Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

We’re getting back to “normal” now after the rush of Summer business. The French tourists stop coming the weekend of August 20th but they all come that weekend so we’d to turn heaps of them away that Saturday as we were full with the wedding. Next day, none and it was back to our more normal UK bias on the bookings.

The Visa pour l’Image photojournalism festival is always a busy week for us. All the accommodation in Perpignan and for miles around is completely full that week with journalists, photographers and editors from around the world. That week we had two editors from Forward Publishing in London (the folk who do Tesco magazine) and Isaac Hernandez from Santa Barbara (who’s a travel photographer published in National Geographic etc.). Isaac was planning on doing a photoshoot of Queribus Castle but left it ’til his last day so, of course, it was shrouded in cloud.

Would you believe that we’ve STILL no bookings from Expedia? No, neither would I. Can’t understand it myself.

Over the year we’re averaging just under three times the occupancy of 12 months earlier which is pretty good going. This month (October) is the reference month that we used last year for our occupancy forecast so we’re back in the dark again as to how it’ll pan out over the next 12 months. Overall it seems to have been a very mixed year in France with quite a few people running almost empty whilst others were full.

There’s been a big increase in foreigners buying houses here this year. Whilst last year we witnessed the appearance of “British aisles” in even the smallest supermarkets, this year the most noticeable thing is that people are much more willing to try out their English plus the appearance of English papers in the village for the first time.

Anyway, as we edge into “Winter Mode”, ’tis time for us to make a start on the website refresh for the coming year. We’re planning to retain the overall look and feel of the existing site but are tightening up on the keyword lists (working on those now) and rewriting some of the text to incorporate them more completely. So, I’d welcome your thoughts on the change from www.mascamps.com/hotel/en.htm (the existing version) to Mas Camps hotel . One change that’s still to come is the separation off of the reservations section to its own page.

Also still to come is the complete winery/vineyard pages but the second versions are at Mas Camps winery and Mas Camps vineyard (and in French too). Definitely still in draft, but of interest to David I’m sure, is Mas Camps wines (haven’t done the translation of that yet as I’m waiting for the neighbours to check it).

The ongoing development of the regional guide at www.mascamps.com/region/en.htm continues and we’ve added Mas Camps tours which we tried out in paper form from August with considerable success in terms of stays being extended and sales of tickets.

Last, but not least, we’re still plugging away at trying to sell our walking tours on Ryanair. So far, no sales but ourselves and the guy doing the tours are very keen on it and the tours look excellent too I think.

Wow, it’s been a long time since the last issue!

We’ve continued at about twice the level of occupancy as last year which is throwing up some shortcomings in the calculations as to how many sheets and towels we need to have. Well, mainly the problem is that we’ve been pretty much 100% full most weekends but with a different bunch of people on Saturday night than Friday night; we reckon that we need around 50% more sheets & towels than we actually have to properly cover it.

Surprisingly we’ve been on expedia for getting on for two months now and not got a single booking from them. Just as well really as there’s an awful lot of admin in keeping on top of all the bookings when we’re close to 100% occupancy seeing as we list something like 120% of our rooms. We’ve continued to get a reasonable number of bookings from our original reservation system listing of last July and are getting most of the new ones from a couple of places that looked like they’d be minor fill-in sites.

Just over 7000km on the car so far.

Some **** pinched our trailer last month. If nothing else, it pushed us into buying the new one that we were needing and it’s heaps better than the last one. Wendy reckons that there’s a fair to middling chance that we’ll see someone driving around with the old trailer at some stage as it had UK plates so they’re probably thinking that we were just tourists.

Just starting to recover from our wedding booking yesterday. We’ve an absolute mountain of food leftover and will probably have to do one of our “bin runs” today to get rid of some of it as even the restaurant size bins aren’t up to taking it all. Everything went really well though the 4am finish was a teensy bit late. After a very late breakfast we managed to get rid of the last of the overnighters around noon and only have two rooms occupied tonight. That could well change rapidly as we had to turn away 6 or 7 people who turned up last night.

Still no car which is a major bummer. It’s supposed to be here next week.

We’ve now arrived in the big time with our listing on expedia. I only worked out how we got onto it last week. It seems that in the course of one of my marketing onslaughts earlier in the year I followed up who does the hotels for AirFrance and it’s an outfit I’d never heard of called WWTE who are actually expedia/hotels.com. Interestingly, if we’d applied to expedia directly, they’d have turned us down as we’d need to have 30 rooms but apply via WWTE and this restriction isn’t applied.

I’d forgotten all about hotelconnect who used to be the people behind FlyBE’s hotels but were dumped earlier in the year. Anyway, they actually call out to see you so our application has effectively been lying around for months. The guy turned up during the week and reckons that we’ll be on around mid-July. Although they don’t look after any airline flying into Perpignan, I think we’ll do quite well from their listing as they do most of their sales through travel agents which is an area we’d always wanted to get into. Also, they reckon that another airline is about to start flights into Perpignan and they’re looking for more hotels to service that.

We’ve finally started to get bookings from bookings.net . Just a couple so far but it’s a start.

Due to a slight lull before the summer kicks in I’ve finally managed to make a proper start on getting the winery/vineyard website. It’s not online yet but mark 1 should be within a week or two. We’ll probably move into online sales not too long after that as they already do mail order next door (only to France though).

Yet another “all building” booking rolled in last night. A travelling theatre group (“la Compagnie Les Affranchis”) is staying for a couple of nights (see http://www.ccas.fr/tcult/spectacle.php?ref=156).

We’ve had all kinds of car problems over the last couple of months with the Toyota which is now dead in the car park with no cooling system, in need of a new radiator, lacking a braking function and with very dodgy suspension following a pickup of rather heavy guests a few weeks back. We think that a couple of thousand euro will sort it out but we’re leaving it to the one side at the moment as we hope to trade it in against something like a Landrover at some stage in the not too distant future.

So, we’ve bought a new Suzuki Alto as our “2nd” car from Stockauto for 7500‚€ or so (yes, £5000 brand new!) and we think it’s now sitting in Paris (have to confirm this tomorrow). We’re currently working out how to get up there economically to collect it. The train is about 90‚€ which is notionally the cheapest way but requires an overnight stay in Paris which’ll bump up the cost. Airfrance is 260‚€ one way (really!) or 47‚€ if I bring John along (they have a “family travelling together” discount and he gets to go free), both plus about 30‚€ taxes ie around 90‚€ but there’d be another 10‚€ or so to get me into Paris. Renting a car is about 10‚€0 (if you’re renting one, www.PerpignanFlightsAndCarhire.com is the cheapest way to do it worldwide) plus maybe 40‚€ in petrol and 10‚€ in taxes (ie about 150‚€).

Following our little marketing onslaught about two months ago, we’re now live on www.activehotels.com,  www.bookings.net and www.travelextras.com and have received no bookings from any of them! We’re nearly live on Gullivers and Expedia which hopefully will do somewhat better.

No more word from the telly people but they appear to be running behind schedule a bit so who knows?

We’ve just received our first reservation in German. That’ll teach me to get bits of the site into languages I can’t understand!

Roy’ll be happy to hear that we’re finally getting the rugby traffic. There’s some match on July 8th and we’re almost completely full that weekend as a result of that. Wendy’s worried that they’ll all be wanting transfers to the match which will take a while in the Suzuki – three people a go means over five trips already and that’s just counting the people that we know are going to the match.

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!