Goodbye August, hello again Easter and July

A quick update on 2012 bookings for our holiday Gite in France ...

August 2012 is now completely fully booked and we've only got availability from September 1st onwards. Unfortunately for two completely different sets of cancellation reasons we've now got availability at Easter 2012 (from 31st March through to 28th April) and in the July summer period (up to 21st July).

For full details of all booked and currently vacant holiday dates see the calendar on our Gite website as we've still got a small number of weeks of availability in May and June as well.

Unexpected Late May 2011 availability for our Brittany Holiday Gite

Rather unfortunately for the couple concerned I had a phone call on the weekend from the guests that have booked our Brittany Gite for the week of 21st May to 28th May to tell me that they'd been involved in a motorcycle accident and weren't well enough to travel to France for their holiday later this month.

I was able to transfer (free of charge) their holiday booking to a week in June but this does mean that we now have this week available to rent.

We're almost full for the summer period now but do have the following dates free:

• 21st May to 28th May - £350
• 11th June to 18th June - £350
• 25th June to 2nd July - £375

If you're interested do use our Gite booking enquiry form to contact us - mention this blog post and I'll see about a late availability discount as well.

(PS: If you're looking for later in the summer we still have some dates availabile in September 2011 as well).

Woken up last night by a Nigerian scammer

I'm in India right now which is 5 and a half hours ahead of GMT. I think I'm surviving on less sleep than normal because I'm going to bed at 2am IST every morning (still 8:30pm UK time) and getting up at 7:30am IST (a horrible 2am GMT).

This morning though I was woken up at middle-of-the-night o'clock by a text message telling me that I'd received a Gite booking enquiry. I read the text, decided it could wait until morning, and turned over back to sleep again.

When I got in to the office I read the enquiry that had disturbed me in the night. Here it is in full, as it's a classic example of the scam artform:

The start date you are interested in: 2/4/2011
For how long: 4 Weeks

Your contact information
Name : jean frank
Street Address : 11 rd clement
Town/City : Canada
E-mail : jean.frk7@gmail.com

Type your message here to include any special Requirements or Comments:
Interesting in your property for the period below:
Checking date:1st of April 2011
Checking out :30th April 2011.
Let me know the cost for the period .
adult on party :2
And do you have internet?as we been using our Pc for our stay.
Looking forward to hear from you asap! Thanks.

Message requested by IP address: 41.155.16.193
Date/Time: 26/02/2011 23:04:35

Immediately suspicious by the long booking duration, the not great English, and the disposable email address with a number in it, I went to check the IP address at the bottom which this particular holiday rental site helpfully adds to the bottom of the email.
(reminder to self, investigate adding enquirer IP address details to the Gite booking enquiry form on my own website).

Anyway, Domaintools' whois site translated the IP address into details of where this network address is actually registered:

IP Location: Nigeria Lagos Dial Pool Subnet For Lagos Subscribers

And that's all I needed to know. Thanks Mr Scammer, your Email has been promptly consigned to the junk folder!

2011 is now open for holiday bookings

In previous years I've usually created our Gite holiday booking calendar for the following year in early September when we return from our own summer holidays, but this year I've had to be a little earlier as we've already started getting a few booking requests for 2011.

In early July I wrote about one family arranging to rent our holiday home for August 2011, an amazing 418 days in advance, and since then I've taken another booking for August 2011 and one for July 2011.

We've been forced into deciding our own holiday plans for next summer or else we wouldn't have been able to make a booking ourselves to stay in our own Gite, and as we're going to holiday in Brittany for a week that means we've now booked with vacation rents for about half of July and almost all of August 2011.

And so the message is that if you'd like to come and stay in our corner of France, then let us know soon!

So how are bookings compared to previous years?

Good question, thanks for asking !

Well, in previous years we've taken most of our peak school holiday summer bookings in September, October and November the prior year, so by Christmas we're typically looking for bookings to fill the less busy weeks in May, June and September.

