mascamps.com

We live in the Perpignan region and Xmas here is a pretty dismal and uninteresting time of year. We wish to go somewhere this year where Xmas actually exists as a festive season; we are thinking about Germany and Belgium right now. Is there anywhere in France that actually has some spirit at Xmas time...markets, lights etc?. Personally I think not but let me know if I am wrong. There are seven of us as a family who need to travel and we want to start our Xmas trip about 22/12th until the 28th/12th. Suggestions with regards to Holland/Italy are more than welcome. The family really want to get out of France for Xmas this year if possible as the past three have been so uninspiring atmosphere-wise. But if such a thing as a festive Xmas can be found within France we will happily travel to it. We need a break.

JR... Whilst my first word of advice when people buy a place is usually to retain the existing name and website, I think that perhaps this might be a time when you'd be best to change it pronto. Also worth looking yourself up in search engines and indeed signs around the place and make sure that everything is changed!   Arnold  

Just had a rather extended conversation in French with a Londoner before we realised that neither of us was French. At nearly 5 minutes, it's my personal best before the penny dropped. Has anyone beaten that? If nothing else, at least it shows that my French accent must sound more French than Brit now :)   Arnold  

Coco, I'm not sure that it's "illegal" as such but not totally within the rules. All prices are as per normal US prices so, if you get the chance, fill up your tank on an American military base. Due to security concerns, I'd have thought it was by now the norm for Americans to use German plates. These systems usually operate on a mutual recognition basis. So, for instance in Ethopia, the Australians run the weekly BBQ (really!), the Americans run the golf course (it's a MASSIVE compound) and provide everyone with goodies, not sure but I think the Brits run the entertainment there. One of the best diplomatic postings I gather, aside from the hassle of being stuck in the compound for the duration of your tour of duty. There is no differentiation between services in this. So being in the reserve would give her the "entry ticket" to the base. Other "services" usually count as well so American civil servants based in the area (not necessarily on the base) and, in some cases, civil servants in some departments in other countries are entitled too. Not sure of the geography, but for example, the UK civil servants based in Berlin would usually be able to access the store in the American bases in Berlin as, usually, there would be a fair degree of mutual contact amongst the Brits & Americans ie each would have the appropriate "entry ticket" to the others base. In case you're wondering, yes, the UK bases have a shop but it ain't up to the standard of the American store.  

Ah, but Coco, buying the BMW in the US and importing it would be much cheaper than buying it in Germany, daft as that may seem. For one thing, there'd be neither US nor German tax to pay on the imports (if memory serves, the US military in Germany have export type number plates) knocking 20% or more off the price. Also, if she could order it via the base shop, it would be much cheaper than that. For those that don't know, all American diplomatic stations contain a shop offering goods at American prices (regardless of the actual cost of providing them) and you can order anything on sale from America through said shop. There is no delivery charge applied so, in theory, you could even order one of those build it yourself house kits if you were very keen. As far as I know, the American bases in Germany have the same facility hence it will usually be cheaper to order stuff via that than to buy it locally. I do stress "all"... even in the likes of Somalia you can buy anything that you can get in America if you've access to the American diplomatic compound.   Arnold  

Well.... after much debate between moi and Wendy, we started listing on gay-friendly sites as it happens. Now and again we get a fair number of hits from them but haven't really had an awful lot of bookings from them. Those that we've had have been amongst the very best guests we've ever had though. What you should try is to call yourself a "country retreat" for the laugh. For reasons which completely escape me, one Australian site refers to us in that way. Anyway, on this side of the world that's a synonym for "nudist colony". We've had a number of people staying with us who have obviously looked at the Ozzie site though they've all booked through other sites and boy do you get strange looks from them when they turn up!   Arnold  

Not really. We were fairly busy at the time and so were telling people "8.30 to 10.00" for breakfast. They always arrived around 10am as people tend to when we give a range of times but nothing really unusual about that (unless we've had a lot more similar people than we've so far realised). Towards the end of their stay, we considered it but though "nah, couldn't be that".   Arnold  

