Paolo

OK, now I know what I need to do, thanks to all for your help. Paolo

Thanks for your replies, Pat and Colin, I think I am getting to the bottom of this now. Quote: "When we got our freeview cards for the gites in May this year, we could only get all the freeview channels by giving the system details of every digibox and the specific card number to Sky. The BBC channels came through immediately without activation, but for ITV, Ch4 + 5, they did not work until the activation had been carried out by Sky." SusanAH, presumably you told Sky the details over the phone, and it was from a French number rather than an English mobile? Paolo

Pat, Thanks for sticking your neck out! Sounds like I need to not cancel my UK mobile contract till I have made this call. Would you know if I could just stick my Freesat card in someone's digibox here in the UK, activate the card by phone, and then take it to France and put it in my own digibox, already activated and working? Cheers, Paolo

From earlier in this thread: "If it's a Freesat card then it can be activated in any Sky digibox as it does not need to be married to any particular box.  You could ask a friend or neighbour with a Sky box to do this for you." Do you need to call Sky at all to activate a Freesat card? I am not interested in the subscription channels, just the UK terrestrial channels through Freesat. Thanks, Paolo

Dave, Yes I do, but when I go to France I will cancel the contract and get a French mobile, if that has a bearing. Paolo

I've read through the posts about this Freesat card and I am obviously a technophobe at heart because I still need to be told what I should do.... I am moving to France in a month, and I would like to be able to get the 5 terrestrial UK channels. I don't have satellite or cable here in England. Am I right in thinking I need to: - buy a Sky digibox here, - order a £20 Freesat card and have it sent to my current UK address, - once in France (deep south, 84) buy a 90cm dish, - plug in the card and everything will work beautifully? Thanks for any pointers. Paolo

Yes, drop her a line, tell her you are looking forward to your holiday and when you will arrive. As an owner I would welcome such pleasantries from arriving guests - it reassures me that they are not savages! Paolo

[quote]Hi, The only true free sites at the moment are as above. Thanks Arnold for your efforts for us all. We did find that www.holidayhavens.co.uk and www.holidaylets.net offered 3 months free advert...[/quote] "The only true free sites at the moment are as above." Not at all. Those are sites that Arnold is associated with but there are many free listing sites. There is a useful thread with a list of free of listing sites and discussion about them at Lay My Hat here: http://www.laymyhat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=569 There is also a very amusing thread where the owner of self-catering-breaks.com, which is a very big free listing site, tells us that we are a bunch of whingers and whiners! I have never heard someone address their customer base like this and the interesting thing is that several people liked the honesty and signed up with the site (except that it doesn't work all that well, hence the whinging). My view on free sites is that you get what you pay for. They are the cherry on the cake but personally I would not think of them as part of my marketing portfolio. Don't rely on them! I would recommend the free 3-month trial on holidaylets.net as this is a 'proper' site. They are re-thinking the free trial so get on while you can. perfectplaces.com and vacationrentals.com have free trials and they are also large, established sites, albeit more likely to attract American users. Paolo

Google is good for this sort of thing. If you type in "un riou" or "le riou" with the quotation marks, it will search for that whole phrase, so eliminating most instances of the surname Riou. I had a quick look at the results for this search and a riou does indeed seem to be a stream. Paolo

"So would it be work if members wanting to use IBAN / SWIFT as a way of receiving payment, used a separate account which they kept 'swept' of funds on a regular basis? ( Easy enough to do with internet banking I would think)" That seems to me to be the most prudent thing to do. If you couple that with making it a savings account it should be even safer, from what Arnold says. I did not believe either that it was possible to withdraw money from people's accounts with just IBAN-type information, but there is a lady posting on the laymyhat forum who had 10,000 euros nicked from her account. Someone called the bank pretending to be her husband to notify them, then sent a fax, and that was that. The bank won't accept responsibility because they say the account-holders withdrew the money, and the case is going to court. It is a major French bank. Incidentally Quillan, I am not an expert here, but assuming those links you posted are to fake sites, search engines do penalise you for linking to 'bad neighbourhoods', so you might prefer to de-activate them. Paolo

