Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

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?).

The other week, it was the septic tank causing us problems, now it’s the turn of the well….

We own two water sources: a spring which was used up to two owners ago and a well which the last guy switched over to. It saves us having to pay the equivalent of the water rates but it’s not “free” as we need to maintain the pumping equipment etc. Normally, it’s fine apart from very busy days in the summer and also in september when the winery are using lots and lots of water; at those times, all that needs doing is to make sure the storage tank is full in the morning which we do by flicking the pump off and on (don’t know why, but it switches off after a while and before the tank is full).

Anyway, things were going fine ’til 2 or 3 days ago when every night we ran completely out of water (the first time ever!) and had to do the flicking thing. That time actually co-incided with the arrival of the grand-daughter of the guy who owned the place two owners ago (she’s the last person living who supposedly knows how the system works!). We thought that perhaps we’d turned a tap that she pointed out as we were walking round but we think we’ve undid all that we did then and still no water: it looks like we’ve emptied the well!

We’re in the process of getting ourselves onto our first American site: www.ownerdirect.com . Hopefully, it’s not typical of the American sites as they wanted so much information entered that it took hours to type it all in and we’ve still a couple of detailed things to do like measuring up the rooms. It’s another one of those guaranteed reservation places too so we’ll have to add it to our list of places for the January update (at the moment, we’ve listed more rooms in total than we actually have which is OK for the winter but, all being well, wouldn’t be OK for the summer so the plan is to sit down in January and make sure that the total is no more than our actual number of rooms).

While we were looking round for our 1-800 number, we found out that you can call American 800 numbers from abroad if you replace the 800 by 880 eg you can call us from outside the US by dialling 00 1 880 571 6392.

As we’re in “winter mode” at the moment, we’ve been plugging away with the backlog of administration that built up over the summer (we gotta be a bit more organised about it next year!). All being well, we will be up to date with the accounts by next week which is just as well as we got a tax return yesterday that needs completed by January 1st.

On other fronts, we’re getting moving on the fosse septique on a more laid back but still brisk pace. The mairie reckon (as we did) that it would be best to have the initial survey done in conjunction with our neighbours which will mean a) it’s cheaper and b) will be done quicker as they’re already in the system. We’ll talk to them about it tomorrow (I think it’s started to sink in with them that they don’t have enough land for it to be workable).

Separately, we have contacted the local fosse guy and buildersabroad who should be coming up with a quote in due course (we need the survey done first). But it’s looking like a completion date of the new fosse around March which is awfully close to the start of the tourist season.

The Hilton has one, the Waldorf has one and now Mas Camps has one. Yes, folks we have joined the bigtime with our very own toll free number, 1-800-571-6392 . Well, as of sometime tomorrow anyway.

More anon.