Welllll, as it happens we, purely by accident, wrote something in the French version of our site (since amended!) that had the effect of us receiving a number of "just for the afternoon" bookings for a while. Going by the arrangement of the pillows in the room afterwards we came to the conclusion (after much consideration!) that they were into some things that can't really be discussed here but, let's say, involved rear entry amongst many other things. Very profitable too. They came in the off-season but even so we still managed to rebook the same room twice in one day once or twice.   Arnold  

I would, but the couple described are definitely not your sister and her husband as we remember them and, as far as I'm aware, none of the problems I described happened to them. We, as a matter of course, don't provide enough information to allow anyone to identify a client who we're critical of and sometimes make the examples a composite or change something, as we did in this case. What we didn't add was that this particular couple actually made up some things in their letter of complaint to us ie it was just a rude and spiteful letter of complaint. However, I wanted to highlight the problems that guests can have stemming from a single, seemingly insignificant error on their part ie not changing their watches in this instance. We have had other guests who quite delibrately don't change their watches and have similar "Mr Bean" experiences during their time in France.   Arnold  

A little while ago, we received a really, really interesting letter of complaint from some guests via the reservation system they'd used which I thought 'yall might find a short summary of quite funny... 1. The staff didn't know when we were coming. 2. They just told us that all the restaurants closed at 9pm when it was only 8pm when we arrived. 3. The antiquated hairdryer in the room had a strange smell when we used it and didn't have any hose attached to it. 4. All the restaurants were closed when we tried to get lunch at 1pm but they told us that they didn't close 'til 2pm. Well, first off, we didn't know when they were coming 'cos they hadn't even told the reservation place about their flights and we'd no way of contacting them prior to their arrival. The antiquated hairdryer is actually a room heater and the strange smell was her hair burning! But most interesting are 2 & 4 which resulted from a rather catastrophic error on their part... they'd not changed their watches on arriving in France and in fact never changed them for the whole week! So, that 8pm arrival was really 9pm and all the restaurants were closed. That 1pm arrival time for lunch was actually 2pm so no lunch all week. Turns out that they'd only ever been on holiday to Spain before and had NEVER changed their watches when they went on holiday! That was OK in Spain as they could eat and shop pretty much any time, but created a whole series of "Mr Bean" adventures during the week of which the above are merely the tip of the iceberg. Any other "Mr Bean" stories to share?   Arnold  

MM: Why not get a credit card machine and avoid the problems? Even via CA, it's only around EUR 30/month so I'm sure it can be had cheaper. I find that we get a much, much smaller percentage of noshows when people have provided a credit card number. That person making multiple bookings would find it a very expensive trip indeed if we all took CC numbers upfront. We find that we rarely bill people as no-shows these days (I think only one this Summer so far) but pre getting the CC machine and taking CC numbers at the time of booking, we'd have notionally been billing at least one a week. So, the EUR 30 is covered very quickly. RR: I so much agree. The problem is that we're essentially in a transitional period between the "good old days" when B&B (and, no Chris it ISN'T Chambre d'Hote: this is an english language forum and you won't find Chambre d'Hote in your english dictionary, says he being equally pedantic) was very much a sideline for the farmer's wife to keep things ticking over after the war... and the more professionally run B&Bs today. That's not to say that the "farmer's wife" end of the market has gone away but they have really upped their game as you'll see if you try buying one such place from a French person these days. Sure there are B&Bs without ensuite rooms but most of those have been around for donkeys. I suspect that the only thing that will probably survive said transition will be Gites de France but that's going to have to change substantially too. After all I remember one person on this forum applying only to be told that she could only get a grade 3 because one room was a tiny bit too small and that she HAD to reduce her prices from EUR 60-ish to EUR 40-ish. This despite her doing quite nicely bookings-wise withour GdF.   Arnold  

