Foreign Perspectives

We don’t get an awful lot of group bookings but, whilst welcome in terms of the money, they’re consistently very disorganised in comparison to either normal bookings or what you’d expect from an “organised” group.

For example, we’ve one group of 12 at the moment who booked nearly two months ago. They’re here for a very popular local festival which tends to fill up all available accommodation for miles around and puts severe pressure on the tourism infrastructure as a consequence of the scale of it. Everyone knows that and therefore books the various components necessary for their trip quite early. This lot? Well, they arrived and wanted to rent a car. There was one 2+2 seater sportscar left in the rental car park so they’ve ended up spending around 6 hours a day ferrying people back and forth to see the festival. Taxis? Nope, all at the festival and refusing to do any short runs at the moment. Meals? Well, it’s hard enough to get 12 people booked in at the best of times so I’m guessing they’re living on pizzas.

The other summer group was that made for a family wedding held locally. They started out with 2 rooms for 3 nights and ended up with a total of 29 room nights. Family weddings are a bit of a nuisance at the best of times as the people rarely eat anywhere except with their family so you often don’t even sell as much as a breakfast and they’re always wanting a discount. Since they’re usually held at the height of summer, we could easily book the rooms with people who’d be taking breakfast and meals and wouldn’t ask for a discount. The bunch this year went even further though as the wedding didn’t go too well and decided that that must have been our fault and that they’d like to get all their money back (this despite us not even knowing that they were here for a wedding ’til they arrived!). Net effect? Well, we’ll be cancelling any reservations in future that look as though they might be for a wedding: it’s just too much hassle for no real reward.

My Dad died on August 24th, suddenly and unexpectedly aged 81.

Frankly, I’d always thought that I’d have some last words to say to him before he went. In fact, I was sure that there would be something or other that I’d have left unsaid. Yet, now that the time has come in fact I find that I can’t think of anything that I should have said which seems a little odd to be honest. How come? Well, we’ve always spoke over the years and if anything probably that little bit more in the past few. So, he knew broadly what I’d be doing in the years to come (or at least as much as I know myself). He knew that Mum, me and his grandchildren loved him and that he’d be missed when he went.

Actually, that being missed bit is a little odd at the moment. I find that I’m not missing him for me but rather for his grandchildren. He’d had a full life of being Daddy to me but, sadly, only got to be Granda for just over six years. I know that he’d never have lived to see them graduating from university but it’s nice to know that he was able to be there for James’ first day at school and he’d expect nothing less than that he would one day be graduating in whatever subject interested him at that time. Actually, that’s not quite true because, as with me, he only ever wanted them to do whatever they wanted to do in terms of education; he felt his job was to provide whatever resources that were necessary to enable me to achieve my objectives.

As with my Nanny almost 20 years back, I’ve very much made a point of not considering him as dead but rather as living somewhere that we never quite manage to get around to visiting. I’m sure that’s a totally crap way of dealing with it in terms of closure but it’s worked really well for me with both my Nanny and my Dad’s brother John. I know that some people feel the need to see an actual dead body to say goodbye to but I much prefer to maintain my little illusion and therefore anyone expecting an open coffin was disappointed.

Anyway, whilst I didn’t have the opportunity to say any last words before he left us, I can’t think of anything that I needed to say to him. Is that strange?

If you think that British ATMs are complicated beasties, you should look at some of the Spanish ones.

For one thing, they’re easily twice the size of the UK ones. That’s not because they’re ancient but because they have seemingly millions of different functions. Whereas in the UK, a bank ATM has basically three slots (card, money and receipt) and a UK building society machine adds two extra slots to deal with deposits, the Spanish variety has all kinds of slots and it takes a few seconds even to find where you’ve to stick your card in.

These days ATMs are quite sophisticated and generally work out what language you speak from the card you’ve inserted rather than asking you which language you’d like. However, that’s frequently a step too far when it’s an expat wielding the card as you may well not be using a card from your own country when you’re on holiday or just travelling.

It’s certainly something that the French machines don’t allow for. The machines usually ask you what language you want but revert to French if you use a French card regardless of which language you select!

There seems to be something of a drift from issuing Visa cards to issuing Mastercards in the UK at the moment thereby reversing the previous trend which was to only issue Visa cards.

Although it doesn’t really matter which you have in the UK, it can matter a lot when you go on holiday and generally it’s best to be carrying both Visa and Mastercard abroad. In that respect the switch of my Halifax Visa card to a Mastercard suits me as that gives me a Mastercard credit card from them and a Visa debit card but others could easily find themselves with a Maestro card and a Mastercard which isn’t a good combination as Maestro isn’t nearly as useful as Visa debit and you’re left with two cards on the same system which isn’t good either.

Not a catastrophe for sure but do make sure that you have both varieties of card handy well in advance of your next holiday.

One of the most surprising thing about the Internet is just how much people are prepared to pay for information from one site that is available free on another site.

This is probably best illustrated by the vast number of websites which sell you the information that you need to open an account in America when you don’t live there. I say “America” simply because that’s the most popular but there are many other sites offering to open accounts in Switzerland (the second most popular) and various countries around the world.

Now, I’ll grant you that it’s more difficult to come by the information for Switzerland unless you know where to look but I’d be wanting to do a whole lot of looking before I forked out the typical $250 to $1000 that some websites charge for this information. I’ll be covering this (free!) very shortly on the expat banking section of Whole Earth so, unless you need your Swiss account in the next couple of weeks, it’s probably best to hold on.

What about America though? Would you pay $100 or more for the information? Many people appear to yet it’s freely available on the expat banking section of Whole Earth already although, to be fair, many others seem to have been getting it there for free for quite a while if the site stats are anything to go by.

The thing that gets me is that, in most cases, the information isn’t difficult to find. What’s worse though, particularly for Switzerland, is that a number of the charging websites are providing information that simply won’t work as they typically recommend opening an account with SwissPost which stopped opening accounts for non-residents a few years ago.

I’m quite tempted to start selling the information on ebay myself!