In the second half of 2009 the bookings slowed right down so that by Christmas 2009 we had only taken two bookings for June 2010 (plus our own August break), but the rentals have slowly dripped in in early 2010 to mean that we're now roughly on a par to finish 2010 with a similar occupancy level as in 2009.
So nett-nett is 2010 has been slow but got there in the end.

Having said all that though we do still have availability for late September 2010 and October 2010 as well as Christmas and New Year 2011. Come and stay, you won't be disappointed.

The early guest catches the booking discount

When I wrote the title of this Blog I was thinking about "The early bird catching the late worm" ... but in hindsight the analogy ran out of steam about half way through so maybe I'd better move on!

I've written before about a flurry of booking enquiries for 2010 I received in August 2009, and more surprisingly the booking we took in August 2007 for the following August - an amazing 363 days in advance, well I've been surprised again with how well organised some people are with their holiday plans.

Last week I received an enquiry from the Spellman family through the France holiday home advert we run on VillaRentals; enquiring what I would charge for a holiday in August next year.

I replied back saying that we normally review the prices for each season towards the end of the year, but for all bookings made this year I would hold the prices the same as this year. Our booking calendar on our Gite website and on VillaRentals only runs up to the end of December 2010 as I don't normally "open up" bookings for next year until September, but as the Spellman's were keen to book I manually marked the week they were interested in as available.

And later that day they made their booking, confirming an 8 day holiday for August 2011 - a staggering 418 days before they're due to rent the Gite.

I will have to talk to Liz and decide what we want to do for our own holidays in France next year because if I don't get organised we risk not being able to stay their ourselves. Meanwhile if you are interested in holidaying with us next year (or even this year we still have availability in September, October and at Christmas), do drop us a line with the dates you are interested in booking and I'll be happy to take your booking.

The question is, can anyone beat a 418 days in advance booking?

Half a day's holiday cottage availability looks better than no availability

I've been fiddling with our holiday cottage website again, making what I hope is a useful but effective tweak to the holiday availability calendar.

When I first created the website I was in a bit of a quandry as to how to show what dates were booked and what were free. I settled on graying out and drawing a line through the booked dates which looked OK but on the day that our guests left or arrived I had a bit of a problem as to how to represent this.

In the end I settled on graying out the nights that the cottage is booked, so the day that our guests were leaving was always left as showing available (because the guests leave in the morning).

This kind of works OK but still has a problem with the first day of the holiday booking because it makes it look like that date is completely booked. In reality the afternoon and evening are booked for our new set of guests but the Gite is still available for the morning.

Where this really becomes a problem is as the diary starts to fill up and there's less and less availability. In the example above from June 2010 we've actually got a free week available from Saturday 5th June through to Saturday 12th June, but as the 12th is marked as booked it's not all that obvious that this is the case. Sometimes I do get booking enquiries where the diary is mis-read, so for instance I'll get an enquiry asking for Saturday 5th June through to Friday 11th June, and I always reply back to offer the extra half day as well.

And of course if I get some customers mis-reading the diary I'm sure there are also some potential customers put off because they think we've not got availability for when they want their holiday.

Well I've found a solution to the problem and rather than just using a solid colour to show whether a particular date is available or not I've hit on the idea of using a background image to show the half-day availability.

Now by appropriate colouring of the left and right halves of the holiday calendar date I can show much more clearly what dates are available and what are already booked. So using the example week in June you can see much more clearly that we're vacant from Saturday afternoon through to the following Saturday morning.

I experimented with different types of half-and-half shading, with diagonals and with vertical and horizontal shading before ending up with this design. I also asked the boss (Liz) what she thought and was given the official "seal of approval" that this was clear and simple.

Full (and clearer) availability for our holiday cottage is now showing on our booking diary!

Bookings starting to pick up for 2010 after a very slow start

Maybe the recession is over and things are looking up?

