Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

As in most things, the French assume that hotel reservations work the way that they worked in France 50 years ago.

Of course, they rarely use the internet to make their reservations (although, to be fair, that is changing) and generally phone. In fact, it’s not unknown to receive a letter asking for a reservation and expecting a reply by letter too. Out of the peak seasons, that’s not too bad but we just ignore any letters received like that during the peak season as we just can’t afford to hold a room on the off-chance that they may actually confirm the reservation a week or two later.

The use of debit/credit card numbers as a guarantee is virtually unknown to them and they almost always ask to pay a deposit by cheque. Their lack of experience of using their card to guarantee a room means that it’s quite common for them to think that they’ve paid for the room when they make a reservation online and have quoted their card number which often requires considerable explanation at checkout time.

One major cause of friction is that they assume that it’s fine to cancel a reservation at anytime without charge. Everywhere else in the world, you need to cancel a hotel reservation before the arrival time you quoted and often 24 hours or more before that. Here, they assume that if they’ve not stayed in the room, then it’s OK. After all, the room isn’t costing the hotel anything, is it? It might not be costing anything, but when we get cancellations well into the evening, we’ve often turned people away because with a card number guaranteeing the room we are obliged to hold the room. This year for instance we had two days when we were completely full and turning away numerous people yet had hardly anyone who actually stayed!

Abroad, it’s even worse for them though. By and large, the French only have debit cards and severely limited ones at that. Whereas in the UK the cash withdrawal limit on a debit or cash card is around £250 (EUR 500) per DAY, in France the standard limit is EUR 300 per WEEK. Not only that but whilst you could, in principle, buy a house on a debit card in the UK, there is a spending limit of, usually, EUR 3000 per month on French debit cards (which is why they continue to use so many cheques). For most purposes, that’s OK. However, consider someone booking into a hotel in the UK. The first think that is done is that the card is run through for an authorisation of, usually, £100 per day (ie about EUR 150), even if the hotel actually only costs about £50 a night. So, a French person can stay a maximum of 20 days in UK hotels and, of course, that’s before you consider spending elsewhere.

This is why France is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t pre-authorise payments.

So, no, the French don’t understand hotel reservations work unless they’re in France with a hotel that only operates in France.

Many things that seem “obvious” in the UK, aren’t in France.

Of course, there are many things that are clearly different between the two cultures and after a while you think that you’ve gotten into the swing of things and can extrapolate into other areas of French life. Everyone knows that it’s common practice to urinate in the streets in France for instance so you turn a blind eye to that after a while as it’s just “something French”, like the streets being constantly full of dog poo. If you thought about it, perhaps you’ve wondered if the French would drop their trousers and do a load in the streets too. Well, I’ve not seen it done in the streets but it’s surprisingly common to see a van pull off the road in the country and the driver head off into the field with a toilet roll.

What about more “universal” things though? Clearly it’s obvious that electricians, plumbers and the like will flock to do even a small job where a large building is concerned. Isn’t it? Well, from a UK-mindset it certainly is obvious. Not so to the French. For them, a small job is always a small job even if it’s in a large building and therefore there are likely to be a lot more similar small jobs in the future with the possibility of a large job now and again.

If you do need something relatively small done, what happens is that the electrician/plumber/etc. will come out (quite quickly if you have a large property) and give you an estimate. He’ll then say that he’ll be back to do the work the next week, or perhaps even later in the same week. After a while in France, you get to consider “next week” as meaning sometime in the next month or two so you’ll wait quite a while before wondering if he’ll actually be back. In fact, if the estimate was for an amount under EUR 500 or so, he will never be back because French tradespeople just can’t be bothered to do work under that level.

Initially, we thought that the reason they didn’t come back was that we were foreigners, we’d said something we shouldn’t have, misunderstood something, or whatever. It’s not that though because our French neighbours told us that it’s typical of the attitude of the local tradespeople: they can’t get any small jobs done either. Want someone to put in an extra electical socket? Either do it yourself, or wait ’til you need the whole house rewired.

The overall effect of this is clear in French towns and villages all over the country. Over a period of time, the bit of the wall where that section of plaster fell off isn’t redone, the door that needed repainted hasn’t been, etc. It’s particularly evident in this area as there are twins of those towns and villages just over the border in Spain. Wherever you look, you’ll see that the French villages are that little bit rundown and if you walk into the backstreets you’ll see houses everywhere that look pretty much derelict from the outside. There are exceptions to this, of course, but they are almost always the houses owned by foreigners who’ve bought an almost derelict house and had it restored. The strange thing is that in equivalent Spanish villages, almost all of the houses look like they’ve been restored yet in many cases the buildings on the French side were built when this area was part of Spain.

The effect is so pronounced that you can pretty much watch the sweep of foreign ownership through the various villages simply by looking at the increasing number that are well maintained.

So does anyone do odd-jobs in France? Yes: the ex-pats do but the French certainly don’t.

That probably seems like an odd question at first glance. How can a country with a fairly major economy be called backward?

Oh, I agree that it has such things as new technology, consumer rights, labour legislation and the like. Unfortunately the belief that anything outside France doesn’t really matter is quite widespread and this negates a large part of those aspects of an advanced economy.

Consider new technology. Yes, France has internet access across most of the country. However, few people use it. Take for example our experiences of the Summer of 2005. Up until then, no French person had every booked online with us but over a six week period during that Summer something like 80% of the French bookings were made online. That’s not a bad percentage as obviously not everyone will book online. Interestingly though, for nearly all of that 80% their booking with us was the first thing that they had ever bought online. They’d never booked a hotel, never reserved a flight, hadn’t even bought a book on Amazon before. This was quite a representative group too which made it even more unusual. So, yes, France is very much a backward nation in terms of internet use in comparison to the rest of the western world.

