Foreign Perspectives

I’ll start with the itinerary as I’ll be getting going on that next Tuesday:
– Tuesday pm, get the plane in Perpignan and finish up in Belfast in the late evening
– Wednesday am, meeting in town in the morning then open a few carpetbagging accounts for our latest addition and get a few things in town
Siobhan: I could probably catch up with you sometime that day
– Thursday, French exam; we usually get away from that relatively early as they do the oral part in the afternoon
– Friday am, probably working my way down Wendy’s shopping list; pm probably calling in to see the folk in Rosepark
guys: remind me to leave £40 for Eric!!
– Saturday, “at liberty” as they say in the travel trade but more than likely filled up with calling to see folk
– Sunday lunchtime, on the plane to Barcelona to try out Jet2, getting there early evening and back here around teatime

With the departure of our last house hunter on Tuesday a week ago, we were planning on switching to “winter mode” ie getting stuck into the backlog of things that we’ve not had a chance to do since June. We had even made a start on writing out our “to do” list for the winter months. And then we got some more bookings for October which has since started to fill up quite nicely.

We finally picked up a booking from the hotel website that we’re on. I’d really high hopes of that but we’ve been on it since late August and so far only the one booking (though it is for a week). Now that we’ve actually picked up a booking via the hotel site, we found out that they’d a duff room description for our main type of booking room (what did they think a “double shared bathroom shared” was? They’re fixing that now so we should start to get more bookings from them over the winter and, all being well, lots more in the summer. The other little problem that they had was that they’d recorded us as having no rooms available which certainly doesn’t help the reservations. Anyway, we’re getting the room type sorted, have updated the availability and changed a couple of rooms over to “instant booking” from “on request” which collectively should bring in a whole bunch more people.

They’re actually our eighth house-hunter since about mid-July which is a fair old number considering that we’re only one of the hotels in the area. Of those, three have already bought houses in the three villages closest to us, two more are in the process of buying a little further afield and one is in “area hunting” so won’t be buying for a year or so. As you can imagine, all this activity is lifting the house prices and I read last week that the prices in Languedoc-Roussillon went up 28% in the last year, mainly due to the English. Still, we did see quite a reasonable house for sale in Estagel for EUR 50 000 the other week so it’s still possible to pick up a bargain. Funnily enough, only one of those folk booked as a result of our ad in French Property News and seeing as they only stayed two days, we may as well not have bothered with it.

We had SNOW last week!! OK, more sleet than proper snow but even so, it’s not really something that you expect in the south of France in September, is it?

The banks here are really dreadful to what we’re used to. In all ways: the maximum withdrawal limit is around £300 per WEEK vs the £250-£500 per DAY in the UK; they’ve got monthly spending limits on debit cards; they charge for debit cards and the few sort-of credit cards are a) charged for b) have MAXIMUM limits lower than the minimum limits on some UK cards and c) have interest rates getting on for twice the UK rates (the mortgage rates are higher too: so much for lower euro-zone interest!). Way back at the end of June we thought we’d settle in with local accounts so opened accounts with Credit Agricole. The cards arrived in a few weeks but we still haven’t seen any sign of the chequebooks. Anyway, on Thursday a little letter arrived from CA saying that I’d to sort out my EUR 50 overdrawn by Monday or they were blocking all transactions on my accounts. Well, that was that. Off we went to close it and give them a piece of our minds. For a start, the account was to have a EUR 1000 overdraft limit (Wendy’s account came with EUR 450, none apparently for me) and seeing as I needed the chequebook before I could use the account, the entire EUR 50 was all bank charges. Didn’t go down well with CA in St Paul. For a start our “relationship manager” wasn’t there; I said “close it anyway, and the savings account too”. I don’t think people go in and close accounts too often. Anyway, less than 20 mins later we got a call from M Martin (our relationship manager) asking what was the problem. He’s assured us that the chequebook will be with us by Wednesday. We got the impression that he’d told the **** who sent out the letter to wise up: blocking the accounts of somebody who pays several thousand euro a month to the bank for a mortgage when he’s overdrawn by EUR 50 is not a good move.

Oh yeah, the “to do” list… Well, this is what we have so far:

1. Move into print advertising.
We are already listed in “GeoGuide Languedoc-Roussillon” courtesy of the previous owner but will be adding at least one more guidebook (well, a series as we’re shooting for an international listing). The French “guidebooks” are truly dreadful as they are just advertising with next to no editorial but it’s handy from our point of view as we can just pay so many euros and get ourselves in. Most likely we will go with Petit Futé although GeoGuide and Routard are both in the frame. Petit Futé would be around £500 but that’s for three years and also enters us in four or five international equivalent guides as well; we’ve not checked out the prices for the other two although I imagine that they pale into insignificance with the £500 for cheznous. Actually, French Property News isn’t far behind with it’s £60 a month (and so far only one two night booking for £120 expenditure!).

2. Get going on maintenance
We’re planning on restarting our “live in a room for a night” programme with a view to sussing out what needs done to each room. The biggest problem is the gite which, although it’s the newest “room”, looks incredibly basic in comparison to the rest of the hotel. We don’t really book it much as an apartment so in parallel with sprucing it up a bit, we’re hoping to create a little suite by adding a door between two of the rooms. That will also give us a lot more flexibility in coping with larger groups: we had to turn away several groups of four during August when the gite was full; in principle it will also let us book the gite as a gite rather than as a hotel room although we did very well over the summer just booking it as a hotel room.