The cynic in me says that the only reason that the press have started writing about how the recession is over is that they've got bored of writing about how bad the recession is.

But looking at the evidence I reckon things are looking up.

Bookings for our holiday Gite were definitely affected last year and I noticed a slow down in bookings as we moved into 2010. In previous years we've seen most of September, some of October, and Christmas/New Year booked in the cottage. In 2009 though once the peak summer and September season had finished that was it and we had no bookings at all after 25th September and we've been empty since then.

Also in previous years we've seen most of July and August booked in advance well before the end of the preceding year, and I've written for example about receiving holiday bookings up to 360 days in advance.

The bookings have definitely been slower this year and we didn't really start getting any 2010 bookings until January this year.

However things are now starting to look up and I'm seeing an increase in booking enquiries over the weeks so most of August is booked as is June 2010. July 2010 still has some holiday weeks free and we've taken one rental booking for May. I've also just confirmed our first booking for a couple who will be going over house-hunting in Brittany in March, and one week of Easter is now confirmed as well.

All in all 43 nights have now been booked in our holiday home which is great news.

Current available dates in our France holiday cottage are shown on our website.

Oddest 'contact us' holiday rental enquiry yet?

We get some pretty varied emails via the holiday home booking enquiry form. As well as the booking enquiries that of course we are hoping to get sent to us we also get a mixed bag of spam and scam attempts (some of which I have written about before - see previous postings about Scam rental enquiries).

Of course we also get a fair number of let's just say "adult" emails which are stuffed full of links to dubious websites that I have no intention of visiting. Fortunately Thunderbird's Junk email filter has now got pretty good at spotting and automatically filtering those out so I only have to go through the Junk mail folder every week or so and double check that nothing has slipped by.

But this email has got me stumped as to what to do with it, here's the full enquiry as I received it:

Hi - I was just wondering if you would be interested in buying my property in Brittany with a view to letting it out? Look forward to hearing from you. Regards Natalie Jones

And that's it. There's a return email address (with a number 2 in it and hosted at hotmail.co.uk - so that gets me suspicious), but there's no details of the property, where it is, how much Natalie might want for it, etc.

I think I won't persue it any further; I've enough 'fun' with looking after one Holiday Home and renovating the second, and even if it is genuine methinks I couldn't cope with another property - and I'm sure the bank wouldn't want to extend my line of credit even further.

Any thoughts?

Back home, unpacking, dealing with the post, emails and a long-term rental enquiry

Oh the joys of getting back home from holiday.

There is something to be said for going on holiday by plane, and especially by RyanAir, as it stops you taking too much stuff with you. Taking your own car on holiday seems to encourage all amount of stuff to be brought (and bought) that you'd otherwise manage to have done without!

Spent most of today unpacking the car, putting the large sack of (unused) tile adhesive back in the garage as I never quite managed to find time to do some bathroom tiling, putting away my tools in the work shed, commencing the washing mountain (despite having used the washing machine in France quite a lot we still seem to have even more to wash), and of course putting away all the holiday souvenirs we bought.

And then of course there is the mountain of post to open and emails to deal with. I took my laptop with me and used McDonald's free Wifi to enable me to read some of my emails and booking enquiries whilst away, but there's still a massive pile to do.

Had a major calamity when I turned on my home PC to find that it wouldn't boot at all. Didn't recognise the hard disk as being present and there was a worrying rattle coming from inside the cabinet. Took the side off, fiddled with the cables to check they were all seated properly, swapped the hard disk power cable over for another power cable inside the cabinet and the hard disk is now working .... but it's got me worried now so I'm currently running a full hard disk backup onto my external lacie drive so that if it's really on the way out then at least I've got a completely up to date backup.

And in amongst the emails was a booking enquiry from our advert on alwaysonvacation.com. The inquiry was from a French gentleman looking to rent our house for 2 months in October and November whilst work is being done on his house in Josselin.

Some of these long-term rental enquiries can be scam attempts but this sounded genuine so with the help of Google translate I carefully crafted my reply email in French detailing the property particulars.

