Advertising

[Red Devil]

Hello

We've got friends who own a chalet in the ski resort of Morzine and successfully advertise rentals through a company called "chaletfinder.com"

Just wondered if anyone could recommend a similar company to advertise with for a self-catering/B&B property in the Puy-de-Dome (63) AUVERGNE region.

Thanks

[mascamps.com]

I don't know that you really want to be looking at regional advertising as your guests probably don't really look for somewhere in a specific department when they're looking for somewhere to stay.

There are heaps of free sites around and the only limitation on these should be the time you have available to find and get onto them. My own ones below for instance but there are dozens of others with new ones popping up all the time. Don't limit yourself to english language ones either as the french are very keen on chambre d'hotes/gites.

There are a few dozen B&B sites charging around the £50 level but in terms of paying sites, visitfrance.co.uk at £145 seems good value in terms of bringing in the business.

I don't really advertise our gite a whole lot but there's a similar breakdown to the above for gite listing sites (VF do both).

Last, and definitely not least, Gites de France although you're probably too late this year to get much advantage from them.

If this is your first year and you've not started the advertising yet, I'd concentrate on the B&B site for the next week before looking at the gite because you've probably missed the boat with the gite for this year by and large (gite bookings are usually made much, much further in advance than B&B bookings).

 

Arnold

 

[Owens88]

I'd agree with focussing on the B&B before the Gite. But in our first year we picked up our place in May (and it wasn't ready till late june). We got some rentals from a sort of French version of Loot, with regional paper editions and an on-line version.

 

p..s the regional paper editions were regional to where they are, not where you are !

Good luck

John

[CatherineS2]

I agree that gites are usually booked well in advance, however there are always people who have left it to the last minute and are desperately looking for somewhere for the school holidays.

We bought our house in April 2003 and it was not ready for letting until 15th August. We only joined French Connections in mid-June 2003, yet we still managed to get the last 2 weeks of August booked as well as most of September.

So I definitely don't think you have missed the boat for your gite.

Good Luck

(By the way, I personally no longer recommend French Connections as it no longer works for us since they changed their website, but it may for you).

[mascamps.com]

Indeed, there are always the last minute bookers.

On average, we get our B&B bookings about 2 weeks in advance of the stay; for the gite it's more like 2 months in advance. Therefore, in terms of prioritising your time (assuming that you've not really started advertising), it's going to be better to do the B&B first as that'll give you nearly two months of summer from the advertising (ie from about the second week of July) vs a few weeks from the gite advertising (going by our average leadtime of a couple of months on that). Naturally, you'll (hopefully) pick up last minute bookers too.

Don't forget that a lot of the advertising places are relatively swamped this time of year. One place took two months to get us on last year as we made the application in early June whereas friends of ours going onto the same place in February were online within a week or so.

Within the last week or so we've seen a really big jump in the hits on ourinns.org and on our own website too which is usually the forerunner of a corresponding jump in the number of bookings. In practice, we seem to be running at around 2 or 3 bookings a day lately though that's for anything from an overnight to the odd all-building booking (if you market the B&B and gite jointly, you're more likely to pick these up now and again).

Or in short, don't be hanging around reading this stuff.... get going on the publicity.

 

Arnold