Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

Whilst we’re in the midst of the peak of the holiday season at the moment, as usual we’re also in the peak season for noshows and cancellations.

The cancellations are understandable. It’s very difficult to get booked in locally at the moment so people grab the first place they see even if it isn’t in the location they really want to be. Then they’ll cancel later if they get something closer to their ideal spot. For instance, earlier today out of the 66 hotels within 30km of Perpignan, just 2 had rooms available and we know that one of those only had rooms available because of cancellations earlier in the day (‘cos one of them is us). If we were braver, we’d delibrerately overbook the rooms as the larger hotels do to allow for the expected high level of cancellations.

However, the noshows are usually puzzling. Just last night we received an e-mail from a group that look like they’ll not be arriving now to confirm that they were coming and that they were looking forward to seeing the area. If they’d cancelled yesterday, it would have cost them nothing, now it’s going to cost them getting on for EUR 150 and we’re sitting with several empty rooms.

People have a whole range of different ways that they approach booking their holiday of course and this year I think we’ve run through all of them!

There are those who book everything months in advance and don’t allow for any changes in their plans. They certainly get more choice in their accommodation and transport options doing this and sometimes they even get better prices (almost always on discount flights of course). However, the downside is that some of those offers can work out quite expensive if you change your plans eg if you’ve booked a non-refundable rate to get a discount and your plans change. We’ve just had a family whose plans changed and that early booking cost them dear as they’d to make last minute changes of their flights (always expensive) and look certain to have lost hundreds of euros on the accommodation too.

Then there are those that get the urge to go on holiday and book things piecemeal not too much in advance of their trip. This can be quite expensive as the flights are almost always more expensive than the first groups prices. Sometimes the accommodation is more expensive too as hotels are increasingly following the discount airline pricing model ie last minute rooms are more expensive than those you book well in advance. The biggest problem though is that many of these people end up booking across holiday periods when availability of accommodation and transport is less than ideal. For example, we have a couple now who couldn’t book a straight week with us as a couple of days crossed a major holiday so they booked somewhere else to fill the gap. Neither did they book a car in advance as, because of that holiday, there wasn’t any online availability so they’re at the airport at the moment trying to get a car.

Finally, there is the last minute group. Well, actually two groups. One tries to book about a week in advance and that’s usually fine except at the peak of the peak season but sometimes it isn’t. However, at the peak of the peak there’s also a peak of last minute cancellations so if you call a week in advance and find nothing available, calling a day or two in advance can often find some rooms available.

One thing that’s slightly peculiar is that almost always when I write something about languages, I get comments on the post.

Why? Basically because there’s something of an underground support group for Esperanto.

Eh? What’s Esperanto? For those that don’t know, way back in the late 1800s there was a feeling worldwide that what was needed was a world language. One that wasn’t tied politically to any particular country (so no vested interests) and could be used around the world.

At the time, such a language didn’t exist so there arose something of a cottage industry in inventing them. Of those produced at the time, Esperanto being by far the best known these days. However, it didn’t stop then and in the early 1900s people proposed even more languages including a simplified version of English.

Although it’s quite a different world these days, the Esperanto community is still developing the language and you can even get free accommodation around the world if you can speak it (it’s reputedly a very easy language to learn). And, they’re very enthusiastic commenters on posts!

We’ve had two separate groups booking with us recently who seemed to be experiencing senile dementia at a very early age indeed: their 20s!

The first group was Australian so Wendy was quite keen on having them here as she always likes to chat to Australian guests when she gets the chance. We did wonder about them a little early on though as they clearly wanted to be staying at a place on the beach yet had booked our place which is in the countryside although some people do that in the peak season as we’re cheaper. Not only that but although we offer pickups they turned up in a taxi (usually around three or four times the rate we charge). Although they were only here a couple of days they managed to go downhill from there ending up by booking a meal with us for 7.30 and not bothering to sit down to eat it. “More money than sense” is a phrase that definitely applies to them!

The second group was from the UK and couldn’t work out how to get here despite being told in the automatic confirmation that they received when they booked and again on the confirmation e-mail that they received from me the next day. What confused them was that there were no buses to our place at 7pm despite it saying on both e-mails that the last bus is at 6pm. Now, I know that most people don’t read the complete confirmation e-mails but this information was in the second paragraph!

They’re just the first of many similar guests that we expect to receive (or not as in the case of the second group) over the next month or so.

It’s been ages since I looked at the detailed stats for this blog so it was something of a surprise that one place reckoned that 75% of the readership is in America.

I say one place because one place reckoned that as low as 25% were from there and that 16% were from India.

Of course, that’s the problem with web site statistics: none of them are really accurate. Bear in mind too that all of those that I looked at have a little stats marker on the site so they should all be in agreement!

To be fair, they’re not all measuring over exactly the same timescale but a few days out isn’t going to make a difference from 75% American readership to 25%. Some statistical errors are evident though so for example the American readership that Alexa guesses at 25% is higher than the British readership that they guess at 20% simply because their toolbar is more popular in the US (all the sensible stats places reckon that both countries are about equal).

However, it does seem clear that we’re getting more American readers than we used to and therefore I’m thinking that it’s time that Foreign Perspectives emmigrated to America itself so over the next week or two I’ll be moving the hosting for it.