Foreign Perspectives

Still no car which is a major bummer. It’s supposed to be here next week.

We’ve now arrived in the big time with our listing on expedia. I only worked out how we got onto it last week. It seems that in the course of one of my marketing onslaughts earlier in the year I followed up who does the hotels for AirFrance and it’s an outfit I’d never heard of called WWTE who are actually expedia/hotels.com. Interestingly, if we’d applied to expedia directly, they’d have turned us down as we’d need to have 30 rooms but apply via WWTE and this restriction isn’t applied.

I’d forgotten all about hotelconnect who used to be the people behind FlyBE’s hotels but were dumped earlier in the year. Anyway, they actually call out to see you so our application has effectively been lying around for months. The guy turned up during the week and reckons that we’ll be on around mid-July. Although they don’t look after any airline flying into Perpignan, I think we’ll do quite well from their listing as they do most of their sales through travel agents which is an area we’d always wanted to get into. Also, they reckon that another airline is about to start flights into Perpignan and they’re looking for more hotels to service that.

We’ve finally started to get bookings from bookings.net . Just a couple so far but it’s a start.

Due to a slight lull before the summer kicks in I’ve finally managed to make a proper start on getting the winery/vineyard website. It’s not online yet but mark 1 should be within a week or two. We’ll probably move into online sales not too long after that as they already do mail order next door (only to France though).

Yet another “all building” booking rolled in last night. A travelling theatre group (“la Compagnie Les Affranchis”) is staying for a couple of nights (see http://www.ccas.fr/tcult/spectacle.php?ref=156).