I think that there has to be some reasonableness on both sides. We go out of our way to avoid charging no-shows but, contrary to what some would say, it does usually cost us money if someone doesn't turn up: the booking system that brought them to us WILL charge us and there is no use appealing to them (I have tried on behalf of guest in the past many times and always been turned down). What we will do is to try our best to rebook the room and we generally succeed if we're given enough notice. Even though in legal terms we don't have to refund any "noshow fee", we always do this if we rebook the room. The problem is that in many cases the guests don't call us and we only hear what happened when they get our e-mail saying that they've been charged for the room. As far as I know, in all cases where we have charged to date, the guests could easily have avoided the no-show charge by calling us when it became apparent that they weren't going to make it. What's also a bit demoralising is that we know that in the first three weeks of August we will get a considerable number of people booking with us who actually want to stay at the beach but can't get booked in anywhere so end up with us in the country. Most of these enjoy their time here as it is a wonderful area but we will be sure to get a handful of the English who try to run down our place in an attempt to get out of paying for the room: in fact they will say anything and everything to avoid paying. Despite the language used, we even do refunds to these *******s because we try to be reasonable regardless of how unreasonable the guests are. They don't need to use the language used: just saying "we really wanted to be at the beach" is enough. I've also seen a bit of an increase in French bookings who seem to assume that we're just doing this as a sideline or something and that therefore a booking is just letting us know that they might be there. One or two have been quite shocked that we've billed them when they didn't cancel. I suspect that this is why you've encountered the overbooking problem Anton: the French run places assume that a number of people won't turn up.   Arnold  

For one thing Anton, you'll find that the small French hotels are closed by around 10pm/11pm. One locally happily accepts reservations for Sundays but isn't open to accept people no matter what time they arrive on Sunday and we do quite well from the people who turn up there trying to get in. He even charges them as noshows! If people have a problem and turn up later than planned we DO stay open, unlike French hotels (except 24hour places like IBIS and the like). We accept that there can be unexpected problems along the road. In fact, although we say we close at 10pm we actually don't close 'til 11pm as a delibrate attempt to give guest a period of grace in their arrival time. We have been travelling in France extensively and there is no period of grace like that in any French owned hotel: even when we have seen the reception staff still standing there, we have never been allowed to checkin if we're even a few minutes after the hotel closing time. One place even closed the doors in our face. Not only that, but try asking for a meal just 1 minute after a restaurant closing time here. In fact, try asking for one 30 minutes BEFORE their stated closing time and you'll often be refused. So, whilst there is usually some ability to negotiate in a Brit owned place, in a French place you will simply be told "no". Brit owned B&Bs go out of their way to serve guests. There are limits though as they don't have any staff. It's just not viable to be consistently up to 2am and then get up for breakfasts at 6am. What we don't accept is people who read that we are open from 2pm to 10pm and then tell us in advance that they will be here at 1am. We don't treat them as no shows but rather tell them that we're not accepting the booking. Similarly we don't accept those from Paris who book for Saturday and then announce that they'll be arriving at 5am for their room on the basis that they've booked "Saturday" when they've actually booked Saturday night (this is very common). However, every single time we have tried to meet people at 1am or whatever we have consistently been asked for even more. One arrival this time last year rang us from Barcelona at 10pm to ask if it was OK to come which we agreed to as they'd be here by 12.30. In fact, they weren't even here at 2am when we finally gave up on them (they subsequently called to give us a stream of abuse because we hadn't stayed open 'til 3.30am when they finally arrived). Our latest late arrival read the website, booked online on a site which wouldn't allow him to quote any time later than 10pm and just added "I'll be there at 1am" in the comments. Given where he'll be driving from this means that he won't even be getting into the car until after 8pm. So, no, we won't be accepting him. Oh, and if the cattery operates on the same basis as French owned places, your cat will be fed the cheapest possible food that they can find. Most Brit owned places use so many ingredients in their meals & breakfasts that they make nothing on them. Breakasts in particular are consistently dreadful in French owned places.   Arnold  

Susie... one thing to watch with the Belgians: write & speak to them in English! We always send out an acknowledgement e-mail for every booking and do it in the language of the country when we can do it and English when we can't. Anyway, we had Belgium listed as "French" and got mildly told off by a series of Flemish who stayed. It's also interesting that the Flemish mostly use Dutch booking sites whilst the Waloons use mainly French ones (don't think there are any based in Belgium itself).   Arnold  

