Foreign Perspectives

Whilst we’re in the midst of the peak of the holiday season at the moment, as usual we’re also in the peak season for noshows and cancellations.

The cancellations are understandable. It’s very difficult to get booked in locally at the moment so people grab the first place they see even if it isn’t in the location they really want to be. Then they’ll cancel later if they get something closer to their ideal spot. For instance, earlier today out of the 66 hotels within 30km of Perpignan, just 2 had rooms available and we know that one of those only had rooms available because of cancellations earlier in the day (‘cos one of them is us). If we were braver, we’d delibrerately overbook the rooms as the larger hotels do to allow for the expected high level of cancellations.

However, the noshows are usually puzzling. Just last night we received an e-mail from a group that look like they’ll not be arriving now to confirm that they were coming and that they were looking forward to seeing the area. If they’d cancelled yesterday, it would have cost them nothing, now it’s going to cost them getting on for EUR 150 and we’re sitting with several empty rooms.

One thing that you can always depend on is that the Spanish will arrival after everyone else and, usually, expect to be able to eat out in a restaurant no matter how late it is.

Quite why they’re so late is anyone’s guess as they usually have the least distance to travel, normally at most a couple of hours from Barcelona. Naturally, they expect to be able to eat quite late as that’s how things work in Spain but it’s quite a different matter in France where locally the restaurants usually won’t serve you after 8.30pm. That’s something of a problem in that the Spanish normally don’t even think about going out for their evening meal until 10pm by which time they’re limited to McDonalds.

Quite why we’ve so many Spanish arrivals this year I don’t know but it’s probably for similar reasons to our large German contingent ie high euro plus expensive “discount” flights meaning that the advantage is towards people who are going to drive here. August is a peak holiday season in Spain but in years gone by all the gaps that they’ve been booking this year have already been filled by the brits.

Of course, the big question is what’ll happen at the notional end of the holiday season here which falls this year on August 23rd? Historically, we’ve been fairly full with UK guests in the final week of the month but, as I say, there’s not so many coming from there this year (funnily enough those that have come have stayed for longer than the average of previous years).

People have a whole range of different ways that they approach booking their holiday of course and this year I think we’ve run through all of them!

There are those who book everything months in advance and don’t allow for any changes in their plans. They certainly get more choice in their accommodation and transport options doing this and sometimes they even get better prices (almost always on discount flights of course). However, the downside is that some of those offers can work out quite expensive if you change your plans eg if you’ve booked a non-refundable rate to get a discount and your plans change. We’ve just had a family whose plans changed and that early booking cost them dear as they’d to make last minute changes of their flights (always expensive) and look certain to have lost hundreds of euros on the accommodation too.

Then there are those that get the urge to go on holiday and book things piecemeal not too much in advance of their trip. This can be quite expensive as the flights are almost always more expensive than the first groups prices. Sometimes the accommodation is more expensive too as hotels are increasingly following the discount airline pricing model ie last minute rooms are more expensive than those you book well in advance. The biggest problem though is that many of these people end up booking across holiday periods when availability of accommodation and transport is less than ideal. For example, we have a couple now who couldn’t book a straight week with us as a couple of days crossed a major holiday so they booked somewhere else to fill the gap. Neither did they book a car in advance as, because of that holiday, there wasn’t any online availability so they’re at the airport at the moment trying to get a car.

Finally, there is the last minute group. Well, actually two groups. One tries to book about a week in advance and that’s usually fine except at the peak of the peak season but sometimes it isn’t. However, at the peak of the peak there’s also a peak of last minute cancellations so if you call a week in advance and find nothing available, calling a day or two in advance can often find some rooms available.

Cash cards are much more limited in function than credit and debit cards but they have one really big advantage abroad: without the PIN, they’re useless and therefore they’re of much less interest to thieves.

Cash cards for international use come in only two versions which are Cirrus and Plus. Both are linked to your bank account although you can also get prepaid versions of both.

These cards can’t be used in shops to make purchases and are limited to withdrawing cash from ATMs. Some banks put these symbols on their cards without considering that it means the cards can be used overseas so the charging for overseas transactions is sometimes less than clear. Once or twice I’ve found banks who were so sure that their card couldn’t be used abroad that they had no provision for making additional charges in their terms and conditions (and didn’t in my case, but don’t rely on that).

Although it’s not always clear, you can use Cirrus cards in all Mastercard branded ATMs and Plus cards in all Visa branded ones. You need to check that the country you’re going to has ATMs (not all do!) as these cards can’t be used over the counter in banks. Also, check that it will be practical to use them eg in India I found that ATMs were not widely available and Rarotonga didn’t have any ATMs until quite recently.

Charges on these are made up of a transaction charge of around 2% with a minimum of £2/$2 plus a foreign currency conversion fee of around 3%. It’s therefore best to make withdrawals of £100/$100 at a time to minimise these charges.

Downsides are basically those charges and the fact that you can only use these cards in an ATM. For those living in the UK, a Nationwide cash card eliminates all charges and if you’re in the American military a USAA card works in much the same way. If your bank is a member of the Global Alliance (Bank of America, Bank of Nova Scotia, Barclays, BNP, Deutschebank and Westpac) then you can withdraw cash from one of the other member banks ATMs without the transaction charge (you still get charged the foreign exchange fee).

I’m going to work my way through the various ways you can take money abroad over the next week or two in the travel money series. I’ve already covered cash, travellers cheques, credit cards/charge cards and debit cards and will be covering prepaid cards in the next episode.

If you cast your mind back to the early part of the year you might remember that we picked up a really big booking from a German family in February. So large that what started off as a couple of rooms for a few days ended up totalling 30 nights worth of accommodation over the course of a week or so.

The snag was that they never responded to any of our e-mails so it wasn’t until they arrived that we found out they were here to go to a wedding and spending the extra time to get aquainted with the French half of the family who live locally. The downside of that for us was that we only picked up the money for the rooms as they didn’t even take breakfast whilst they were here so we’ve had a relatively restful week.

For them, the lack of response meant that they weren’t even aware that our booking conditions for groups are quite different from those for individual rooms until they checked out this morning. For normal bookings we only charge for the rooms when people leave and if they cancel at least 24 hours in advance they don’t have to pay anything. For groups, we charge the full balance for the rooms a week before they arrive and it’s not refundable unless we can rebook the rooms.

So, we’re sitting with the place half-empty in the peak of summer at the moment. Although we’ll almost certainly rebook some of the rooms it doesn’t seem too likely that we’ll rebook the whole lot as we only found out this morning that they were leaving four days early which is just a few days before the main French holiday of August (the 15th) ie most people coming to the region on holiday will already have booked their accommodation and therefore there’s a fair chance that we’ll remain relatively empty for the next few days.