But what to charge for a monthly rental figure?

The normal weekly holiday rent for the Gite would have worked out at circa €1200 per month but I felt this'd be too high for a long term out of season rent - the Gite would be occupied for an extended period of time which is worth having and we wouldn't have the changeover costs normally incurred with multiple holiday lettings.

A bit of google searching brought me to ViteLoge a French equivalent of RightMove to find houses to rent or purchase.

3 bedroom houses and apartments seem to be rented for anywhere between €430 and €800 with most being around the €500 mark.

€500 seems just to low to me. This is only going to be a 2 month rental agreement not for 12 months, our rental prices normally include electricity, heating oil, water etc and it makes sense to do the same for a 2 month agreement so I can't make it too low as it could cost me more in heating oil alone, and I have to consider that I may incur additional cleaning costs afterwards.

So I've plumped for €750 a month and we'll see what happens.

Bookings bookings bookings - 2010 already??

Flipping 'eck

Just checking my emails in McDonalds again to confirm a holiday booking for two weeks in September and found 104 emails since I last checked on Monday!

And the good news was several booking enquiries:
- Confirmation of the September booking
- An enquiry from an American couple about April 2010
- An enquiry for a family for a week in May 2010
- And another enquiry from another family for 2 weeks in August 2010.

Family getting bored now, better go ...

Nearly got caught out by a spam booking

I'm usually pretty good at spotting Scam Gite bookings which usually just "smell wrong" like the "Honeymoon" booking request I received summer last year.

The other week I have to admit that I very nearly got caught out by one that came through from French Entree (who are still happily sending me booking enquiries a year after I didn't renew my trial advert with them!)

Here's the enquiry I received:

Name: Olivier Jean
Email: europe.XXXX@ibelgique.com
Tel: 00225 66 XX XX XX
Rental from : 15/02/2009
Rental to : 15/04/2009
Number of weeks : 8

The Enquiry:

Hello dear one,

I am interested in renting your house for a period of 2 months if possible and starting from 15/02/2009 to 15/04/2009 . please i will be happy to know if there is disponibility of the house, i will like to also know the total price of my bill incase the room is available for the mentioned date above.

Your faithfully,

Jean Olivier.

Tel: 00225 66 XX XX XX.

I have to admit being slightly ill at ease by the slightly odd phrase "disponibility of the house", but after Googling for these words I couldn't find it'd been quoted by any other Gite owners so concluded that it was probably just poor English by Olivier Jean (whoever he/she is).

Unfortunately I couldn't support these dates as we've got some other Gite guests staying in February and we're there ourselves in April, so I was part way through writing an apologetic email to the enquirer when for some reason I went back and looked at the enquiry again.

Maybe it was a sixth-sense or maybe it was the "i will like to" phrase that caused me to re-look at the enquiry, and in particular to check out the telephone number used.

Another Google search brought me to a list of international dialling codes which I searched for dialling code 225, and voila my concerns were realised as I found that 00 225 corresponded to Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast).

Definitely some kind of African scam booking attempt so I've ignored the enquiry and won't be replying (and thus opening up my mailbox to even more junk).

My top-tip therefore is to always check and double-check any unusual booking requests (long durations, short notice, etc) - search for unusual enquiry terms and names on Google, email addresses "look right" and not from a disposable email provider (so no fred99@hotmail.com), and also double-check any telephone numbers given. If in doubt, don't answer.

Scam booking - a "honeymoon present for friends"

Lay My Hat

I've written before about some of the scam holiday gite booking requests that I receive from time to time, but yesterday I received one that almost had me believing it before I checked it out a bit further.

Most of the scam bookings I get via our 'contact us' form are completely obviously rubbish, they're packed full of links to definitely unsavoury websites (I never bother looking at what they are but judging by some of the link titles I can guess they're porn related). Why anyone ever bothers trying to entice me to visit their websites via this means is beyond me, but I'm quite good at pressing the 'Junk' button in Thunderbird when I receive these.