3. Visit the neighbours
We just started doing this when the bookings took a jump; the plan is to work our way around the various vineyards, say “hi”, and maybe expand our wine list for the restaurant by buying a box or two at each place. We’ll be using these visits to try and build up a group of vineyards for our proposed wine tours.

4. Build up the guide
Our regional guide at www.mascamps.com/region/en.htm isn’t bad but I’d like to beef it up some more as we get a lot of hits via it and also because it should encourage people to stay a bit longer. We’ve the easy places done already so this will probably mean quite a bit of travelling around and combing the local tourist offices for information. I’m also hoping to make the event list (www.mascamps.com/event/en.htm) a whole lot more comprehensive although that will be far from easy as they are simply dreadful at promoting any kind of event or festival over here.

5. Tidy up the “house”
The hotel was and is tidy but the house side of the place needs a LOT of work. We could do with some furniture for a start and we could do with sorting out a lot of new lightbulbs as it’s getting to be too dark now.

6. Get the admin sorted
This has been sidelined for several months now so it’ll take me a while to catch up with it all. We also need to get ourselves properly sorted in respect of the French authorities with the stuff that I talked about earlier. It probably wouldn’t do any harm to track down our drinks license.

7. Build up the activities list
We’re hoping to have a reasonable number of activity-breaks built up over the coming months. So far, we’ve used the “specials” facility on the hostel booking site but we’re hoping to add those more directly onto our own website and also on an activities booking system. We haven’t had a lot of direct success with these but have made quite a bit of money through people seeing the “special” and booking direct with us (we don’t have to pay commission that way). At the moment we’ve several variants of our “Ryanair seat sale” package online to cover the whole period of their seat sale up to February but it’ll be another week or so before that appears on google so we’ve not had any takers as yet.

8. Website development
The next “big thing” will be the arrival of the vineyard pages, probably with the initial version online by late October. I’ve been taking more photos for that during the week. I’d liked to have had it live before Michel goes to the wine fair but that’s not too likely as I believe that’s early October. Oh, he (and possibly us) might be on French TV by the time you read this. Seems that his “separator thingy” for the grapes is the only one in the region and the local paper (the Independant) was here on Thursday to do an article on it. The harvest pages will be the first to go live as the sheer volume of text in them should get us a reasonable ranking in google. Haven’t really given much thought to the structure of his bit of the site yet but there will, in due course, be a www.mascamps.com/cave/en.htm page corresponding to the existing www.mascamps.com/hotel/en.htm page. Once his pages are up and running, we might run up a totally new www.mascamps.com/en.htm page to act as a gateway into both halves of the website but ’tis early days for that.

9. Website promotion
I’ll be restarting my “Sunday Searches” again to find free/cheapo places to promote the site. Have to see how to go about promoting the vineyard section as well. You would be amazed at how many different places you can pick up in two or three hours searching. You’d also be amazed at how many websites charge astronomical amounts of money for incredibly naff listings. We actually only paid for one site listing this year (all of £30) which has given us a really impressive looking entry with them (www.greatbedandbreakfast.com), lots of enquiries and no paying customers. At the other end of the scale, £200 on www.cheznous.com has, so far, given us one hit, no enquiries and no bookings. We’re actually going with cheznous again but this time we’ll be in their printed brochure (another £500!) which should hit the streets around Christmas (that’ll be their last chance).

Where are our customers coming from anyway? Well, it’s hard to say as the mix has changed significantly since April. April/May/June most customers were driveby (though the most profitable was via the website), early July was a mix of phone and driveby and August/September have been almost evenly split between phone, website and Ryanair (with virtually no drivebys). For the coming months, it looks like we’ll be mainly getting people from the Ryanair site though we’ve been getting significant numbers of enquiries via the website and should be having our very first repeat booking in December. In practical terms, we work on the assumption that the bulk of the phone reservations are effectively customers of the previous owner which means that for this summer we’ve had getting on for triple the customers that he would have had and that doesn’t seem too far off the mark as we know we had more reservations than both of the local competitors put together from mid-July through to the end of August (that’s the entire period for which we had their figures). If we can manage to keep that up we should do pretty well if next year is more normal (this year was dreadful for hotels all over France) and, of course, we are still increasing the number of places that list us.

10. Sort out our registration
In an ideal world, we’d like to be listed as a “hotel restaurant” but we’re not sure if that’s possible in one jump so we will be making enquiries to see what we’d need to do to acquire that listing. The plus side is that we could then legitimately run the restaurant but on the downside we would, over time, need to redo a lot of our existing registrations: cheznous wouldn’t take us anymore for a start (OK, so that would save £500 a year). We’d also need to change the Ryanair entry to move onto their hotel pages which may or may not be a good idea: we’ve only had one booking from our proper hotel listing (on www.venere.com) yet got our first booking from the B&B/guesthouse/hostel listing the day after it went live and have done very well with it ever since.

11. Have a look at Spanish
I’ve already got the pre-course course for the OU Spanish diploma but need to have a look at that to see whether or not I could realistically start the diploma in February. We get quite a lot of Spanish guests so it would be useful. On the other hand, we get next to no Germans so perhaps I need a German language website? Hard to say, as I’ve already got a German version of the Ryanair mini-site and we’ve yet to get anyone booking through it (a friend of a friend translated it for me).

Anyway, most head on to get ready for the Danish folk who should be here in another hour or two. They always quote 6pm arrival times but it just ain’t feasible to get from Denmark to here in a day and arrive that early. I reckon 8pm will be closer to the mark.

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