We used to say that breakfast was from 8.30 to 10 and found that people ended up coming down close to 10 quite a lot of the time which is a nuisance. So, what we started doing two years back was to say that breakfast is at 9 to everyone except when we're pretty full when we say 8.30 to 9.30 to try and spread the workload a little. That worked quite nicely until this year when everyone comes down at 8.30 so we'll likely go back to "9 for everyone" again. We had something of an "incident" last year with a dog. Seems that you can't refuse to take them unless you have a "no dogs" sign on the door so best to print one off and get it on the door now. Be wary of listings sites outside France too: some have a box to tick saying "dogs accepted" which sounds fine but if you don't tick the box it doesn't mention dogs on your entry and you need to add it in the text. Best we ever had was one family who booked the smallest room which states that it's two max regardless of age yet they turned up with five and couldn't understand why we couldn't put a couple of extra beds in the room even when they were standing in it and could see that there just wasn't the floor space to do that. One thing we've done this year is to run with a 2 night minimum for the weekends which is brilliant. Not only are we not wrecked after several days of overnighters but it's left the gaps for those staying for a week or more so our average stay is way up on what it was last year.   Arnold  

BN: no, they were quoting an advantage specific to being based in London, not down to their servers. In principle, I could see there being an advantage in being in London on the basis that the networking infrastructure is probably going to be more beefy than it would be in, say, Aberdeen. Don't forget that I'm just assuming that google prioritise on the basis of where the hosting is and it could be simply down to how fast the response is from their spiders ie you could get a UK targetted website doing quite nicely hosted in America compared to a UK based host if it were at the end of a really fast connection. I know a lot about marketing. There's only so much you can write before people nod off. Besides, they may simply not have picked up on differences re hosting location, even though it is talked about now and again on webmaster forums. It's true that adwords can be geotargetted but then presumably google itself does the same thing with results. As far as I'm aware google.com/google.co.uk results are not always the same when used from France and from the UK. Searching on "Chambres d'Hotes Languedoc" doesn't prove that wrong since we're in the midst of the holiday season so all the really active site promoters are going to be going full pelt and therefore the first couple of pages could well be identical on a search like that at the moment. You may have noticed that similar searches carried out at different times of the year can produce very, very different lists of results. RH: My thought is that google.com and google.co.uk results are different in that people don't always add the appropriate region tags to their websites (eg not using en-gb for a UK targetted page). However, I have also seen the order of some of my pages being different in both googles so it's probably not so simple as that.   Arnold  

I always used google.com even in the UK. If you use google.co.uk you'll actually exclude a great many UK based websites because few people bother to change the language and location defaults when they're writing websites. Even if you don't specify "UK only", the majority of websites returned are from the UK/Ireland area rather than the US/Canada region or even Australia for that matter. This implies that google always uses your real location (as per your IP address) to prioritise the results on the basis that there are loads more US/Canadian websites than there are British/Irish ones. Yahoo appear to do a similar thing though it's much more obvious that yahoo.co.uk isn't the same as yahoo.com .   Arnold  

By "the other side of the fence" I meant that were I were on the other side of the argument I'd be pretty sceptical too. UK hosts wouldn't necessarily pick up on it as they might well not be aware of the effect. However, I have seen several make a point of highlighting that there is an SEO advantage for them to be located in London. If they consider that it's an advantage to be in London presumably it would be even more of an advantage in comparison to being in America/France/whatever. I suspect that most people in the UK use a UK host by default so perhaps they don't bother mentioning the advantage because it doesn't affect massive numbers of people. After all, Catherine and Quillan seem to be the only ones here using an American host. Quillan: it may be that there is a difference in the significance of which American host you use. Marcus (from the LMH forum) found a 50-100% jump in his move whereas I got x10. I moved from godaddy to 1and1 UK. He wasn't with godaddy but I don't know who he was using. Google does default to the country specific one where one is available. You can change which google you pick up as you know BUT even if you use google.co.uk that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll get the same search results when you use that in France as someone would get if they were using it in the UK (or any other country). For one thing, you've probably noticed that you get French language adverts on adsense on websites which presumably wouldn't appear were you in the UK. I think I read somewhere that you can force it to work as though you were in the UK but it's not as simple as just selecting google.co.uk .   Arnold  

