Taken a booking for Christmas & New Year guests

Last year The Gite was booked by a couple for Christmas and I was rather hoping we'd get a similar booking this year - we'd even got a Christmas tree and lights ready for the guests!

Dutch flag courtesy of ITA's
Flags of All Countries
and used with permission

Three weeks ago and no bookings in sight (despite putting up some 'late availability' adverts) so I offered the Gite on ebay to no avail. Tried again a week later and this time got a couple of enquiries, one of which looked like they were going to book ... and then we received a booking via our holiday home listing on VillaRenters (so I had to cancel the ebay listing).

Our Christmas guests will be with us for 12 days and it turns out that they're from Holland. So far all bar one other couple (from Ireland) have been from the UK. I'm slightly surprised that we have not had more overseas guests (even though we do advertise via Google in Germany, France, Holland and Belgium) - a few website visitors but no booking enquiries at all.

We did have an enquiry in November from a French group that wanted the Gite over New Year but they wanted to book in a party of 12 which is rather too many for our 3 bedrooms. Even pressing the two children's cots into use wouldn't really suffice ...