Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

One noticeable difference in the bookings this year is that we’ve had a lot more Americans staying with us.

Americans, in general, only get two weeks vacation time each year which obviously has quite an impact on the type of holiday that they take. For one thing, it’s rare for a working American to take a holiday longer than two weeks and therefore they are, for the most part, channelled into taking package holidays as that’s the only way you can really pack a lot of sightseeing into a short period. Moreover that short period means that they tend to concentrate on the highlights of a country or group of countries (“doing” Europe is quite common) so typically they will consider that they’ve “done” France if they’ve been to Paris.

Therefore, normally, the long-stay Americans are either students on a back-packing type holiday to Europe or retired people. However, it’s been noticeably different this year and we’ve had both more Americans and more varied categories of Americans staying with us. The couple who have just left us today were normal working Americans for instance and moreover they are planning to return as they were both quite taken with the region (and us!).

After spending all that time looking around, we think it’s going to be a whole lot simpler and cheaper to go somewhere by car.

So, we’re restarting our search for a holiday destination yet again.

We don’t want to drive for days on end from here which limits us to a range of around six hours driving time or thereabouts. Thanks to the previous searching, we’ve ruled out the original northern locations and are instead looking south which simplifies the search process considerably.

All being well, we’re hoping to actually book somewhere today although we were also hoping to book somewhere last week too so you never know.

We’ve almost given up hope of getting flights to match the apartments/villas that we can find in Majorca.

For one thing, a lot of the self-catering places have specific days for checking in which means that the flight prices on those days are much higher than they are for the rest of the week. The effect of that is that we can’t run with a place that requires us to checkin on a specific day as we can’t afford the flights to get to it.

Then there’s the ongoing hassle of very little in the way of online booking for these places so we’ve to send off a heap of enquiries and wait ’til each place gets back to us which is a real pain.

On the plus side, at least the car hire is pretty cheap so we can add that on. Or can we? Given that it’s a peak holiday season I’m none too sure that we’ll be able to get a car which would, of course, affect the locations that would be viable for us for the villa.

Even before Schengen came into force, most of the borders around Europe had very little in the way of immigration control. Bit slow in getting out the passport? You were just waved on.

Yet, that doesn’t happen to some people apparently. One British/Russian couple are stopped at every border post and told that the wife needs to have a Schengen visa. How come?

Simple really. They offer up their passports at every border post and thereby give the border guards something to do. Everyone else just assumes that they’ve the right to go over the border and just keeps going anyway.

We’ve still not ruled out somewhere in the direction of the Alps for our Christmas break as we quite liked the area the other week.

As usual for us, we were looking for last minute Alps hotels which, for the most part, means looking at RatesToGo. Why? Well, that’s one of the sites that specialises in selling the final couple of rooms in the hotels that they list. Courtesy of the way that expenses work in hotels, it’s in their interest to fill those last couple of rooms and often that means that you get a substantial discount on the RatesToGo site vs the rate that you’d get even when booking directly with the hotel.

One minor hassle with the site is that because these are usually the very last rooms available in the hotels listed, you can’t hang around deliberating about your choice of hotel because chances are it’ll be gone if you do. For example, the rather nice Eurogroup Hotel Le Royal Ours Blanc is already gone. That’s a good example though as the site doesn’t just have the dregs of hotels listed: many luxury hotels use it to sell their final rooms too ie the bargains that you see are quite genuine.