Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Not a massive one but a jump nonetheless.

Chances are that it’s down to one of the oddities of the recession. Most of our internet income comes via the stable of accommodation listings sites that we run. Since holiday accommodation falls in the category of discretionary expenditure you’d think that this income would go down quite sharply during a recession. So it did initially, but the accommodation owners read the news too and have realised that their income should be dropping. This in turn means that they start advertising more which initially showed up in increased numbers of new entries on the sites and now seems to have started to show up in increased adsense revenue.

Definitely peculiar effects, but the question is what’ll happen during the rest of the year?

As y’all may have noticed of late, this blog is in the midst of yet another change of focus.

Originally, it started life way back in February 2004 as a means of keeping in touch with the folks back home when we were getting going on our life in France as from April that year all under the tagline of “Life in France without a TV crew”. That went great ’til we found ourselves in the position of being pretty much settled into life here, or at least settled in terms of not having anything much new to say about it. Net effect was that the writing fizzled out by late 2005.

Then I figured that what was needed to get me going again was a change of focus to an expat blog with a tagline of “Travel, expat life and foreign politics. As featured on TV and seen on Reuters.” as from the summer of 2006. Featured on TV? Well, funnily enough, the blog was the lead headline all day following the announcement of Chirac’s resignation. Articles from it are picked up fairly regularly by Reuters too although I’ve yet to work out exactly why!

However, now that we find ourselves in the midst of a partial relocation back to the UK (more on that anon), the focus is changing yet again. This time around I’ll be talking of our re-integration into the UK administration along with the continuing saga of my education and no doubt a whole bunch of other stuff along the way.

It’s been almost two years since we’ve had a trailer on the car but with the move date approaching fast it was time to get a tow bar on the car and darned expensive it is too. That’s, of course, the problem with trailers: not only are you out EUR 1000 or more on the trailer itself but you’ve also got to pencil in another EUR 500 for a tow bar.

Separately from that we’ve made a start on the packing and trying to work out just how much will actually fit into the trailer. At the moment, it seems like quite a lot but, as always, no matter the amount of space that you have available, it’s never quite enough as there are always last minute things that you’d not thought of and then there are those things that fall into the “wouldn’t it be nice if we could take that?” category which expand to fill any space available, no matter how large it might have appeared initially.

What’s a really plus point this time around is that we’ve loads of rooms available and have the luxury of being able to accumulate all the stuff in one room in a rough trailer-shaped pile so, in theory, it should be fairly simple to relocate said pile into the trailer. Not only that, we can park the trailer in our courtyard so can pack it over a few days and just hook it up the night before we head off.

Yes, it’s the time of year when all good bloggers write a time-delayed post to totally clog up the Internet…

What happened last year? Well, the world economy took a definite turn for the worst as y’all know. We were expecting that to hit us bad but what it did in practice was to change the nationality mix which we normally get over the summer from Brits/French to German/Dutch/Danish/French and generally lengthened the average stay which in turn bumped up the profitability. Somehow I fancy that the economic downturn won’t be quite so benign on the travel industry over the coming year.

I did what was supposedly the hardest course in the university as the final one for my modern language degree and found it to be the easiest one that I’ve yet done. The net effect of that is that I had a considerably easier finish to the degree than expected and picked up my BA (Hons) Modern Languages in December. For next year, I’ve already signed up for a course on Child Development which is notionally the first one in my psychology degree although I’m really only doing it to help with looking after the little guys.

Although the last five years have been great here for the kids, now that their school life is getting underway we’re finding that the French education system locally just isn’t up to dealing adequately with non-French children. As we’d expected from comments last year James isn’t doing at all well in the local French primary school.

For a whole bunch of reasons we find ourselves in the process of moving to a France/UK split for our lives at the moment whereby we’ll be in the UK September to June and in France July and August. That will let us get James’ and John’s education back on track and should help neutralise any sustained downturn in the economy too.

If nothing else, the coming year will be an “interesting” period to come for us.

Most of the booking websites provide a mechanism for guests to comment on and score the performance of the accommodation which they’ve used recently.

In most cases the comments are approved by the booking site before they’re published so you only get to see the relatively sensible ones as they weed out those that are from another planet. For example, the commentary that we received a year ago that criticised the “ancient boxy hairdryer” in the bathroom; in fact it was a reasonably modern room heater. Or the couple that wrote quite an extensive critique of their stay that rarely touched base with reality and for which it turned out that all their problems stemmed from them not having changing the time on their watch.

However, as well as the commentary there’s generally a scoring system in place which can sometimes have quite bizzare numerical effects. For example, on one site we’ve the vast majority of scores 7 and over yet because of two 2.5s from a single group we end up with an overall 5. It’s scoring bias like that which makes a nonsense of the scoring. In a large hotel with hundreds of comments one or two low scores disappear of course but when you’ve only a few dozen comments just one disgruntled customer can really throw the overall result.