October School Holidays 2007

Having been booked constantly at Sandcastle Cottage, Crail since early May, we've suddenly come to a grinding halt with our bookings for the rest of this year. Until last Saturday (15th Sept) we had no bookings after 29th September, then I got a telephone call while walking along Callander High Street asking us for a weekly booking fromm 6 - 13 October - hallelujah! However, this gives us another challenge. Because we're just not sure what people are looking for at this time of year. We'd only just finished 'crafting' a short breaks offering from 29th September, and updating all the websites, and now we've a weekly booking - which is great, but means we're back to trying to sell a week from 29th Sept - 6th October, then probably weekly breaks again through the end of October. Last year we had a couple of short breaks in October as well as some weekly ones.

So I've updated my short breaks page on my '2crail.com' website.

Which other sites are worth working on? Well, we've a listing on 'The Cottage Guide' - so it could be worth posting some late availability there. Must e-mail them with our prices for next year too.

Then there's the dreaded VisitScotland listing - why do we 'dread' this? Well, the infamous (to members) Tiscover system is almost unintelligible for us mere mortals who have to do the updating, and our visitors don't seem to be able to figure out how to use it either, because we've had NO BOOKINGS AT ALL THIS YEAR which resulted from our presence on the system, and we paid an extra shed load of cash for a PRINTED BROCHURE ENTRY - for what??? Wish I could find a decent alternative place to spend the money we wasted this year on advertising with them! As I do this I search for my own accommodation for the week of 29 September and find it isn't available - despite updating my availability. Another e-mail required...

Need to do some more searching round for where best to advertise Autumn Breaks