Money Transfer system - Too good to be true ????

[enid]

I'll reserve my right to dream about both of you.

Tansy - perhaps he should be called Smoothy not Fluffy! '

[WELSH ANGEL]

I also use Villarenters.com and have done for over a year,there system is brill I urge you all to look at it,plus you can advertise your home for FREE I live in Wales and my bank is in Spain there system has never let me down.

LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU ALL THINK OF VILLARENTERS

[Mountain Goat]

Eyewateringly expensive.
Goat

[janskov]

I am not impressed.
They are trying a little bit too hard to get you to use all their facilities and last year they only gave me guests for 2 weeks.
Nothing this year.
I actually have them at the top of my list of sites that I will stop using in 2007.

[Hells Bells]

I have signed up with villarenters, but will deleting it. It wasn't clear that you don't get any of your money until the booking is over. I can't operate like that as I need deposits etc to keep the cash flow going.

[Guest3]

I have signed up with villarenters, but will deleting it. It wasn't clear that you don't get any of your money until the booking is over. I can't operate like that as I need deposits etc to keep the cash flow going.

Can't agree more! We looked at their website and decided we did not like the way the money was handled (mostly on their side) as we had no control. It did not appear a viable system for us either as we too need the deposits during Winter months to keep us going.

[Nightowl]

We have a UK account with Natwest and although they don't shout about it, they have a service called RELAY whereby you can transfer up to £2,000 overseas into local currency for a charge of £10 - no other fees either end. The only downside is it takes up to 5 days - but to be honest that doesn't cause us any hassle. Although the first payment is deposit and obviously until the funds are received, in theory the booking isn't confirmed, I've never had a problem with it.

We have used it ourselves and the charge has indeed been £10. We have advised various guests to try Relay and one chap did have an experience where his branch insisted there was no such thing, but he directed them to Natwest's own website and there it was so they had to admit they were wrong.


http://www.natwest.com/business02.asp?i ... ENTS/RELAY

Maybe other banks also have a similar service?

[Nightowl]

Just been doing a bit more surfing: Lloyds seem to do something similar called Economy International Moneymover


http://www.lloydstsb.com/travel/interna ... rvices.asp

I have also used a system called Sun-Pay but that is only available for payment to spain. You can't pay other people's cheques into it though. What you can do with that one is receive cheques in sterling from your guests and you pay them into your own UK bank account. You can then pay those funds from your own UK account into the sun-pay account and then you pay out in Euro to your spanish bank account. That part of the transaction can take about a week from begin to end. They charge about £10. I haven't used it for ages but it was useful for one person who insisted they couldn't possibly pay in euro. It was a bit convoluted but does have the bonus that you don't have to ask your guests to register for anything in order to pay you. I seem to remember their exchange rates weren't bad.

[paolo]

NatWest's 'Relay' is just an electronic (or wire) transfer with a name attached. They have a faster version which takes a couple of days and is more expensive. Any bank can do an electronic transfer, which is a transfer from one account to another. Apart from the transfer fee, you do also lose money in the exchange rate they give you.

[Mountain Goat]

For once-in-a-lifetime-never-again-there-goes-my-pension seriously large transfers I've used HIFX, who were excellent. For small 'stuff they're not competitive and say upfront they're not but I still used them because it was so much less hassle than our clearing bank (who make you turn up in person clutching a birth certificate for a foreign transfer - some money laundering guff) and it was lightning quick.

Goat

[Guest3]

What we can't understand is that we can make an international transfer online (within the EU) from our Spanish bank account, however, cannot do so from any of our English UK online accounts!! Also the transfer charges from Spain to the UK are alot cheaper than the UK bank charges.

We have refunded security deposits to guests from Holland, Denmark, Finland and Sweden using our Spanish online account..no paper work to fill in and it's very quick.

Why can't the UK banks operate like this? Probably because they would lose too much revenue!!