different for meals in Spain than they would be if you were staying in your own house.

That lack of heating bills can make for quite a substantial saving taking the net cost down from 150‚€ per week to under 100‚€. This means that many pensioners are able to take up the winter in Spain option every year and with the increasing rise in “home working” it’s becoming a viable option for many more of us.

We’re just back from a very packed short Christmas break to Valencia.

What we’d not allowed for was that, of course, Christmas takes out several days from the time available as there’s Christmas Day itself and then there’s the Christmas shopping, etc. Anyway, net effect is that we’ve heaps of stuff to see when we go back there the next time.

The apartment that we stayed in was right in the centre with just a short walk taking us to the massive eight floor Corte Ingles department store and the almost as large shopping centre just behind it. Just beyond that were the arts & sciences museums that you can see in the photo.

By chance the Titanic exhibition was on so we started off with that. It takes a couple of hours to go round and goes into often tedious detail about maybe a couple of dozen of the passengers but skimps on other areas where you might like more detail eg there’s just the one short segment on how come they ran into the iceberg.

Next up was the Museo de la Ciencias (on the right of the photo). It’s one of those hands on interactive museums so sounds pretty good for the kids but in fact there’s very little on offer for children who are younger than mid-teens and even then we found that an awful lot of the exhibits weren’t operational. I suspect that the Hemispheric would be a better bet as it’s based on a series of IMAX shows though whether you’d want to stay there the whole day I don’t know.

We’d also a very brief trip round the old part of the city which we’d liked to have spent a lot more time on and will do next time around.

Definitely a city very suitable for a short-break.