Foreign Perspectives

When you run a booking service, you get a strange perspective of the holiday booking habits of people which is generally at odds with what you’d think people would really do.

For instance, our B&B sites pick up a lot of traffic from around April through to August each year and outside that they’ve relatively low numbers of visitors. That’s understandable really as most B&B bookings are for just a few days at a time at most and you wouldn’t expect people to book short term holidays a long time in advance.

It’s quite different for the self-catering sites though. For them the booking season started just before Christmas and we’re getting so much traffic on the sites at the moment that it looks like we’ll need to upgrade the bandwidth next week. In fact, the traffic is pretty much as high as it was in the peak of the summer season!

As you know, we’ve been tootling along with over two hundred thousand readers per week, mostly via Reuters.

I’m sure that’s an incredibly misleading statistic but it certainly sounds good. What I didn’t know until now was quite how good it was in comparison to the competition as everyone seems rather cagey with their statistics.

Anyway, I’m dead chuffed to see this morning that I have both this blog and An Age of Magic in the top 100 of the Blogburst network. In fact Magic is doing rather better than this one thanks to an experiment that I tried a few weeks back which I’ll be building on here over the coming months.

Definitely a great start to the year for the blogs!

We’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the latest versions of both these satnav systems over the last couple of weeks ie the sensibly priced Tomtom One v3 and the Garmin Nuvi 250W.

On a first comparison, the Tomtom seems the better of the two in that the menus offer a lot more options compared to the Garmin model. However, the majority of those extra options are to do with things like changing the voice and various non-navigation related features. There’s also a range of display related options letting you add the current speed, max speed, time remaining and so on where the Garmin just shows your speed and projected arrival time and next turn. OK, so you’ll play around with all those extra options but realistically the arrival time (or the time remaining) plus your next turn is all you actually need and, in general, that’s the theme for the Garmin: it gives you the information that you need without all the extraneous information that the Tomtom provides.

One key difference though is that the Tomtoms don’t have a memory card slot whereas the Garmin do. With the increasing range of maps available these days and all the extra detail that comes out with each new version that’s a builtin obselence on the part of the Tomtom which is going to cost you dear sooner or later. For example, if you get the Tomtom One single-country version you’ll find that you’re stuck with the map that’s preloaded because the machine hasn’t got enough memory to load any other countries. In the equivalently priced Garmin you have an SD slot which would let you load maps of a continent if you wanted to. If you buy Tomtom UK and would like to add the European maps for the holidays, you can’t.

Incidently, on the map pricing front, it’s probably better to spend the extra £30 upfront to get the European maps rather than run with the UK only ones. The European maps, of course, include the UK. If you’re going for the Tomtom, you have to make this decision at the outset but you could add a memory card for the extra maps in the Garmin.

Overall, I prefer the current Tomtom software but that lack of a memory card means that you’ll be throwing it away in a few years when the maps grow too large when paying £5 or so will get you a very large memory card these days and upgrade your Garmin to hold much larger maps.

Last year we had quite a noticeable dip in traffic on the sites from November onwards but this year we’d simply a small dip over part of the Christmas period.

In fact, it would seem that people have been booking much, much earlier for 2008 than they did the previous year. We’ve had pretty much level traffic on the sites from August right through to now with, as I say, a small dip over part of Christmas.

Part of that is probably due to us starting our marketing programme for the sites in November but even so we still had pretty much summer level traffic on the sites before we started which is pretty unusual as the B&B site traffic usually drops like a stone after August and the self-catering traffic drops up to a month earlier than that.

In fact, the traffic is up so much that I suspect that I’m going to have to upgrade the hosting package for the sites as soon as Easter when ordinarily the upgrade that I did in December would have seen me through at least a year.

Not so long ago the talk was all about how we’d all be working from home by now and it all seemed terribly practical if you listened to the sales pitches but then I’m sure the flying cars did when that idea was pitched in the 1960s as transportation for the 1990s.

Realistically, the majority of people will always need to be “at work” in some way. Certainly, it doesn’t seem likely that there’ll be portable steel mills around anytime soon that would be suitable for home use and I can’t really see car manufacturing getting going as a cottage industry on any kind of large scale.

However, there are an increasing number of jobs where it doesn’t really matter where you are when you’re doing them. Whilst, blogging isn’t my main job (yet) it obviously doesn’t matter where I do it from so long as I have a half-decent Internet connection to write the stuff with and there are a lot of jobs in that category such as telesales and the like. Service and software industries in effect rather than manufacturing. Clearly we will always need a great deal of manufacturing capability around but for many service industries it doesn’t matter where you are in the world these days as ADSL is available right out in the sticks in many countries.

Naturally, for those of us working from home it’s cheaper in many ways for us. No more commuting to work for a start although that can be counteracted by having to heat your home of course (unless you’ve set yourself up on some idyllic beach).

Is it for you though? If it’s just you at home it could easily get very lonely and naturally there isn’t the office banter that you may have gotten used to.