French bookings up but UK down!

[julesb]

Just wondering if anyone else is finding a big swing with bookings this year - we have our usual few dutch guests - quite a few french but no UK bookings - having switched to pay-as-you book with HL and OD ( due to really high renew fees on annual subs) I'm wondering if this is what has switched off our UK visitors, or if UK visitors in general are down. We are SW France. Any thoughts?

[tavi]

my UK enquiries are also much lower this year than last. Exchange rate not so good?

[julesb]

Well Tavi the exchange rate has been pretty good for the last few months although of course it is dropping now - I tend not to alter my UK prices just up and lower the Euro price - so if anything I should have had more Uk than France bookings not the other way around!

[bornintheuk]

Our UK enquiries and bookings are up on last year and people are booking earlier - we even have a booking for 2017 !
Just bucking the trend maybe ?

[Cassis]

It's still early days for B&B owners for 2016 reservations, but I haven't noticed a drop off in UK bookings.

In the past we have had year-on-year fluctuations that seem to have no connection to exchange rates or anything else we can think of.

When the rate dropped below 1.10 euro to the pound there was no drop off in our UK bookings, nor did they surge when the rate rose to 1.40.

Sorry for the layout - can't format tables on here - but for us, these figures are normal for early in the year.

Year 2016 2015 2014
UK 51% 39% 40%
France 17% 28% 31%
Belgium 5% 9% 8%
Aus 4% 0% 0.5%
Canada 0% 1% 0.3%
USA 12% 5% 4%
NL 2% 9% 7%
Italy 0% 3% 0.3%
Germany 8% 2% 4%

[Bassman]

Its the same for us Julesb UK bookings are down French are up. New enquiries from the UK are really low thankfully a lot of repeat business this year.