Visit France - AGAIN!

[Coco]

I know the VF question seems to be an annual one and I appear to be flooding this section with queries at the moment but it's my time of year for re-assessing advertising and my website.  As I've said in previous recent postings, I am delighted with the amount of bookings I am taking (best year so far).  However, I have not had a single enquiry from Visit France.  I know people have moaned about them in the past but they have always been my best source of bookings by far, with Great Bed and Breakfast close behind.  I have noticed that the number of B&Bs advertising in my section of the site has dropped from about 18 to 8, so others must be noticing it too.  I have also noticed that they are no longer appearing on the first page of searches, which presumably is compounding the problem of not receiving enquiries.

Are others finding the same?  Has anyone heard anything more about Greatbedandbreakfast.com?  I've sent two more emails since my posting on the subject and still no response.  It's such a shame as it was a great source of income but I don't feel inclined to send any money off to renew an ad until I've heard something from them to assure me that they haven't disappeared off the face of the earth!

[Coco]

I sent VF an email pointing out that they are quite often not even appearing on the first two pages of searches and I got this wonderful example of excellent customer relations in response:

"Organic search positions change over time and are not within our control.

That's why we state in our advertising terms and conditions [at http://tc.goholidays.net/] :

The publisher makes no guarantee that any specific search engine position will be acquired or retained for any particular page of the distribution channels. The advertiser accepts that the number of views of the advertisement and the number of enquiries generated by it may vary over time. Correspondence about website traffic creation and website traffic statistics will not be entered into.

 

Whether or not you renew the ad is your choice. You will receive an automated notification closer to the expiry date."

 

So, it would appear that the selling point for most of this type of website is that they constantly achieve high rankings in the search engines, but VF have not decided that not only will they not guarantee this but they will not enter into any discussion on it either![blink]

 

"Organic search positions change over time and are not within our control."  This statement in particular made me smile. Perhaps it's not within their control but I think they "could do better" as Mr Smith may say to some of his students.  There's a certain little sausage on this forum who ALWAYS has about 4 results on the first page no matter what combination of search criteria I put in for CDH, B&B, etc in Normandy - and he isn't even in Normandy!!!!  Cassis, do you want a job showing the big boys how it's done? [:D]  Or perhaps just me![;-)]