Foreign Perspectives

The travel news site from RatesToGo isn’t the “in your face” promo of their bookings site that it could so easily be and in fact has gone to the other extreme with only a logo to indicate that they even run a hotel booking service.

That makes it quite an interesting site to read as it covers a really wide range of articles such as the most expensive hotel room (in Las Vegas) which at $40,000 is hardly one that you’ll be booking through their site.

They do link to hotels on their site for instance in their top 10 binge drinking getaways but that’s not really limiting the content of this very informative blog as the range of hotels which they have doesn’t act as a limitation to them. Besides their occassional self-promo is more than offset by general travel articles such as the beds on Lufthansa flights.

Overall, it looks like they write the articles then look for a suitable hotel on their list. As in their piece on Japanese fireworks festivals where the mention of the hotel seems very much an afterthought.

At the moment this is a fairly young blog: let’s hope that they maintain the variety of articles that they’ve produced up to now.

Although we’re in the midst of the busiest season of the year, the first offer of a free listing has just arrived!

Of course the reason for this is that the gite people already have all the bookings that they want for this year so should just be starting on their marketing for next year. In practice most of them don’t seem to really get underway until September or even October but they’ll already have renewed their inprint advertising (the deadline is usually around June!).

The B&B people however are totally swamped at the moment and should stay that way until they get September out of the way so there’s not a whole lot of point in offering them discounted listings and whatnot at the moment.

In true mercernary style it’s best not to take up the 6 month free offers ’til early in the year (probably around January/February for gites, around March/April for B&B) to maximise the benefit of the free period and indeed to get a fair comparison of the free offer with other competing offers.

Anyway, we’ll probably be restarting our “junk mail” programme later in the month. Our sites are a little different though in that we are free all the time so why not sign up (B&B, self-catering or hotel) at our signup page?

The funny thing about chickenpox is that once you’re covered in spots, you’re not infectious.

That doesn’t stop people backing away from you though. I well remember the time when I was in the middle of the exams for my MBA and caught it: one big step backwards was taken by everyone once they found out what I’d got!

James wasn’t feeling too well yesterday and he’s still pretty hot at times but he isn’t anything like as lethargic as he was yesterday so I guess that he’s on his way to getting over the disease itself which “just” leaves those darned itchy spots.

We’re looking forward to John getting it, probably sometime next week I expect.

It mightn’t look too impressive but this little laundry sign marks the point when last Thursday we officially became part of the route of the laundry lorry.

So, no longer do we need to spend about 90 minutes two or three times a week over the Summer just to drop off and collect our laundry and instead get it picked up and dropped off by the lorry. How come it’s taken three years to reach this point? Well, up to now they’ve claimed that the truck was full with all the laundry from the hotels from Carcassonne (we’re on the Carcassonne circuit) although they’ve been collecting stuff from a place about 15 minutes from us for over a year now.

Actually, we miss our little runs, at least the Winter ones, but certainly not the three times a week trips that we ended up doing last Summer.

Almost all of the photos on our sites were specially taken for the purpose and a number of them are quite unique. The overall effect of this is that we get quite a lot of hits on our sites arriving because of those images so we thought we’d have a go at selling prints of them a while back but have only gotten around to doing something about it today.

We’ve started with by far the most popular: our photo of the castle in Foix but will be adding the rest as we go along (it’ll probably take a few weeks to get caught up with the backlog). In the meantime, if there’s one that you’d quite like a print of, pop a comment on this post and I’ll put that on by the following day.

In theory, we can produce t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets etc. using the same images so if you fancy one of those, let me know. Also in the works will be a book form version of our Pyrenees guide but that’s going to take us well into the Winter I expect.