Some days I receive one or two of these junk booking requests, but occasionally I get several in the day, and on a particularly bad day I received nearly 40 of them. My usual tactic is to periodically rename the "contact us" website page so whatever auto-bot is visiting the website and filling in the form will just get a 404 page not found error. This usually reduces the volume for a few months before it's time to apply it again.

Today's "booking enquiry" though was quite different:

Booking enquiry submitted by Glenn King (king_xxxx@yahoo.com) on Tuesday, July 8, 2008 at 01:03

Query: Hi,
I will like to make a reservation for 21 days for friends who will come there for honeymoon its my gift to them since i cannot attend their wedding. Let me know if there is any vacancy for the month of August 29th to September 18TH 2008 or any other dates you have available, I will await your response
Regards,
Glenn King
king_xxxx@yahoo.com

Although it looked 'sort of' right, it did raise my suspicions especially when I realised that Mr King was proposing to buy a Gite booking for someone's honeymoon present in a little over 7 weeks time. I can't imagine anyone in their circumstances wouldn't have their honeymoon already booked, and even if it wasn't, they were unlikely to be able to take 3 weeks off work with such little notice!

With warning bells now firmly switched on I did some exploratory Google searches and didn't find anything, and then I turned to Lay My Hat which is a website forum dedicated to holiday home owners around the world.

A quick search on their forum turned up trumps, several other property owners reporting similar "honeymoon" booking requests with identical wording, even down to the poor English at the beginning ("I will like"). Here's one such example.

Moral of the story is to keep your wits about you as a Gite owner and trust your instinct if things don't "look right".

Mr Glenn King won't be getting any kind of reply from me ...

2008's just around the corner, we've had our first booking

RentalSystems advert

Some people are just more organised than others.

I like to think I'm fairly organised (the reality is I'm organised about some things and not at all about others), but I'm not as organised as the Porter family of Devon who have just tonight booked a 2008 summer holiday in our Brittany Gite, an amazing 363 days before they are due to go!

The booking came through the holiday home listing we have on VillaRentals who rather than charging an up front fee, they charge on a per-booking basis. Over the 20 months or so we've advertised on VillaRentals we've had about 8 bookings via them and looking back at my Blog posts from last year I saw that in fact my first 2007 holiday booking was also made via VillaRentals; only it was slightly later on, on the 24th August 2006 vs. 5th August 2007.

If it keeps on going on like this I'll be getting 2009 bookings before 2007 is out ! [Well actually I can't as I've only published rental prices up to the end of 2008 ....]

Spot the scam booking

Received a direct email today about the Gite (which I've slightly obfuscated with X's in case the email addresses are real):

From: "Mr.Morgan XXXX"
Reply-To: morgernXXXX@yahoo.com
Subject: GET BACK TO ME WITH THE TOTAL COST.
To: morganXXXX@yahoo.com

Good Day Sir/Madam,

I need to make reservations for an organisation of three people who will be coming to your country for a programme.They are going to lodge in your place during their stay.Three rooms will be needed from 15th-25th June 2007 and I will like you to provide accomodation for them for the time period. 3 rooms will be needed. Please provide me with the total cost for their stay for 10 nights for 3 people so that reservation will be made immediately. I hope you accept Credit Card Payments.
Get back to me ASAP so that we can proceed with the booking.

Thanks.

This is so obviously a scam attempt that deserves straight to go into the Deleted bin.

Firstly I never leave my email address directly on the Gite website, instead I use a 'contact us' booking enquiry form to cut down on email harvesting by spam-bots. Unfortunately not all other sites I have advertised on are as diligent so some email addresses I use have been 'captured'. Looking at the message source code I could see it was actually sent to one of these addresses rather than the 'to:' address that appears above.

