Foreign Perspectives

People seem to be moving online in droves in search of holiday accommodation if the stats on my own accommodation listings sites are anything to go by.

Whilst ordinarily, I expect to have to upgrade the hosting for the collection of sites once a year, I’ve already had to upgrade it three times since Christmas such is the rush of people looking around for summer holiday accommodation. The increase in traffic from December looks like coming out around eight fold which is a major jump by any standards.

Whilst financially it’s no problem in that hosting costs have dropped like a stone in recent years, technically it’s heralding a problem that may arise this summer, somewhat ahead of my expectations. That problem is that I’ve only one more upgrade that I can do before I have to move from a shared hosting plan to a VPS hosting plan that essentially provides me with my own virtual server (actually shared by around four others).

Plus points of that upgrade are that it will give me the extra bandwidth that I’ll be needing by then and that the websites should run a lot faster but on the downside it costs about five times the price of the service that I’ll be using just prior to it.

Once you’re in France for a while, chances are that you’ll come across a few “experts” that is somebody doing something or other that comes with the title of “expert”.

In fact, the meaning is somewhat different to the english word and equates to something along the lines of “senior” so that you find “Expert Comptables” ie Senior Accountants and so on. However, whilst the meaning doesn’t translate across to the word “expert” in english, in practice it seems to be taken as meaning that in many instances ie that the “expert” can’t possibly be wrong because they are an expert.

Even those who don’t regale under the title of “expert” in their profession are often taken to be essentially infallable when working in their field. So, for example, the assumption is that whatever comes out of an official channel is bound to be correct is quite common and therefore not to be questioned. Perhaps our own accountant provides the best example of this practice. In common with everyone else in France starting a business she received a bill from the social security people for around 3000‚€ when she started her consultancy business and in common with almost everyone else she paid it. In fact, it’s not actually necessary to pay it as it’s based on an estimate of what you might earn in your first year of business and if you tell them the true figure then their demand for payment drops around 90%.

Perhaps the worst example of this is in the area of estimating the value of a car after an accident. Obviously there can be a lot of uncertainty in any estimate as no two cars will have been used identically of course. Yet, the expert accepts no uncertainty: his price is the only price and must be correct because he is the expert. Except that, naturally, even experts make mistakes.

So be wary of the “experts” in France for they seem to believe that their expertise is carved in stone and unquestionably correct. Even when it’s wrong.

As we’re edging into the main booking season for the summer, the number of travel advertisements is increasing quite dramatically as you’ve probably noticed.

Although the world is obviously pretty much the same as it was last year, the emphasis on particular holiday destinations seems to change from year to year. So far this year, the emphasis seems to be split between Costa Rica, Canada and Carribbean cruises which are three very different options.

At first glance Costa Rica seems to be primarily an ecotourism destination with rain forests, exotic animals and so on. However, whilst making a point of ecotourism the tourist infrastructure in other areas has been built up substantially in recent years and you now have a very complete offering under most types of tourist activities.

Canada is, for the moment, concentrating on luxury ski vacations both around British Columbia at the west and Quebec in the east. Luxury seems to be the common theme for both sides of Canada with a lot of emphasis on personal service and fantastic meals.

The Carribbean cruises being pushed this year are also generally at the luxury end of the market but emphasising the discounts available from a number of cruise lines. Very substantial discounts too in some cases, notably from SilverSea which is very much a personal service cruise line.

Of course, where they want you to go will probably change as we move further into the year. For one thing, the Canadian ski resorts will be dropping out from around April/May as the snow starts to melt although those areas are very attractive in the summer too.

As we’re confident that we’ll be on the move at some stage this year, we’ve started thinking through some of the logistics of the process.

Our first problem is that we don’t know when the sale will go through and therefore we can’t currently go out and buy somewhere else. Also, given the slow pace of sales here and likely delays in the process, it would be quite difficult to synchronise the sale here with the purchase somewhere else and especially so as each trade is separate here ie buyer/seller chains don’t exist.

That lack of synchronisation means that we’re almost certainly going to need an interim place to live in between living here and living in our new permanent home (where-ever that may be). Although simplifying the logistics of moving out of here it adds some other complications for us in terms of schooling for the kids and where to tell the removal truck to go. In that the interim place isn’t going to be our permanent home and may not even be in the country that we’ll finally settle in, it’s also looking likely that we’ll be needing to store the stuff from here somewhere but, of course, we’ll need some of that stuff whilst we’re in our interim home which means that we’re going to have to sit down and work out what we’ll need to take with us rather than put in the truck. That’s not so simple in that there’s a whole lot of kiddy stuff which takes up quite a volume not to mention items like the computer I’m typing this on, bedding and so on. Now obviously we could do without some of that stuff for a “while” but here too we don’t know how long we’ll be in the interim spot.

Far from simple, eh?

We’ve been rolling out our marketing campaign to pull in more entries on our B&B listings sites over the last few weeks and it’s interesting to see how differently the offers have been taken up.

First off, the Spanish began with a vast number of duff addresses which implies that a lot of them don’t bother with e-mail for their bookings. Virtually all of the addresses were from free accounts like hotmail and the Spanish equivalents which also implies that they’re not really using the Internet as a primary means of promoting their businesses. Overall takeup was really low at around 0.5% although, to be fair, it’s my first attempt to do a mailshot in Spanish so I wasn’t expecting an overlly high response. What did surprise me was that they looked at the example sites I quoted in really big numbers and also clicked on the various ads that they came across.

This was my second major mailshot aimed at Scotland. The first, about a year ago had a fairly low takeup but this one completely took me by surprise and the takeup has been over 3%. By contrast, they didn’t look much at the example sites nor did they click on the ads: they just went ahead and either signed up right off or passed on the offer.

It’s my first run at Ireland too and early days with that as yet. What has surprised me already though is that a much lower number of places quote an e-mail than I’d expected. In fact, the Internet presence seems largely to be confined to B&Bs with hotels not bothering to quote either an e-mail or a website. Still, we’ll see about Ireland over the coming week.

Next up is England and Wales which I hope to do over the coming week or two. It should provide an interesting contrast with Scotland where I went from fairly low numbers a few weeks ago to quite a sizeable and growing presence today.