pambon wrote: OK so they may have been away themselves for some reason....then set up an automatic email reply.
Well, people might not wish to broadcast that they're not at home, but in these days of wi-fi and smartphones, it doesn't take a lot of effort to "carry on abroad".
I've handled enquiries from my place in France, and in hotels all over the place - it's not exactly rocket science.
So the only suggestion I have left (apart from couldn't-care-less owners) is that some email addresses are automatically suppressed or diverted into Junk by some email systems, and indeed some email systems seem to categorise as Junk almost anything at random (depending presumably on the sender's star sign). Hotmail is currently the worst offender in this (AOL was the mega-villain of all time) and I recall many enquiries which were only answered after a titanic struggle - and of course I still don't know how many registered as "non-replies" quite simply because the enquirer never received (or found) my reply.
Yes Mols, you have a point as this happened to me with both a hotmail enquirer and a dot ru enquirer. Neither received my emails and even now when I have to reply to friends who have hotmail I have to use my gmail address. It seems my particular IP address of Telecom Italia has been blocked by hotmail and Telecom Italia say they can't do anything about it:(
I also have a problem with certain Irish email addresses....so my gmail address has proved useful over the years.
In our agency work (we manage over 160 cottages on behalf of our Canadian owners) we deal with hundreds of enquiries a week - sometimes hundreds a day in high season. Our rental clients are mostly based in Toronto which is highly multi-cultural. We've found that certain cultures seem to be much 'ruder' than we were used to in UK but have become used to it now. "Please" and "thank you" do not seem to belong in the vocabulary of some nations, and some can come across as extremely abrupt both on the phone and in email correspondence.
We've become very tolerant and accepting of other people's lack of courtesy - as long as we deliver a high standard of service, it's not necessary for it to be acknowledged. Would be nice, but thats the way it is.
Moliere wrote:
So the only suggestion I have left (apart from couldn't-care-less owners) is that some email addresses are automatically suppressed or diverted into Junk by some email systems, and indeed some email systems seem to categorise as Junk almost anything at random (depending presumably on the sender's star sign). Hotmail is currently the worst offender in this (AOL was the mega-villain of all time) and I recall many enquiries which were only answered after a titanic struggle - and of course I still don't know how many registered as "non-replies" quite simply because the enquirer never received (or found) my reply.
Mols
Its for that very reason that I always reply from two email addresses whenever I get an enquiry. I find my Spanish "telefonica" address seems to get stopped by some ISPs but my Gmail account almost always appears to get through. I annotate each email saying the reader may get two copies of the email but from difffernt addresses but this is done to ensure they get a timely response to their query.
I don't profess to own anything here apart from my own opinion.