I find that it's exclusively the French who are like that. We price the breakfast separately so ask people if they want it. Several times we have had it ordered the night before and as they didn't take it the next morning they didn't want to pay. Their reasoning is always "but your family will eat it". If it's ordered, we bill them for it. We've also had a bit of a run of people booking and quoting arrival times from 1am onward. This despite us making it very clear that we close up at 10pm (though we do allow a grace period up to 11pm or so). I gather that this is quite common at the moment as the booking system that the last lot booked through have refused to contact the guest and cancel the booking despite us telling them that we will definitely not be letting them in at 1am (we've no contact details for these guests). And, as it's August, we have a fair number of people booking a double room and turning up with more people. Two nights ago they wanted four people in the double room, last night three people had booked the smallest double room we have (which just ain't big enough to add another bed) and phoned this morning to ask for their deposit back because they didn't arrive 'til way after we closed and couldn't get in. Still, only another three weeks and 'twill be back to normal :)   Arnold  

I was running analytics (and other similar tools) on the sites concerned. The majority of traffic was from the UK before and after the move. However, it appeared to be a pretty much across the board x10 increase in traffic ie we received more hits from the UK AND the US after the move (plus everywhere else for that matter). On the assumption that google et al actually do look at where your site is hosted this implies that one component of their ranking algorithm is that that the site is hosted in the location that its content is about ie an American holiday site should be hosted in America, a European one in Europe. I even have some circumstantial evidence on that front: whilst ourinns has been set up to take listings from America for over a year we have received none yet when I expanded into the UK we started receiving them within a few weeks. On the circular argument front, I do accept that if I were sitting on the other side of the fence I'd find it hard to believe that simply changing the hosting from the US to Europe would bump up traffic x10 (and it has grown steadily from that level). However, that was the only change made over the two week period during which the traffic jumped up so there don't appear to be any other variables. For instance, I wasn't running any site promotion over that time, there weren't any changes made to the text/design of the sites, etc. I haven't yet separated out the stats for the .co.uk domain so it'll be interesting to see if that has a different geographic appeal. At present whilst the bulk of traffic is from the UK there is a sizeable chunk from France, Spain and America which is as I'd expect ie France will feature because of the entries there and the language (it's a bilingual site), America because of the language but less prominently due to the distance and because they don't get as much vacation time. Given what I've heard, the .co.uk domain should be more strongly concentrated on the UK.   Arnold  

Quite simply from everywhere. Those arriving by yahoo and google went up more or less equally if memory serves. The google was the easiest to see in the adsense went up x10 within the two weeks (although, annoyingly, so did image search). The search terms used to get to the site became more varied overall but then you'd expect that with such a rise in site traffic. Given that the search engine traffic went up 10 fold I imagine that our ranking improved as a consequence of the move. It didn't appear to be due to us moving from, say, position 3 to position 2 for a specific search term but rather an overall lifting in the ranking for all search terms. I agree with you that it shouldn't happen but it is a fact of life that it happened with my collection of sites and some others that I know of who changed from US hosting to European hosting. This implies that some search engines do look under the hood so to speak and use the hosting location as one element of the ranking algorithm. I suspect that the lesser search engines don't have the computer power to do this but it would appear that google and yahoo (not sure about the msn results) do and they are by far the most significant search engines around. My guess is that the domain also matters to a significant extent too in that my .co.uk listing site does much better than it should as compared to it's .com and .org equivalents. However, it's much harder to compare like with like in a move from .com to .co.uk (for me anyway) in that I have promoted the .com and .org sites but not, so far, the .co.uk equivalent (this will probably change over the winter, so ask me about that this time next year). Certainly if anyone is currently hosting in America, it would be worth trying out a move to a UK based host. Worst case, you're down £20 and waste a few hours of your time making the move. Best case is your site traffic is dramatically up.   Arnold  

Nick, I know that it shouldn't matter where your site is hosted, but it quite simply does as you'd know if you read the webmaster forums. I say again: the ONLY change I made to the sites was where they were hosted. Within two weeks of changing that, the traffic was up 10 fold. I simply uploaded the site on the European host and the traffic started going up within a couple of days: the only thing that changed was that the nameserver was pointing to a European host rather than an American one. I did look at the referrer stats and the like before and after the move and it appears that UK sourced hits on the site were what went up but it was very much an across the board 10 fold jump. Now, I do accept that perhaps a x10 jump is unusual, but others have also made the US to UK move of hosts and also experienced a jump in hits, albeit those that I've heard about have been in the 50-100% range in terms of increased traffic. Why mine was so large, I just don't know but it was of the same order for all sites that I moved (around a dozen in total). As I say, anyone who doesn't believe that it makes a difference can quite easily try it out. If you're hosted in the UK, get an American host (maybe $20/year) and move your site; if you're hosted in the US, get a UK host (£20/year) and try it. I would be very surprised if there wasn't a noticeable difference in site traffic within a few days after the move.  

