Foreign Perspectives

Happy Halloween!

October was relatively quiet on the hotel front ’til this weekend which is a holiday in both France & Spain so we were completely full from Friday to Sunday night.

I’ve been tidying up the various websites that we run and improving their search rankings. The combination of improvements on the main hotel page (www.mascamps.com) has given us a 10 fold increase in the number of hits so far. The equivalent changes are in the works for www.ourinns.org which is already moving up the rankings and we’re making about $50 a month now on the advertising on it and the related www.chambre-dhote.org (in French) and the self-catering equivalent, www.ourgites.org .

Separately from those developments, I thought I’d see if we could more directly make a few bob on the transport arrangements people make and registered www.perpignanflightsandcarhire.com which is starting to get a sensible search engine ranking though it’s got a long way to go. If you’re booking any travel yourself, you’ll find the cheapest car hire in the Perpignan area (no, really: I checked them all) and, I think, in Europe, worldwide flights on discount and normal airlines, the Heathrow & Stansted express tickets and even ferries. We’ve already made about half the start-up costs of this in commissions which is pretty good going I think.

More as somewhere to hang our affiliate links than anything else at present, we’ve also got www.personallychosen.com which has quite an assortment of things on it. All the above travel things but also some financial links and even La Senza. In due course, we’re planning to use it to sell some of the photos that we’ve taken for the website as prints and for a few other items that people have asked us about. Basically, it’s intended to be our main non-mascamps website. If you buy any stuff online, let me know where from and I’ll see if we can get a link for it (if you ask nicely, I will probably split the commission with you).

Started experimenting again with e-bay which is a dead cheap way to advertise. Costs just 15p for 10 days which has picked up around 40 views on average although no direct sales. We’re not that bothered about the direct sales this time: last year we had one, slightly lossmaking, direct sale but pulled in getting on for EUR 1000 in indirect bookings over the following 9 months attracted by our ebay ads.