If I wanted to market a speciality holiday I would use a Google pay-per-click campaign. This allows you to target the searches that your potential clientele will type into Google. For example if you offer painting courses you could specify that you want your ad shown for searches like 'painting holidays in brittany', 'france art courses', 'limousin painting holiday', etc. A small percentage of people will see your ad (the boxes on the right on the results page), and an even smaller percentage will click on it, but they will be predisposed to enquire into what you offer. This is the page on Google that tells you all about how to use their Adwords pay-per-click programme: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/Login?sourceid=AWO&subid=UK-ET-ADS&hl=en_GB Paolo

I am just about still playing football, and I think when you play or have played a sport intensely you get an instinct for the behaviour of the ball, of players' movements and intentions, and the geometry of the playing area. All I can say is that when I first saw the 'goal', in real time, I just knew that the ball had crossed the line. But only just. Controversial! Miki you said this was the first semi between 2 British clubs, but wasn't there one between Celtic and Leeds in about 1970? Paolo

On the subject of free trials, I have had good results from a 3-month trial on www.holidaylets.net - enquiries and even a few bookings. It's what I call a 'proper' site, and for ease of uploading your information and pictures it is hard to beat. It has a late availability section (which you may not be allowed to use on a free trial), but what I would do is write the desciption line, which normally says something like 'Les Oliviers, beautiful villa for rent in Languedoc', to say something like 'June 14-28 now available - see Languedoc at its best'. So when people scan down the list of possibles, the key fact you want to get across is there. You can change this line and the rest of the text instantly. Paolo

'a translation of key web search phrases in the different languages so that a google search in say German would bring up my site. .... Any volunteers? ' This has been addressed in this thread at the Lay My Hat forum: http://www.laymyhat.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=209 There are also a couple of Dutch phrases in there. Paolo

I know of a site that markets itself as a late availability site - latelet.com. But I have no experience of the site, I just remember the name. It seems to me that this is just a marketing angle, because they charge for a year’s subscription – you can’t just advertise a late availability for a short period.   The site should do well for search engine searches like ‘late availability rentals’ – but does anyone search like this? I don’t think so. I think people will just use a normal listing site to search. The best of these will be those that offer search by availability, so you don’t have to check the availability calendars of lots of properties.   Some listing sites also have a Late Availability or Special Offer section, but again, that is not a function everyone will see or use.   Holiday-rentals.com has both search by availability and a special offer section so that may be a good site to try, but they are not the cheapest at something like £170 per year. But as they are the 5th most used listing site in the world, perhaps you get what you pay for.   Another option is pay-per-click with Google Adwords. This lets you appear on page one of Google for many different searches, albeit on the right where only a small percentage of people will look. You can write an ad saying you have late availability and it links to your own website or listing ad. Your campaign can last as long or as little as you want, and cost as little as you want per day. Google’s own instructions on AdWords are pretty good and can be seen here: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/Login?sourceid=AWO&subid=UK-ET-ADS&hl=en_GB   Paolo

Thanks for the advice, I will direct her to read this thread and she can take it from there. Cheers! Paolo

Hi Val 2, Thank you for replying. She is flying over next month to finalise things, but she has no idea how to sort out the insurance, and her contact at the Museum isn't able to tell her what to do. So what would you advise - find an insurance agent in the nearest town? I know France is insurance-mad, which is why I am concerned that she is being a little laissez-faire about this. I don't want all her guests to fly out there and be turned away because there is no insurance! Many thanks, Paolo  

Hello to anyone who understands French insurance, I have a question for you.... My friend, who lives in England, is having a wedding reception in a sort of museum, La Maison du Vin, in France. The person who runs the museum told my friend that she must produce insurance to cover the reception, called a Responsabilité Civile. My question is - for someone who lives in England, how to arrange this insurance? The person at the museum can't give any guidance. Thanks for any input. Paolo

