Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

I’m toying with the idea of branching out into website design and a few other related things for the Winter months (assuming that I can get a few punters with cash burning a hole in their pockets).

Anyway, what do ‘yall think of Crystal Consultancy ? Would you buy a used website from these people?

Any thoughts on the level of charges? (or indeed comments generally: this is definitely mark #1)

We’re starting to dispare of ever being able to collect on the child benefit over here!

It’s been a couple of weeks now since we started a full scale onslaught on the citadel but every time we think we’ve broken through, we find yet another letter on the doormat a couple of days later (always dated for the day that we were there) asking for more documents. Two letters ago it was asking for proof from the child benefit office in Donegal (yes, Donegal) that they’d stopped paying us; that was sorted by yet another visit when we were assured that the money would be with us within the week.

Saturday, the letter arrived. They want proof of income for 2002. Since the UK tax year is April to March, what they want is actually impossible to provide so we’re just going to weigh in with the April 2003 tax statement (if I can find it) which at least covers most of the time they’re looking for.

On other fronts, we went live on the main pages (hotel, guide and transport) in Dutch over the weekend and tidied up a few loose ends along the way so now the tabbed look & feel is reflected across all the pages in all the languages and the language bar has been shrunk to cater for the seven languages on the hotel & transport pages (most pages only exist in English, French and Spanish) as the old style was getting a bit unwieldy. We’ll be running with that style for the rest of this year.

I’m hoping to add photos of the various festivals to our festivals & events page so we’re hoping to get along to a reasonable number of them during the year. Locally, there aren’t any ’til February and supposedly the first one is the hunting festival at Arles-sur-Tech which the tourist office site says is always the first weekend in February ie this weekend, so off we went. Nope, ‘taint this weekend. One thing that the tourist offices here are consistently dreadful at is publicising festivals and the like but you’d think that if they’d listed something as happening this week, it would.

The level of bookings seems to be starting to pick up a little. Not by a massive amount but then we normally get most bookings a few weeks ahead so starting to get summer bookings now is a good sign. The mix of sources seems to be quite similar to last year, in spite of all the additional listings ie about a third each from our own website, from the reservation systems and by phone. As with last year, we haven’t much of an idea of where people are getting our phone number but as the breakdown is similar, it’s probably from the website (the French rarely book online).

We had a family of Belgians in the other day. They’re always good to have as they nearly always take the evening meal and aren’t bothered about the cost (almost completely the reverse of the French). Anyway, the coffers for February are starting off on a decent footing as a result. Thanks to a considerable increase in our restaurant charges, we pulled in virtually the same amount as we did for the Dutch hiking group last year and that was including a big chunk of cash for an airport shuttle from Carcassonne!

On the restaurant front, that’s one area that we’re hoping to promote a whole lot more this year. Due to the awkward time of John’s arrival last year we didn’t really push the restaurant over the bulk of the high season which was something of a shame as the restaurant pretty much doubles the income from a room. Wendy’s planning on giving her coffee shop a go over the next few weeks though I don’t know that we have enough passing trade at the moment.

Our Sunday run was cancelled today as it’s absolutely pouring. Weather-wise, the neighbours say that January & February are generally a bit of a write-off but that things pick up in March. I’ve had to take the jumper off over the last few days so I guess the temperature must be starting to get back to normal.

The OU parcel arrived a few days ago (via my parents); we’re none too impressed with airmail that takes a fortnight from Belfast to here. Anyway, so far, so good with the Spanish. I’ve managed to complete the exercises in about 30 minutes when they are supposed to take about an hour; that’s about the same ratio as I had with the first French course three years ago. So, Jackie, it’ll be no problem for you this time next year either :))

Yes, folks, we appear to be within sight of the promised land of a French Child Benefit (Allocation Familiale) payment. At last, courtesy of a phone number that Colin acquired, we have prised a little note out of the Child Benefit people back in Belfast to the effect that they stopped paying us on July 12th. We’re looking at getting on for 3000‚€ of back payments.

We had a little trip up to see the people at the Auberge du Balestie near Carcassonne. They took over last June so, in theory, we’re running a few months ahead of them. In some ways we are, for they’ve not really gotten into getting listings on reservation systems yet whereas we’re running out of new places that we can be listed on. On the other hand, their restaurant is miles ahead of us and we’ll likely adopt a few aspects of it that we’re quite taken with over the coming months. Basically it reflects a different emphasis: at the moment we are essentially an accommodation provider that has a restaurant, whilst they are a restaurant that has some accommodation.

Our website is way ahead of them, of course, but then that reflects the fact that we’re not paying for the web development and have therefore ended up with a website of a scale more befitting something with several hundred rooms than our somewhat more modest establishment. In fact, we’ve yet to see a hotel, no matter how large, that has a website remotely approaching ours: no doubt you guys will email me straight back with one though!

Technically, we have (or had: we’ve yet to nail that fact down!) two stars whilst they didn’t inherit any from the previous owner. It’s difficult to say what our respective rating would be at the moment as we’ve both been upgrading things since we took over. Their restaurant is clearly better than ours in terms of appearance and ambiance whilst we’ve been luckier with our rooms. In practice the differences will be gradually diminishing over the coming months as they’re presently upgrading their rooms whilst we’re intending to up the ante with our restaurant so it’s anybody’s guess what the rating would ultimately be.

