Foreign Perspectives

Now that we’ve started looking at the detailed costings, we’re thinking of the tradeoff of the £30 each flight vs just driving there.

Going in the car is a whole lot simpler of course in that there’s none of the hassle of weighing luggage and juggling stuff from one case to another that you get into with airline trips. A minor downside is that it’s about six hours drive from here to Alicante but then it’s nearly three hours to Barcelona airport so it’s not a whole lot further.

Much simpler to organise too in that all we need is the accommodation and no worries about flights nor airport parking.

Despite spending the whole morning searching for somewhere to go over our Christmas break, we’ve still not settled on anywhere to the extent of booking it.

At the moment, we’re looking towards places further south than in the original plans in that we can get away for longer for around the same amount of money as we could when we were considering the likes of Germany or Switzerland.

So, in the frame at the moment is Ibiza which comes in at the lowest price for the flights and the apartments but means that we need to book into a hotel in Barcelona before and after the holiday that costs almost as much as the apartment we’d be staying in for the week in Ibiza. Also, Ibiza doesn’t have a great image and the apartment in question isn’t in a great town on the island.

Next up is Mallorca for which the flights are more expensive and so are the apartments BUT we don’t need the night before and after the holiday in Barcelona so the overall cost is much the same as Ibiza. There seems to be a whole lot more to do in Mallorca too which is a big plus point.

Late news: Wendy fancies Basel in Switzerland so she’s looking up hotels for there too.

I find that that’s a very difficult question to answer these days.

Originally, it was very much an expat blog, covering the process of settling into a life in France and therefore it slotted fairly neatly into the “travel” category. By listing it as a travel blog, I picked up a whole lot of other stuff travel related and at times over the last year it has most definitely been a travel blog.

However, a glance at the category cloud shows that this is changing. The rise of the America category is a little misleading as that really reflects the increased number of paid posts that I do these days but the rise of Banking & Finance is perhaps more meaningful as it represents the combined effect of me writing more paid posts in this category but also of me writing a lot more normal ones in it as well.

What’ll it look like in six months? I’m sure that America will be much larger for one thing and France will have shrunk as we’re effectively in the process of withdrawing from France (which’ll be quite a long process I suspect). Although you can’t see it yet, the UK categories are also starting to slowly rise so expect to see them starting to displace a few of the France categories over the coming year.

Where I can, I usually try to tag paid posts in the same way as I would for normal ones with the exception that almost all of them are also dropped into the Sponsored category too.

However, over the last six months of doing them quite a lot have been related to America which, if you look at the category cloud to your left, has had the effect that America has risen almost to the same status as France had previously. It’s not so much that the France entries are reducing (although they have been) but that the sheer weight of American ones have shifted the scales considerably.

It could be worse in fact as many posting opportunities specify that the blog has to be written and maintained in America which obviously eliminates us for the moment although it does have me wondering if we were doing pretty much the same level of posting and living in America, would it bring in enough money to live on? I suspect that it could well do and presumably there are at least some Americans with blogging as their occupation. That might sound a little weird but if you think about it, this is just another branch of journalism in some ways and there’s loads of professional journalists around.

Although we’re now well into the marketing season for B&B and self-catering listings sites, the usual wave of marketing e-mails from such places is quite noticeable in its absence this year.

Last year was a little unusual to be fair as maisoneurope.com had a new owner and he was firing out e-mails like there was no tomorrow several times a month at least and sometimes several times per week. This year, that particular factor is absent for the moment though presumably he’ll be getting going again in the not too distant future provided he’s not gone bust on the adwords campaigns that he was running. Whether he was successful at it or not remains to be seen but the site has never yet come up on ordinary searches that I’ve done myself so I’m a bit doubtful. Still, perhaps the adwords to sell the properties combined with the subscription income from them is enough to keep things ticking along nicely.

This year, all that’s appeared sporadically has been an e-mail from frenchentree.com who are expanding their site with rental listings. The pricing doesn’t really work for B&B so I’ve not bothered with them as yet but if their six months free offer is still around in February I’ll probably take them up on it.

Our own sites don’t have offers as such in that they’re free all the time which has caused us problems in roping in new entries for the crazy reason that people figure that if it’s free it doesn’t have any worth. Consequently, we added the option of paying us £29 per year which by placing a value on the listings meant that we started to pull in more people than before.

Of course, that begs the question: if I raised the notional price to, say, £129 would that bring even more people in?

Indeed, if I listed it as a six months free offer would I pull in really big numbers of new entries?

I’m toying with the idea of doing something along these lines on one of our new-generation sites – either Inns4u or perhaps, when I get around to updating it, Our French Chateau (which gets a surprising number of hits even now).