The scores on the doors

[DivineMrsM]

For 2005, this is what we had:

Babygoes2 - 2 bookings

Holidays Wanted - 1 booking

Perfect Places - 1 booking

French Connections - 1 booking

Owners in France - 2 bookings

Own website - 6 bookings including some repeats (they may have found us elsewhere but ended up making contact through our own site).

A total of 16 weeks.

I haven't worked out where all the 2006 bookings originated yet, but we currently have 12 weeks booked with most of July and August still available. We're very pleased...!

We cancelled our listing with FC earlier this year so our only current advertising is with Owners In France, Perfect Places and babygoes2.com. My suspicion is that lots of our website bookings find us through babygoes2. Whatever people are Googling for that type of holiday in the Dordogne is bringing us up often.

Perfect Places gave us our first French guests (this year) from the free listing period. Since renewing, we have had one booking for next year (our first American guests).

I'm frankly rather impressed that we've done so well when our website is so out of date...!

Lynne

[Christine Kenyon]

The DivineMrsM - I'm sure it's all down to the magic you weave from your kitchen (and those two bottles of wine!!).

The UK market seems to still be quite buoyant (what do others think?). Like Sue we've used cottageguide and internetcottages. We're now with cottageguide only - their fees have increased considerably but they are still good value (although maybe we shouldn't praise them too much on this site in case they read it .... eh, Adrian!).

We've just had our best year ever (over 44 weeks) and bookings for 2006 are looking good. Our analysis goes something like:

Repeat bookings: 25%
cottageguide: 40%
own website: 20%
recommendations: 5%
free listing sites: 10%

Thank you, cottageguide.