What about consumer rights? In any supermarket in the UK, you can take back a faulty product and have your money refunded. Try doing that in France sometime. The attitude in the shops seems to be an amalgam of the very worst of practices from decades ago elsewhere. Refuse to pay for a service not delivered? The first reaction is to take you to court because you have to pay for it anyway. Think the bill from your insurance company is too high this year and want to change to another one? Sorry, you had to cancel the insurance two months before we told you what it would cost (no, really, that’s true!). It’s very much a backward country in this area.

Perhaps you think that France was way ahead of the game in introducing chip & PIN technology for its debit cards? It was, 10 years ago. Snag is that as with other things they only considered France so the technology they used couldn’t be rolled out elsewhere. Net effect? France has had to change all it’s card machines to cope with the international chip & PIN standard. Result of this? Chaos. It made life so complicated that all the shops in one local tourist village have stopped accepting all cards.

Note that I said “debit cards” in that paragraph. That’s because, even now, France doesn’t have credit cards in the sense of the term as used elsewhere. Overdrafts don’t exist either. In fact, on the whole France is one of the most backward nations in terms of financial products in the western world.

Labour legislation is one area where France will argue that it’s more advanced than anyone. The problem is that the laws governing employment are so strict that the unemployment level is much higher than it needs to be. Small companies just can’t afford to employ people in the hope that the business will follow: they need to be sure that the business is there because sacking employees is such a long and costly affair.

So, in many respects, France is quite a backward looking country.

I read an article in the Conexion today about integrating yourself into French society and one piece of advice was to speak French to the kids and ban English TV which set me thinking.

The family giving that advice was effectively robbing their kids of any chance of being bilingual which is a major advantage that you can give your children by living here. Moreover, isn’t that trying to be “more French than the French”? After all, a growing number of the French are finding that speaking English is an advantage in todays world. OK, France as a country may not like that situation, but that’s the reality.

Friends of ours are finding that by only having French TV and having their children going to French school that it is already becoming harder for them to communicate with their 10 year old (they’ve been here about 5 years). She’s not as fluent in English as she is in French and that situation can only get worse (or do you think “better”?) as she gets older. I’m sure that it’s not only her English language that she’s losing but her British culture too.

What about her parents? They only watch French TV so are gradually becoming more detached from the reality of life in the UK. Is that a good thing? I’m sure that they’ll not lose their ability to speak English fluently but if they stay here another 20 years, I suspect that going back to the UK would be like moving to a foreign country. Just look back to 1986 to see what I mean. How much has the UK changed since Thatcher? You don’t fully understand French taxation now I’m sure, but with a 20 year gap, would you understand UK taxation? I think not. Scotland didn’t have it’s own government then but it could even be a separate country in 20 years time: how much would that change UK culture? Even if you’d left as little as ten years ago, chances are you’d not know the English terms for e-mail and the like and be quoting your Minitel address to people. But you get the idea – the longer that they are out of touch with UK life, the more it will seem like a foreign country.

As for your kids: remember that they’ll have spent a much larger proportion of their lives “abroad”, so will they still consider the UK as “home”? What will you do if/when you decide to move back to the UK and they don’t want to move to a “foreign country”? Because, if you’re talking 10 or more years, it would be a foreign country to them.

So how French do you want to be? How French do you want your children to be? How French do you want your grandchildren to be?

They’re not easy questions to answer, but you should think about them.

Arnold

Whilst most countries in the world tend to move forward in terms of the use and usability of technology, it’s often the case in France that it’s one step forward, two backward.

Case in point: just a few weeks ago we noticed that Carrefour had, at last, started to accept foreign cards in their petrol stations and we thought that this was the first sign of the “promised land” of being able to use foreign cards in all petrol stations. Sadly, no. A matter of days later, the only petrol station that we know of within about 100 miles of us that did accept foreign cards on Sunday installed brand new petrol pumps and no longer accepts foreign cards!

This seems particularly short-sighted in light of the experience of the petrol station closest to the airport. Last year, it was “upgraded” from a manned station to being fully automated. Previous to that, there were always queues of cars getting petrol. Now, there are never any queues because the bulk of their potential customers can’t use the pumps anymore. Funnily enough, the pumps offer the choice of four languages but just don’t accept any foreign cards.

Why is that though? After all, even in France the old style cards will be phased out by the end of this year and just about all the other countries in Europe seem to be issuing new chip & PIN cards.

Petrol stations aren’t the only example of this craziness. The ultimate expression of that is the village of Tautavel which lives on tourism. Last year, due to the complications that the combined introduction of foreign chip & PIN cards plus the various banks upgrading their machines to accept them, all the tourist shops decided to stop accepting cards altogether. So, what happens now if you arrive at the till will EUR 100 or so of souvenir pots etc. is that they’ll point you towards the cash machine across the road. Now, for French people, that’s fine as they have debit cards and therefore don’t pay any more to withdraw cash from the ATM than they would to use their card in the shop BUT almost all foreigners use credit cards and therefore would have to pay cash advance fees plus interest.

Overall effect? Well, it’s fine for the French or for those who are buying small quantities of souvenirs but the customers wanting to make larger purchases just walk away. The shops can’t understand why: after all, in their eyes, there’s no difference in cost for the customer as they’re pretty much entirely unaware of the extra costs they’re asking their customers to pay.

The other consequence is that several of the shops are looking rather shaky and seem sure to close. I suspect that the same could easily happen to the airport petrol station too.

Arnold