Kingston - Paris of the north. Hoping to move to Provence - Surrey of the south. Paolo

This villa is available for September 3-10: www.menerbesvilla.com You can't really beat the location, in the heart of the Luberon, and that is reflected in the price. Paolo

Hi Clair, I have not had dealings with Interhome but I am surprised at the facts you have been given. I believe their commission is more like 40% (although it is not advertised anywhere). You also say they would help with off-season rentals - I would be amazed if they did not insist on managing your rentals for the peak summer months too. Interhome has actual offices so it has much greater overheads than a purely web-based company. It wouldn't be worth their while just filling in a few winter weeks for you. All the best, Paolo

This feels a bit like walking into a duel to sell hot dogs, but... I thought I wold just point out in case anyone is considering a directory listing on Yahoo: - there isn't a £299 fee, it is $299 per year on yahoo.com, and a one-off payment of £199 for Yahoo.co.uk. - free submission is only for non-commercial sites, so not applicable to gite or B&B sites. If you are on yahoo.co.uk, you automatically get onto yahoo.com. Is £199 worth it over the course of your site's life-span? I don't really know! If you want to find out more I recommend the High Rankings forum at www.highrankings.com/forum - this is where the experts spend all day talking about this, but they keep it surprisingly comprehensible for us laymen. En garde! Paolo

Michelle, I would recommend looking at Terry Kearns's site: http://tksvacationrental.com/ Even if his designs don't appeal, the site is a good information resource for holiday rental owners. And his prices are very reasonable I think, especially as he is in the States and charges in dollars. Another way to find a designer you like is to find sites you really like. Sometimes there will be a link to the designer at the bottom of each page. Or you can just email the site and ask who designed it. I don't know the site you mention about Limousin gites, but you could also try my site for holiday rental owners (yes this is a plug but the site in not commercial) - there are designers there who have answered this question before and you can see what they are offering. Just click on the link under my name and go to the forum. Paolo

This is an interesting discussion, and I hope it's going to become a real issue in Britain. Going back to what we feed our children, I watch this Jamie Oliver programme with mounting horror. We've got two little 'uns and my wife has always tried to make them proper food, nothing processed, no sugar, no salt. Is it unconnected that they are very happy, very healthy, sleep 12 hours straight every single night, don't have tantrums, etc? We live among middle-class, educated parents (this is Kingston after all!) and we are regarded as fanatical oddballs. Every other parent we know feeds their children an almost exclusive diet of processed/frozen/ready meals. When they are thirsty our children drink water - all their friends drink Ribena or worse. Ribena is now seen (and marketed) as a healthy drink. One mother was particularly proud of her son for eating a 'Frootini'. A 'Frootini' is a tub of processed fruit parts in a sugar syrup. It is like eating fruit with all the vitamins removed and half a pound of sugar and preservatives added. His reward for eating this was a chocolate bar. How does an intelligent parent come to the decision that instead of buying her child a fruit, she will buy him a 'Frootini'? It is very time-consuming and tedious to prepare fresh meals every day for your children. It is incredibly easy to stick something in the microwave, especially when you are reassured that it has 'reduced salt' or some such nod to the health lobby. But what do parents do with the time they save by not giving their children a decent start in life? As far as I can see they watch television. (Don't get me started on plonking kids in front of telly for their meals - I saw a cornflake in the living room carpet at a friend's house, she bashfully told me that her kids of 1 and 3 have TV breakfasts!) Jamie Oliver - I didn't like him as the Naked Chef, but he is some sort of latter-day saint. He should be made a government 'czar' Paolo

I would definitely bank the cheque. This person has lied to you so assume the worst. What would you do if/when he turned up at your door and said he couldn't get cash due to a family tragedy and can you cash the cheque instead? You should always be in control of the transaction, if you don't bank the cheque now you are handing control to someone you know to be dishonest. Paolo