Well, here we are it’s the 1st of November already… where did the summer go? 

We finally got back from our short break in Spain and although we had a lovely time staying with Jeff’s brother and visiting lots of amazing places, to be honest we were quite pleased to get back to our ‘home’ here in the Dordogne.  You may have heard rumours that we have been considering selling-up here at La Treille and perhaps even making a move to Spain but the trip has opened our eyes of exactly what we have here and how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful part of the world.  So, to put it plainly we will not be going anywhere, well, not for quite a few years yet at least and let’s face it, the market (yes, even France’s property market) isn’t at it’s best to be selling. So, with our re-newed passion we are staying put!

We have always kept the gites and gardens in tip-top condition, personally I wouldn’t like to stay in a ‘tired gite’ and would not wish to subject our guests to one either,  but with our batteries fully re-charged and this new inspiration in our hearts we are enthusiastically putting those finishing touches to the property.  Jeff started in the Spring by starting to re-paint all the shutters a beautiful shade of terracota and is now pointing-up the exterior walls to bring them back to their traditonal ‘Pierre-Apparent’ glory.  What a difference it makes… photo to follow!

I’ve been doing my bit too, mowing the lawns – hopefully for the last time this year and collecting the ever falling autumn leaves as well as collecting a few of this year’s bumper walnut harvest.  It’ll soon be time to go marron (chestnuts) collecting in the woods – I love all this ‘freebie food’!

With all this going on unfortunately I have been neglecting to keep my eye on the gite admin. You cannot afford to sit on your laurels in this competitive market.  Having checked my daily analysis (yes I know, I’m turning into a ‘gite owner anorak’) I realised I needed to sort out which advertising directories were performing for us and which were not.  We have been advertising with Chez Nous since we started 4 years ago and dissapointingly for us they are no longer performing.  You cannot afford to be loyal to these businesses and I made the decision to not re-new my subscription for our 2010 advertising budget.  As well as Chez Nous, I have also dropped Holiday Rentals and French Connections.  It may have been a risk as all 3 of these companies are well-known within the French lettings market but they were just getting so expensive – I was spending nearly £1000 annualy just on these 3!!!  So far I have no regrets and with our brand new website and brand new adverts taken out with Owners Direct, Pour les Vacances, North Of The Dordogne and many others we are optomistic for a busy 2010.  These are holding their own on the numerous search engines but I really need to keep up to date with regular blog posts too.  These help to keep our own website on page 1 of the search engines – especially Google. 

No 2 years are the same in the gite market as we’ve discovered over the last four years of renting our gites.  Although we are well-established now (I think, although I try not to get complacement) we are still in our infancy in comparison to other gite business within this area.  Last year started off a little shaky with only a few bookings received by the end of December compared to previous years.  This was perhaps hardly surprising considering the credit crunch and although we tried to tap into a broader European market including French, Dutch and German visitors to broaden our customer base they have proved elusive to date – this is obviously something I need to work on.  Never the less the bookings did come in, fortunately for us from the loyal UK market that obviously still loves France, these included 8 re-bookings from previous guests and although we were ‘down’ on the previous year we did a lot better than some of our competitor’s.  2010 is looking much more promising so far with 22 weeks booked-up already (again from the ever loyal UK market) thankfully/  This is unusual but as I said no 2 years are the same and if things carry on in this fashion we may just have a bumper year next year (fingers crossed) and perhaps we’ll have a little left over to get the pool heated!