How are bookings going?

[Coco]

How are other people doing with their bookings?

My pattern is totally different to last year.  Last year I was getting at least 4 enquiries a day from January to beginning of March but only about 1 in ten converted to a booking.  This year I have had many many fewer enquiries but I think all but two have become firm bookings!

Interestingly, I've also put a counter on my website which allows me to do a basic tracking on where people that view my site are coming from.  So far I've had a couple from Arnold's Ourinns site but otherwise, without fail everyone has been from the French or Italian sites that I'm on and NONE from the UK sites.  Two years ago about 60% of our business was French, last year it dropped to 25%, I wonder if this is an indication of high ferry prices putting the Brits off and a resurgence in our French visitors.

What are other people's experiences?

Also, have other people put their prices up at all? 

[Grays]

Hi St Amour,

We have a similar pattern,  we also have had less enquiries over Dec to March (so far)...but we are getting the weeks filled with the ones that do come in. Does this mean that the timewasters are wasting peoples time in another country..

 

[mascamps.com]

Nice to see that people are getting click-throughs from me... I've not yet worked out how to record them so, usually, don't know how well I'm doing for people aside from looking at the hits that ourinns.org receives itself.

I've noticed quite a different pattern this year too. We have a much, much higher percentage of bookings from our own website. In the past it has been something like 70/30 in favour of reservations systems vs our own site but this year it's very much the other way around, more so even as, aside from Easter, it has been almost 90/10 in favour of our own site.

Be wary of the webstats. One thing that I've noticed is a very significant (and rising) number listed as "no referrer". These usually aren't picked up by stat counters just inserted on your pages (but are picked up by the stats recorded by your hosting service). So, in general, you will undercount quite drastically the number of hits on your pages.

I've also noticed that a considerable number of listing services don't appear on my stats but yet they are clearly bringing me hits. For instance, up until quite recently visitfrance.co.uk didn't appear at all on my stats (even though we were definitely getting hits from them) because of the way they passed the hits on to my site. I think (not sure) that it may be related to the way that they record the clicks out of their site. I pointed out this problem to them last year and, finally, they have fixed it; other sites may not and hence will be lumped into the "no referrer" group.

 

Arnold