 |
Everything you always wanted to know about France |
|
|
Rentals-France Newsletter January 14 2000 Number 15 Contents.
1. Happy New Year ======================= 1. Happy New Year This is the first newsletter of the new year, I did not add to your e-mail burden over Christmas and the holidays by sending yet another festive greeting to everyone on our mailing list. Now I can say my sincere wishes for you to have a happy and healthy new year. I do try to keep these newsletters informative, to keep to the point and be brief. I appreciate that many of you simply want clear, unbiased and accurate information about travel, accommodation and information about France. There are also many of you who have visited us here and others who we have helped. I hope that by writing in a direct and personal way and by including things that interest me that I can give information and also keep in touch with the many friends we have made over the last two years. I will always try to help with any question you may have, just e-mail me. Also read about the new Forum you can access from our sites. Thank you to all of you who have written to me about the terrible storms we had here in France during November and December and asking if we are OK. In Nizas we had no more than some strong winds, but less than 50 miles from us entire villages were flooded and many people suffered. Our village is built in a sheltered valley, the word Nizas is derived from the word for "nest" in Occitan, the ancient language of Langeudoc (Language of Oc). ===== 2. Our Internet Sites and Plans. Our own Internet sites http://www.GoTo-Languedoc.com/ offer you a selection of accommodation here in the South of France. To help you plan your trip to France I plan to make a good information site, a portal, which can be used to access information about all aspects of visiting France. For this I will use http://www.GoTo-France.com/ http://www.GoTo-France.com/ This lists other sites with accommodation, route planners, entertainment and general interest. I have been collecting hundreds of other links about France and will put these into a directory on the new site. If you know of any travel sites which you have found useful or interesting I would be most grateful if you would send me an e-mail with the URL. Also if you have any thoughts or wishes which you would like to see in an information site, please let me know. It does not just have to be about France, your experiences with airlines, car rental, tickets and anything else to do with travel and vacations is most welcome. ===== 3. Survey and our New Forum Last year I asked if you would help me in a survey Many of you generously offered to help and I have been working on a questionnaire, but each time it was ready I found new questions to ask and delayed sending it. In the meantime I have received a lot of valuable advice and comments so I will now be adding a notice board (chat-room, discussion forum) to our sites and will use this to help improve the quality of our services. It will also have lots of tips, information ,FAQ's and other links to help you get the best from your travels It will be called "Wanted on Voyage". You can access it from most pages on the sites by simply clicking on the "Join Our Free Discussion Group" banner. Or you can go the URL at : http://www.1stVacations.com/WantedonVoyage/ ===== 4. Car Rentals We have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to find a local competitive car rental company for our guests. I have always advised you to rent and pay before you leave, car rental rates in Europe are very high and if you just turn up at the airport you can pay up to four times the price for the same car. We did try a 'Rent a Wreck' sort of deal here in Nizas for a while, but found that the laws in France are not "sympathetic" to this sort of initiative so we cannot offer this again. I am delighted to read that Easyjet in the UK are going in,to car rentals from about $15 per day, but this will be later this year and only a few trial locations in the UK at first. My advice at present is to shop around on the Internet for the best deal. On a trip to the UK for six days over the new year, I was given prices from $30 to $120 a day for a similar car, eventually the best rate I got was from Hertz through the USA to collect from London. I didn't actually say I was coming from America, but the rates were set only for American travellers. I get the feeling that car rentals are a complacent cartel in Europe and deserve to be shaken up with some real competition. If you are coming for more than 19 days you can get excellent short leasing deals. Guests last year could get new Peugeot cars for as little as $12 per day, booked and paid in the USA of course. Would anyone with information on leasing Peugeot cars in the USA write to me with a URL; or post it on the new forum. ===== 5. Telephone Charges Regular readers will know my dislike (to put it mildly) of France Telecom. The rates for phone calls in France are a scandal. It costs me about $1 every 10 minutes for a local call. It is cheaper at night and weekends. But as I am trying to build an Internet based business here I still get a monthly phone bill of $400 just for local calls. I have however beaten them for long distance by using the Boomerang service from Americom. Some of you have already signed up and so far the feedback is good. They take a few days to get the paperwork sorted, but I have used them for all International calls last month and it has dramatically cut my costs. You can go to a page for Americom from most pages on our sites or go direct from : http://telecom.nothing-but-net.net/4173/ We do earn a small commission, but it will never pay my phone bills. ===== 6. Property Rentals Our business is to find you the best rental property for you for your visit to France. It started when Carole and I bought our house here in Nizas. It was big enough to make two extra apartments which we can rent out. We advertised on Internet and had so many inquiries we asked other people here if they wanted to rent their properties. We started our own sites and it grew from there. Unlike most other sites we do not have any paid advertising from the owners. We select the properties and we charge them a commission only if you are satisfied when you arrive. In the last two years we have only had three people who were dissatisfied with the property they had booked (not ours). In each case we immediately gave them other, acceptable, accommodation and we took the property off our sites. We say on our sites that we guarantee that the properties are as we describe them. I have tried in these newsletters to describe what the properties are like. There is a big difference in an "old" property in the USA or Australia and one many hundreds of years older here in France. When most of the properties we rent our were built, they did not have glass for the windows and even the grand houses were home for the cows and pigs as well as several generations of the extended family. The houses were also a store for the maize, corn, oil, wine and farm produce. All houses were clustered together in a tight community for defence against bears, wolves, wild boar plus invading Vikings, Moors, Visigoths and the next village (much like today really). It is still possible to find properties here which have changed very little in over one thousand years. When we were looking for our home here five years ago we visited properties with no water, electricity, drainage or even windows with glass. If you have the dream of buying an old property here and modernizing it, be careful, the costs of working on these old stone houses are very high. Don't worry, all the properties we show on our sites are clean, comfortable and fully furnished and equipped, most have windows and hot water now and we have chased out some of the pigs and cows. ===== 7. Jack-travel.com A site I strongly recommend for a personal clear and original insight to travel in France and Europe is Jack writes with a love for his subject and his pages have good pictures and an "off beat" flavor. He is continually adding to this non-commercial site and has good stuff on Paris, Provence, Cote D'Azur and Belgium. ===== 8. Guinness bubbles ? I couldn't resist this clip from the i-sales newsletter : Reuters reports: "Australian scientists say they have answered a question that has plagued and entertained drinkers for generations -- why do the bubbles in a glass of Guinness appear to be falling to the bottom?" Story at: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000111/sc/science_guinness_1.html Animation at: http://www.fluent.com/news/pressrel/guinness/tsld001.htm ===== 9. Photo Tip Interchangable lenses have gone out of fashion with zoom lenses. It is true that the quality of modern zoom lenses is superb, they are a bit slower than fixed lenses but with fast films this is not really a problem. I could go into detail why a range of interchangeable lenses can give you more creative power and why the discipline of working with a limited number (one?) of fixed lenses will help you "see" things better. But I wont. However, most of us are already equipped with an excellent zoom lens, they are called feet. If you move backwards and forwards from your subject, you will find that it gets further away or nearer to you, "voila", your own integrated and fully automatic zoom lens. They cost less and weigh less in your luggage.
======================== |