Just a quick update to let you know that Jeff and I are still here – we haven’t disappeared of the face off the earth, we’ve just been busy arranging bookings for ‘last minute’ holiday makers!

I think most people in the world today have been affected by this credit crunch, including us here at La Treille and other gîte and holiday home owners here in the Dordogne region of SW France.  Fortunately this is our 4th year in the gîte business and our bookings were growing steadily year on year.  I certainly wouldn’t want to be starting-out in the gite business this year!  Our success is reflected in the lovely comments our guests have left and the amount of repeat guests and recommendations that La Treille is generating each year.  Don’t get me wrong… it hasn’t been easy!  5 years ago when we first arrived in France many ‘experts’ were saying the French tourist market was already saturated with too many gîtes and gîte complexes, especially in the popular Dordogne region.  This had been our dream for too many years to ‘throw in the towel’, so,  we ploughed-on with our plans and all our hard work and optimism was starting to pay-off with last year yielding 46 weeks worth of bookings – pretty good when you think we were told by the ‘experts’ that a 12 week season was good!  We were delighted to find that many of our guests were either booking up for their next years holiday whilst still here enjoying this years or within a week or so of arriving home.  Neither of us had any experience in the tourism industry so it was nail biting stuff the first year that people liked what they were paying for.  Things were looking pretty rosy by the end of last year although Jeff was starting to be pessimistic about 2009 being as successful as 2008 due to this ‘credit crunch’!

Inevitably the crunch has hit us this year and enquiries and bookings did start to dry-up.  Fortunately we’d got most of July and August booked-up for all of our gites by the end of May but the shoulder weeks of our already ’short season’ were looking worryingly vacant.  As suspected many holiday makers have left booking late and are now looking for those ‘last minute bargain holidays’.  Our phone lines and email in-boxes have been very busy this last month with enquiries and we have now filled many of our vacant shoulder weeks although we are still falling short of our target of at least 36 weeks bookings across the 3 gites.  Enquirers who are still trying to book the main school holiday weeks during July and August have however missed out by leaving booking until ‘last minute’.  They may well find alternative accommodation but ‘what will it be like’?  We understand the importance to holiday makers searching for availability – especially in today’s economic climate.  Because of this we are vigilant in keeping our availability calendars up to date wherever we advertise but we are still receiving many enquiries for these ‘already booked’ weeks of July & August.  I can totally understand people leaving booking till late (we are guilty of doing it ourselves) but you just cannot guarantee getting the accommodation you would really like if you do this for July and August.

We also understand the importance of keeping up-to-date with marketing and have ploughed much of our hard earned cash back in to the business.  This year we have a brand new website that has been set-up with the help of a web design expert Gite Guru aka Dave Smith who specialises in the gîte market.  Hours of work, research and much thought have gone into the design and set-up of the site and the integration of this blog will hopefully help with search engine optimization for bringing-in direct enquiries.  We have also reviewed which advertising directories we use and have placed adverts with new directories to target a wider European market, these include Owners Direct (for the UK market), Pour Les Vacances (for the French market) and gites.nl (for the Dutch and German market).  As well as these we also advertise on many ‘free’ Internet sites that occasionally bring in the odd booking.  I don’t know if we will ever get to the stage where we no longer have to advertise, I know there are gîte business’s out there that are very successful and fully booked via their own website, recommendations and many loyal repeat guests – The mark of a good gîte business is to eventually not have to ‘pay to advertise via these directories’ and that is my goal!  We’ll keep maintaining the property whilst business is good and making improvements where possible. We were hoping to add pool heating and a games room this year but it looks like those improvements will have to wait until next year… such a shame but it will happen eventually.

The future is very optimistic at La Treille with bookings already coming in for 2010 so if you are thinking of taking a gîte holiday in the Dordogne why not make sure you ‘get the gîte you want’ by booking now.  You can secure your chosen week(s) with just a small deposit of £100.  Come and spend a week or more here at La Treille in one of our stunning gîtes – Le Ble, Le Tournesol and Le Maize – you will not be disappointed!

Oh and don’t forget September this year – we still have availability and the weather is still beautiful!