It looks like it will be useful for us to get together now and again as they’re coming at the hotel business from a different starting point and we’re looking forward to their critique of our setup on the return visit.

On the website, I’ve just finished a complete refresh this evening so if ‘yall all have a look I’d appreciate comments on the new style. Not radically different from last month but it is quite a change if you’ve not looked at it for a few months. Notable additions are that we’re now up to six languages on the hotel and transport pages (the hotel pages are very basic for Catalan, German and Italian at the moment but will improve); there are page navigation buttons on the english, french and spanish hotel pages; there are site navigation buttons across all of the english, french and spanish pages; the “book now” button features on the english, french and spanish hotel pages; and I’ve added google ads to all but the english hotel page. I’d particularly appreciate comments on the placement of the “reservations” button.

Tomorrow we’re off to see about getting the front wheels aligned and to book the car in to get the radiator sorted. I don’t know why, but they won’t do any work on the car without seeing the log book (carte grise) so I’ll have to hunt that out this evening.

You know the way that the birds all circle round before they head south for the Winter? Well, we are south and they’re still circling round and in really serious numbers. Maybe they’re intending to go a bit further south now!

We’ve got snow!! For the first time, it is definitely colder here than it is in Belfast.

As of this evening, you can now do guaranteed reservations through our own website. We’re running it through hostelworld who are the folk behind the Ryanair and FlyBE reservation systems among others. At the moment, we’re treating it as an experiment but I think that in due course it will pull in a lot more reservations through our own website than we would have had: it’s certainly a lot simpler for people to get a confirmed reservation there and then than it is to go through the whole rigmarole of e-mailing us to check availability.

We’re off to a hotel trade show tomorrow in Montpellier for a few days. If nothing else, it’ll give us a chance to wander round with an “Auberge Mas Camps” badge!

Hope ‘yall had a good Christmas and New Year.

The French family started arriving at 3pm on the 31st (well, two hours late isn’t bad for France, is it?) and it was all go from then ’til 1pm today. We didn’t get to bed ’til about 2.30am and had to get up again at 6.30am to get the breakfast out. Saturday night wasn’t so bad as we had a think and put the tea & coffee out in the lobby which gave us a chance to clear the restaurant a bit earlier and get to bed at 12.30 and we’d not to get up ’til 7.30 as we only had a couple of people taking breakfast and the rest hanging around for the brunch at 11.

Of course, it was all go during the day too. Saturday seemed to be one continuous meal from 9am through to midnight. The breakfast dragged out ’til almost noon with the stragglers from the night before. That in turn delayed lunch from the planned 12.30 to more like 2.30pm. French lunches are, of course, pretty drawn out affairs at the best of times and when you’ve no where to go afterwards it’s even worse. Anyway, we ended up doing the high tea (with genuine freshly cooked scones) a little after 6pm instead of 4.30. And, naturally, the dinner didn’t have a hope of starting at our hoped for 7pm, kicking off at more like 8.30pm.

The amount of food they got through was phenomenal. As, of course, are the scaps. We completely filled our restaurant size bin by lunchtime on Saturday so it’ll be topped up again after they empty it in the morning. We’ll be tossing out something like a dozen full baguettes (French bread to us foreigners). Not to mention half a crate of clementines (baby oranges), much the same amount of grapes, a mini mountain of stawberries,… You just don’t appreciate how much is left over after a meal ’til you’re clearing up after 23 of them! You also don’t fully appreciate just how big this place is ’til you spend two days walking back and forth between the two kitchens, the restaurant….

Amazingly, we only had one problem the whole time! Seems that the water heating system doesn’t work anything like I assumed that it did. On Saturday evening, we thought that it was an off-peak thing but it seems not as the water is now boiling. We still don’t know how it really works as it shouldn’t be warm yet if it’s an offpeak system. Still, we now know that we may hit a problem if we’ve 23 people in but that it’s OK with about 15 in (we’d about that many in the summer). I’m also quite amazed that a fuse didn’t blow with all the electric going full blast (every room in the place was like a sauna when we went in to clean them this afternoon). Well, actually a fuse did blow but it wasn’t ours as the neighbours power was off too.

Way back in October when we accepted the booking, we figured that we’d take the rest of this week off to recover but it hasn’t worked out like that. We already had a booking for four Australians for tomorrow but on Saturday night we took a three day booking for some Germans and this morning we picked up a reservation for this evening from one of the booking systems we’re on. So we don’t even get one night off :(( or should that be :)) It must be the start of the new year booking season as we’ve also got a reservation for a few days in March from another system. Oh, almost forgot… one system even managed to let through a booking with a duff credit card number for nine days starting last Thursday (don’t know what we’d have done if the credit card number was valid as we’d used every single room in the place for the family booking). Anyway, this coming week is looking fairly full with the French this evening, Australians tomorrow, Germans for Tuesday and Wednesday, some Spanish from Thursday to Sunday and it’s still the weekend (most folk book during working hours… just as well their companies don’t forbid such things in their IT security policies, eh?).