Into year 5, and a look back on 2008

Payment time came around again this week with a renewal request from 123-reg.co.uk to renew another year's website hosting for giteinbrittany.com. Another £25 lighter in my pocket but it got me thinking back to how we've progressed with our Gite website, our Blog and renting the Gite over the last few years.

So courtesy of Google Analytics, here's a summary of how the websites have performed:

Year	giteinbrittany.com		giteinbrittany.blogspot.com
	visitors	page views	visitors	page views
2005	4,363*	15,270*	N/A	N/A
2006	8,114	28,377	2,192	3,540
2007	11,413	40,171	4,081	6,088
2008	13,617	42,756	4,492	6,523

* The 2005 figures have been extrapolated as I launched the website on 22nd January 2005, but didn't start tracking it with Google Analytics until November 2005, so only have visitor numbers and page views for the last 43 days of the year! In reality I expect the actual numbers would have been lower than this. I launched the Blog on 1st January 2006 (a New Year's resolution), so again no data for 2005.

As well as the people that view the Blog on the web there are also a number of people that subscribe to my RSS feed, and according to FeedBurner as at 31/12/08 there were 20 subscribers, 4 who receive daily emails of new entries through FeedBlitz, and the remainder split across Internet Explorer, Firefox, Thunderbird, My Yahoo, Google Reader, etc.

So how has all that translated into holiday rental bookings?

Year	Rental bookings	Number of nights rented	Average days in advance
2005	14	119	67
2006	17	180	118
2007	23	170	147
2008	22	162	150

I've excluded from these figures our own holidays in the Gite which vary year by year; last year we were there 26 days for instance, and this year we have already planned for 35 days stay.

I can't really tell whether the up's and down's of bookings are as a result of pricing, the global economy, ferry costs or just as a result of randomness, but it is pleasing to see that we're getting more and more advance bookings. So far we've taken 5 bookings for 2009, for 40 nights in total, and most of July and August is booked as a result.

We've also had 76 sets of guests stay in the Gite, although some of these are families that have been back a couple of times, and one family has been back 3 times, so the number of unique guests is slightly lower.