Missed your replies Nick but I'll also reply here for the benefit of those reading this one. Who knows why my particular increase in traffic was so drastic, but I can assure everyone that it was very real and kicked in very fast. I appreciate the comment about "hits" not being a totally reliable way of counting site traffic but used "hits" as a shorthand. The amount of traffic on the sites which I moved increased by every measure that I had available at the time ie hits, visitors, and even adsense all went up 10 fold over the course of about two weeks. As it happens, I never used the stats provided by the American host and so the counts of hits/visitors were consistently counted (via statcounter) before and after the move. For clarity: there were no changes made in the websites at all. I simply uploaded the website on the new host and changed the nameservers. The traffic started going up a couple of days later and was around 10x the original traffic by two weeks after the move from America. The recent move from 1and1 UK in Germany to a London based host has produced a 50-100% increase in site traffic, again consistently measured. The sites affected are principally my listings sites and our own property site which all have a largely European audience rather than an American audience. I'm aware that Marcus had an increase of 50-100% in hits when he made the US to UK move. Presumably the difference is down to the different way we each write & promote our sites but even that increase is, of course, useful. The only difference between us is that I kept the American registrar and he moved to a UK registrar so perhaps that's an aspect worth investigating at some point. I suspect that moving to a .co.uk domain would also affect matters but I've not done much experimentation with that as yet.   Arnold

Even without making the site improvements you'd get quite a jump in hits by moving to a UK host. How much I don't know. Mine went up roughly x10 on two quite different types of site but friends from the Dordogne only got a 50% jump (still worthwhile, of course). We're with eukhost.com at the moment. Something like £20/year. Changing the nameservers is usually easy. Once you've signed up with a UK hosting company and uploaded your site, what you do is go to the control panel on your current hosting service and look for "name servers" or "DNS". That will list two addresses something like americanhosting1.com, americanhosting2.com. You change those to point to the new hosting service (which'll tell you what the two values are) ie replace americanhosting1.com & americanhosting2.com with ukhost1.com and ukhost2.com (or whatever values they've told you to use). It can take two or three days for this change to start working. If you don't make any changes to the site, you won't even notice the change (aside from the extra hits), so what I do is to add a tiny bit of text to the bottom of the homepage before uploading the site on the new host (which is why you'll see the word "sevateem" at the bottom of some of our pages).   Arnold

Catherine... tried e-mailing you a while back but maybe I've an out of date address. The absolutely vital point that nobody else has picked up is that your site is hosted in America. This of itself is reducing the hits (and thereby direct bookings) by around 90%. We had our sites in the US for a while too and when we moved it to a European host, the hits went up around 10 fold. And, yes, that does mean that bookings made directly through our site went up by about that factor too (from a low-ish base then to be fair but x10 all the same). I know that others who've made the US to UK move have experienced significant uplift in site hits too. Sadly, it's the one factor that virtually nobody picks up on. Yes, it's cheaper to host in the US but on a commercial site you just can't afford that 90% drop in hits. You can get UK hosting (and it's best if it's in London) for around £20/year. It's not necessary to move the domain as you can change the nameservers and thereby speedup the move (it takes a couple of days). Note that 1and1.co.uk actually host in Germany and, yes, it makes a difference: I used to do most hosting via 1and1 and moved some sites to a London based host as an experiment which has taken up the hits about 50-100% as compared to when the same sites were hosted with 1and1 (this is with absolutely no changes whatsoever in the sites). PM if you want the host we're currently using or, for the more technically minded, you can just look up where mascamps.com currently lives.   Arnold