Seems like ages since the last Mas Camps News!

What's been happening?

Well, we had our first holiday since we got here. More on that if you read the blog entries from April. Although we just went to Turkey to see the solar eclipse, we'd like to go back as the trip was far too short. Might even drive it next time as we had some Turkish guests a month or so back who did exactly that. However, they recommend taking the ferry from Italy to Greece rather than driving through Croatia etc. as they reckon that route is a bit dangerous.

The pattern of reservations has been quite different from last year. Very, very little in February and March but once we hit Easter, the occupancy was way up. Almost triple the number of people this June as we had last year. July was slightly higher but completely with "ordinary" guests as we didn't have the equivalent of the two massive bookings we had last year. Different from last year too is that September already has a fair number of bookings.

And we've launched a few more websites. With the quiet period in February, I was able to move www.ourinns.org and www.ourgites.org into PHP and MySQL which has reduced considerably the amount of effort required to put properties online. Not only that but I've taken the opportunity to add a number of enhancements and permit people to add a whole lot more information.

Once all the information was in the database (major nightmare!), I made a start on the much more commercially targetted www.ourholidayrentalhomes.com and www.ourbedandbreakfasts.com. Can't really see them doing well in the search engines this holiday season but the older sites are doing very well. Both www.chambre-dhote.org and www.ourgites.org (listing B&B and self-catering properties in France respectively) regularly appear in the top 10 on google searches.

Last, but not least, I thought that I'd move the blog into my own domain. Still haven't sussed out the full route, but expect to see it arriving at Foreign Perspectives shortly.

Living in France: the Basics Expat blog