Secondly the English of the 'supposed enquiry is poor, and the text is quite generic. There's nothing in it to indicate what area the three people want to be staying in, nor of the programme details they're coming to see, nor even the country name. If you or I were sending a real booking enquiry it would be more specific about location, country, venue, etc. This email can quite easily be sent to hundreds of other property owners - as the email address used is undoubtedly on a spam list I'm sure it has been.

Finally the email isn't even targetted at the right sort of business. It's written as if I were a hotel renting out rooms, not a holiday Gite.

About the only thing that's missing from this scam (which I've seen on other scam emails I've received is an offer for the 'guests' to pay me more than the rental price and for me to wire back (e.g. using Western Union) the difference. Perhaps if I replied to the email that'd be next. Instead it's the delete key for this one ...

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 ...

Holiday rental scam warning

I received an email warning earlier in the week from one of the sites I advertise on, vacationrentals.com which I thought worth passing on ...

Several holiday home owners have contacted us regarding a scam booking for a "Christian Summit" conference held near their holiday home.

One owner wrote to us: "A Rev Ken Bryan from the UK made a booking for 11 days in May for a Christian Summit in Rotorua. I became suspicious when both his grammar and spelling were inadequate for such a person. Also a phone call came from him at 4.00 am with a middle eastern accent. He then requested a conversion of the rental into pounds and sent a cheque for 3x the correct amount, requesting the balance be returned by immediate TT to a bank account in the UK..... I cancelled the reservation without any loss and have not heard from them again. Upon checking in Rotorua there were no Christian summits being held."

Fortunately I've not seen this particular scam although I do occasionally receive enquiries that "don't seem right" - usually they're asking to accomodate far more people than we have room for, the English is incredibly poor, or it's for what looks like a scammers email address like johnsmith43@hotmail.com.
What I usually do is register for a one-month disposable email address with shortmail.net and reply back using the temporary reply-to address - that way if it is a scam then I haven't given out my real email address and contributed even further to the mountain of spam and junk mail I already receive.

The email then went on to explain that they've setup a blog to collate reported scam messages (which for some reason has now been suspended by wordpress) and ended with some useful advice to all holiday home owners:

• Use caution and common sense when dealing with any financial transaction
• NEVER wire funds to a distant buyer, via Western Union or any other carrier
• Be wary if the other party wants to use an escrow service such as BidPay or Squaretrade
• NEVER give out personal financial information (bank account number, SSN, eBay/PayPal info, etc.)
• Trust your instincts, and always remember the most important rule -- BUYER BEWARE

So far we've been OK (or maybe just lucky) and all our guests have been genuine - keeping fingers crossed that it remains that way.

First holiday booking for 2007

In amongst the hundreds of junk emails I received whilst away on holiday were a couple of 2007 rental enquiries for our Brittany Holiday Home.

Over the weekend I corresponded back and forth with one of the enquirers answering questions about things to do in the local area surrounding the Gite, facilities at the Gite and the various routes and costs of getting there (including pointing out the Speedferries £27 open ticket offer). By the end of Sunday they'd decided to book a a two week holiday in the Gite for July/August 2007. Additionally this was our first holiday booking received from RentalSystems (formerly VillaRenters) which makes the advert worthwhile.

Although it's great news to be receiving rental enquiries and a booking for 2007 when we're still in the middle of the peak 2006 holiday season, it did remind me that we need to make our own 2007 holiday plans for when we want to go to the Gite . One of the advantages of owning a holiday home is supposed to be the opportunity to use it yourself - if we don't get our act together then we're likely to miss out - like we did this year!

Yesterday I then had to spend an hour or so adding 2007 rental dates to the Gite availability calendar for all the way up to January 2008. We're offering 2006 rental prices for all 2007 bookings that are confirmed by the end of this year so hopefully that'll bring in a few additional bookings as well.

It's been a busy last week for enquiries and bookings

I think the summer sun's definitely causing more people to think about going on holiday as we continue to get a steady stream of booking enquiries for summer 2006.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, we've very limited summer holiday availability for our Brittany holiday Gite, with all of July and August being booked out some months ago.

