Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Every year I send an e-mail to all the B&B and self-catering properties listed on the Our Inns websites telling the people what we’ve done with the sites during the year and the kind of improvements that we’re planning for the coming year.

Each year, I get a trickle of returned e-mails representing those properties that have been sold within the previous year. This year has been particularly sad in that almost 10% of the original people listed on the site have dropped out of the market and aren’t traceable. Now, if we charged for a listing we’d expect to have people drop out each year but the free listings that we provide just keep going.

Why do they give up on B&B (and, so far, it’s been exclusively the B&B properties)?

Well, many people come to France with rose coloured glasses courtesy of the many “moving to France” series that you get these days. In those, there are never any insurmountable problems but in real-life there are problems that you just don’t want to deal with day in day out. For instance, whilst none of the people on those series speak French (with the notable exception of Patrick & Collette of Chaos in the Castle fame), you DO need to speak French to run a B&B here (but not if you’re running a gite).

For others, it’s their first experience of dealing with paying guests on a regular basis and it’s just not their thing. Again, with rose-tinted glasses it might seem an idyillic lifestyle but in reality it’s pretty hard work.

Then there’s those that have never run a business before let alone one in France and don’t appreciate how much money is required to get a place fully operational. Others haven’t considered pricing. For instance, we’ve just heard of one more upcoming dropout who are packing it in because they were constantly full and it was just too much work yet they’re in a property which they could easily have charged almost twice as much and still been full but been able to employ someone.

Finally, some people who think they’re really committed francophiles, find that they just can’t stick life in France. Yes, it can seem the perfect lifestyle whilst on holiday but that very laid-back aspect of it which seems initially very appealing can become an annoyance when you want to get things done.

So, every year whilst we get a flow of new properties coming onto the sites we know that we’ll also see a trickle of the existing properties departing.

One of the stranger aspects of us living here is the different way that James & John refer to things.

As we’re in France, they aren’t picking up english from kids at school as they’d normally do but rather picking it up from home and the TV. This means that it’s possible for us to pick out where they’ve learnt a word. So, by and large, they “speak cooking” with an Australian accent and they “speak computer” with a Belfast accent.

It’s also interesting that whilst both James & John refer to “Granda” and “Nanny here”, James who used to be looked after by my parents has “Granda’s Nanny”, John who was born here has “Nanny at the airport” as that’s usually the last place that he sees her.

We think that it was because Wendy was looking after James a lot more when he was younger than I was that he has developed a largely Australian accent but with us both being around much more equally since John was born he has a much more pronounced Belfast accent. You’d have thought that since James has been here over 60% of his life now that his accent would have become more balanced but it hasn’t done, or at least not yet so I guess that it’s the first couple of years that are the most important in terms of accent

We’re listed on a number of instant-booking websites which are quite different from the usual “drop us a line and we’ll get back to you” type of site that the majority of B&B type places (and many hotels) are listed on in that once the guest has clicked the “book it” button, they are guaranteed to have the room available.

Now obviously when there’s an automated process like this, the system needs to hold information about various aspects of the room and, in particular, the number of people that the room will hold. So, for example, if you book a double room through a system like this, then it’ll sleep up to two people.

So what do people start doing around this time of year? Well, they book a double and in one case turned up with five people for the room. Why? Well, on another site (not the one that they booked through), we say we don’t charge extra for children so they figured that they could book the cheapest double room and turn up with an unlimited number of children.

This, despite the site saying, “the maximum number of people (including children) is 2” for that particular room.

We’ve just received the first of these bookings for the Summer season… there’ll be many more. Actually, the current family are quite lucky in that we have a room available: I think that the 2 adults plus 3 children ended up sleeping in the car as they arrived on the busiest day of the year last Summer.

As you’ll have noticed, I’ve posted next to nothing over the last month. A total of seven posts vs what would have been a more normal 30 in fact.

That’s because I’ve been over in Northern Ireland trying to sort out some administration since June 5th and only got back home on Friday evening.

Now, I wasn’t expecting there to be much change in the traffic on my websites but the blog is different. The most commonly held belief is that you need to post at least once a day to keep up the traffic. That seems reasonable: after all, blogs, for the most part, cover “current events” in some fashion so without the regular updates, the traffic on a blog is bound to drop off quite quickly, isn’t it?

Well, the funny thing is that the blog traffic didn’t drop at all by any meaningful amount. The number of hits showed very little change at all nor did the adsense income. The number of subscribers via Feedburner dropped about 10%. The number of incoming links as counted by Technorati went up.

So little was the change that it has me wondering if the best strategy would be to build up a blog over six months or so then start a new one.

Northern Ireland hasn’t been in the international news much lately but that’s not really an indication of peace as such, more an indication that violence isn’t happening which isn’t quite the same thing (welcome as non-violence always is, of course).

In fact the first indications of the arrival of peace was on its way started quite a number of years ago and, to my mind, was the arrival of the supermarket chain Tesco in 1997.  Prior to that the only UK supermarket chain operating in Northern Ireland was Marks & Spencer which had opened in 1967, 2 years prior to the start of the troubles, and hadn’t bothered expanding much since then. Nothing really says that peace is coming quite like big chunks of cash being invested.

However, the more certain arrival of peace (as opposed merely to reducing violence) was really only in the last few years and that has been marked in two very noticeable ways. Firstly the investments being made in the local economy are massive these days: you can’t drive more than a mile or two in Belfast without seeing building works of some kind. That’s also an aspect of the second point which is that there has been a large scale migration to Northern Ireland by everyone from the Poles to those that left because of the violence. Combine those two and the booming of the economy is very noticeable.

One very obvious side-effect of that mass immigration is that the house prices are going through the roof (hence the building work everywhere, of course) which is effectively a catching up on rises that didn’t happen in the last 30 years. The banks don’t seem to know what has hit them and mortgages are now available for up to 8 time salary (vs the maximum of 3 times just 3 or 4 years ago).

Anyway, at least Northern Ireland can now stand as an example of what it’s like when you do get to the end of the violence. Hopefully, it’ll provide an encouraging example to areas of the world that are still immersed in a culture of violence such as Colombia.