Foreign Perspectives

As we move through August the number of people in the place has been steadily increasing and, of course, we’ve had the usual spikes in occupancy at the weekends.

Unfortunately those weekend spikes have become even more pronounced this year. That causes us severe complications in terms of the logistics of getting the rooms sorted out as we end up using nearly all of the bedlinen over two or three days worth of over-night stays.

The reason behind those spikes is quite simply the Saturday change-over day for the self-catering accommodation in Spain where many of those people are heading to or coming back from (hence the three day spike). Packing all that change-over work must be even more of a nightmare for the villas further south than it is for us and it seems crazy that almost everyone sticks to the same change-over day which causes everyone upstream of them problems too and bumps up the flight and ferry costs on those days too not to mention causing a major backlog of traffic at the border.

Surely it would make more sense for everyone to stagger the change-over days?

Last year managing the reservations coming in became an almost full-time job at times as we ran right through the summer with the rooms over-listed and bookings were coming in at a fair pace over most of that time.

With the economic mess around the world it’s quite a different picture this year. Bookings everywhere locally are well down and so it’s even more important to over-list the rooms but in addition there’s much more work to be done in adjusting the prices in an attempt to fill the rooms.

Unfortunately, there are practical limits to the amount of over-listing that can be done. Typically we list about twice the number of rooms that we actually have but going much beyond that drastically increases the chances of double bookings at the peak of the peak times which would create much more work in proportion to the income that they might bring in.

You might think that when I say “adjusting the prices” that I mean lowering them. However, we’ve found that raising the prices can bring in more bookings than lowering them does and, of course, it brings in a lot more money too. In fact, it’s really only worthwhile to lower the prices of the cheapest rooms as that means that you come up on top of some searches. What raising the price does is to improve the image of the place in the minds of potential guests. After all, arguably the only “real” way they have of judging the quality of a hotel is by the prices of the rooms; some hotels rely on that false perception quite a lot as I’m sure some of you will have already discovered.

So, in practice, what we’ve been doing this year is lowering the prices of the cheapest rooms and raising those of the more expensive ones. It’s not bringing in quite so much business as last year (there just aren’t as many people around) but it does seem to be improving the occupancy numbers.

In my short term plans for OU courses the next one up is Human Biology which starts at the start of October and which overlaps my Child Development course by about three weeks. To reduce the work overlap what I’ve done is to buy the first book of the biology course and I’ve been working through that over the last month or two.

However, a bunch of the people doing the Child Development course are going straight on to Biological Psychology which starts in February. As it happens my aim in doing the Human Biology course was to simplify the Biological Psychology and they complement each other quite well. Thus, I’m in the process of getting talked into yet another overlap (February to June in this case).

Interestingly, since the bio psych course doesn’t have an exam it means that it may well not overlap with the next psychology course that starts in October as, usually, I end up running quite a bit ahead of the official course timetable so in principle I might be able to complete it some time in September if not before. That in turn should let me slip in the graduation ceremony for my modern languages degree which would have been this September but I couldn’t manage to fit it in.

What’s even more interesting is that doing the bio psych overlap would knock another year off my psych graduation and still be sticking to my 60 points a year maximum for the degree.

In these days when virtually everyone books their accommodation online it’s particularly important to read the small-print regarding cancelling your trip or simply not turning up at all at your accommodation.

If you simply don’t turn up almost all hotels will charge you for the first night of your stay but some resort style hotels will charge you for the entire stay. In both cases this is a non-refundable charge.

However, you don’t necessarily need to pay it. In most cases, if you call the hotel a day in advance of your stay you’ll generally not have to pay anything further. Even cancelling the same day can sometimes save you money. For example, although we can charge for a noshow unless the reservation is cancelled a day in advance, in reality we waive this if we can get someone else for the room following the cancellation. Incidentally, it’s really not necessary for you to make up some excuse to explain your cancellation: hotels have heard them all before and it’ll make no difference as to whether or not they charge you.

Do watch any deposit payments that you’ve made though as in many instances these are kept by the reservation system that you used and are usually not refundable. If you find a hotel listed on a reservation system it’s usually worthwhile to contact them directly as this will save you the booking fee and you may get a discount too.

You might think that these “noshow” charges are just profiteering on the part of the hotel. They aren’t. Whenever you make a guaranteed reservation online the hotel is obliged to keep the room for you even if other people turn up asking for a room. In some cases we have turned away as many as a dozen couples looking for a room because our last room was subject to a guaranteed reservation only to find out that the people who’d booked it never turned up.

And a final plea… read the description of the hotel and particularly its location. Hotels are usually listed by “resort” which means that all hotels within about 25 miles of a city will come up as being attached to that city. This means that hotels well into the country are listed as associated with cities. Cancelling because you discover that a hotel you expected to be in the city centre is actually in the country doesn’t save a “noshow” charge if you only discover that when you arrive in the city.

Thanks to the “short” list of courses that I ran up last summer whilst thinking about what I do following the modern languages degree, I find that there’s quite a lot of scope for shortening the period to pick up the first two degrees from the overall sequence.

TWO degrees? Yeah, I know, it seems a little crazy to be thinking of doing two degrees at once but when I ran through the list of possibilities I ended up with the bulk of two separate degrees worth of courses having my little stars beside them. Thus over the next 10 years or so I will be working my way through both a psychology and a physics degree along with a few totally unrelated courses that seem close to forming a history degree.

Anyway, because the two degree programmes aren’t actually designed to be taken at once there’s quite a lot of scope for me to play with the scheduling of the various courses. Moving more than five years out is way too complicated as OU courses come and go but looking at the next three or four years there are still oodles of viable sequences that can be created and a surprising amount of time to be saved.

For instance, my original plan was basically to do the first major physics sequence followed by the first major psychology course sequence and finishing up with the archaeology course. That results in a completion date of December 2014. However, it’s actually possible to complete the same sequence of courses in December 2012 by changing the order slightly and removing what would have been quite long gaps between courses at several points.

Sadly, I don’t think it’ll be possible to shave so much time off in later years though there’s at least one spot where a year can be saved several years from now.