Thursday last week was especially busy as we had two bookings confirmed on the same day for September holiday's (one for 7 days and the second for 11 days), meaning we're now full all the way through to the 22nd September .

As I've written before, 2006 is our second year of renting the Gite out and to date we've had 13 different groups booking their holiday with us (plus our own family holiday's there as well of course). Groups have ranged from one person to six and durations from 6 to 14 nights. Last year (our first year of renting) we had 14 different groups staying (plus ourselves) so we're on track to hopefully meet or slightly beat that target. Only wish I didn't have to work and could spend more time enjoying the Gite myself ...

Booking enquiries are like busses, nothing then two at once

Availability for our Brittany Holiday Gite is pretty limited for the summer now, with the exception of the last two weeks of June and the odd day in August, we're fully booked up August 29th.

Great to be so busy (especially as we received a booking for August this year in October 2005), but it would still be nice to fill the remaining two weeks in June and start getting some more bookings in September.

After a week or so since any enquiries, today we received two booking enquiries - the first time we've had two enquiries on the same day I think. Telephoned one of the enquirers (as I think it's more personal if you can speak by phone) but had to email the second one as they didn't leave a phone number.

Here's hoping at least one of the enquiries turns into a booking ...

Spam booking enquiry

So when is a booking enquiry not a booking enquiry ?

When it's a spam booking !

Logged onto my email yesterday and was excited to see a 'giteinbrittany.com booking enquiry' email. When I designed the website I was quite keen to ensure that I didn't get any more spam than I do already so I deliberately didn't put my email address on the website. Instead I wrote a contact us to enquire about Gite availability page which would behind the scenes email the enquiry details to me but without having to display my email address anywhere on the site.

On the whole this has worked reasonably well. I still get a few emails addressed to admin@websitename but I think it's far less than I would get if I had the email address in plain text just sitting there to be harvested by all the spam engines of the world ! Only downside is that prospective guests have to fill in a form to contact us but this doesn't seem to have been a problem to anyone as far as I know.

Anyway, the "booking enquiry" email I received looked like this:

Booking enquiry submitted by Richard (richardXXXXXX20006@msn.com)

Address: 3445 minchester steet usa

Telephone: 448717205190

Adults: 2

SmallChildren: 22

Query:

MY NAME IS BEN I AM A MODEL AGENT I CAME ABOUT YOUR
ADVERT ON
THE INETERNET SO A FRIEND ADVISE ME TO CONTACT YOU
OVER THE
ACCOMODATION, THERE ARE TWO OF MY FEMALE MODELS THAT
ARE HAVING
A MODELING PROGRAMED IN YOUR AVENUES FROM MAY 30TH
TILL JUNE 30th 2006 FOR 4 WEEKS SO ALL I WANT NOW IS JUST
THE RENT COST FOR
THAT PERIOD ALSO I WILL LIKE TO KNOW IF CHEQUE
PAYMENT COULD BE
ACCEPTED BY U, ONCE I GET THE COST.

PAYMENT WILL COMMENCE IMMEDIATELY.

HOPE TO HEAR FROM YOU SOONEST.

I've obscured the email address and removed all the blank lines (the original email was all double spaced) but the extensive use of capitals, interesting spellings ('inEternet'), grammar ('a modeling programed in your avenues' - wonder if he means modelling session in my street ??), inconsistency of email address (Robert....) and name ('Ben') and everything else is just as I received it.

To me this just looks so obviously like an attempt by someone who's not a native English speaker to do some kind of dodgy deal. My guess is that if I replied I'd have some kind of "processing fee" to pay or the cheque would bounce. I just don't have time for things like this so I've ignored it.

Oh and Robert, if you were genuinely looking to book, we've already got a booking for the first two weeks of June so we can't accommodate your female models (and 22 small children) at that time anyway, sorry.