Foreign Perspectives

Can’t believe that it’s been a month since our last issue!

It’s been rather a busy time with several major developments to report.

We’re on loads and loads of new reservation and listing sites courtesy of a pretty intensive few weeks of hunting around for new places and getting our details loaded onto them. Net effect of that is that the bookings are rolling in at a fair old rate and we are pretty much fully booked over the Easter weekend and have a nice trickle of reservations most days although most people seem to just book a couple of weeks ahead which is a bit disconcerting.

www.ourinns.org has finally made its appearance on the search engines and is in the first two or three on a range of searches which isn’t bad. We’re even getting hits from it ourselves! At the moment, it remains a select band of properties but the coverage is gradually increasing as word spreads. If nothing else, the stream of new entries is at the right speed for me to be able to cope with it.

Last, but possibly not least, I may have to change the title of the blog (“Living in France without a TV crew”) in the not too distant future. We had a call from Ricochet (producers of the Chaos in the Castle and No Going Back series) last week. They’re hoping to do a new series featuring small brit-owned hotels around Europe and it looks like we are on the shortlist for the French entry. We’ve firmly sitting on the fence as to whether or not it’s a good idea. On the one hand, we’d get loads of publicity and would get the benefit of having a top hotelier telling us how to run the place properly. On ‘tother, we would get an absolute mountain of junk mail (500 e-mails after each show with 10,000 webhits after each show is typical) and the top hotelier & film crew arrive in mid-summer when we will have barely enough time to do the hotel work never mind making a TV programme. Any thoughts on which side of the fench we should jump if/when they call to ask us to sign the contract?