Welcome to the 12^th France For Families newsletter.  This newsletter has a slightly different focus – rather than focusing on ideas and information for holidaymakers, this time we’re going to focus on gite owners!  It’s that time of year when we all get back to work with happy (hopefully) and distant (sadly) memories of our ‘vacances en France‘. Already holidaymakers’ thoughts are turning to booking next year’s holiday.  If you’re a gite owner it’s probably the time of year when you can start to relax again after a busy season, hopefully fully satisfied with your occupancy levels and without too much work to be done to tidy up!  And of course your thoughts start to turn to your advertising plans for the coming year.

In this newsletter we would like to remind you about the France For Families concept, to explain about the advertising opportunities we can offer and to give you a perspective on choosing gites from two families that have holidayed in France for more than 30 years altogether!

The France For Families concept

The idea for the website was created in 2002 when the Harding family were planning a holiday in France (in the Dordogne).  We purchased all the usual guide books and found them very disappointing in the sense that they talked more about the culture and history of the area than about “how to entertain a family”!  Before setting off on the holiday we spoke to our friends, the King family, and they gave us a couple of handwritten pages of tips on places to visit.  During the following two weeks we realised that the King family knowledge was far superior to any guide book!

On returning to the UK we discussed the idea of creating a website to share our combined knowledge and experiences of holidaying in France.  And so the work began.  After about 2000 hours of work we finally launched the website in May 2004 and held our breath!  The hits started to come, slowly at first, but then steadily building to the point today where we often get more than 50,000 unique visitors in a month.  But more of that later!

As we built the site we realised that we could also cover the cost of running it through offering advertising space.  Again, interest has grown to the point where we have links to more than 250 gites from our website, with convenient gite location maps, featured adverts and other services also advertised.

Why are people choosing France For Families?

Well, we believe that we offer a unique combination of advertising space and detailed information on attractions, châteaux, towns, beaches, restaurants (and much more) in each locality - more than 500 destinations listed at the time of writing and increasing all the time as we continue to holiday in new areas and visit new places.  And our statistics speak for themselves:

1st Jan to 31 Aug 2006: 352,683 unique visitors

Daily average: 1452 visitors per day.

Search engines that we’re listed on:  Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, BBC, Lycos, Alta-Vista and many more.

Ranking of key gite pages on www.google.co.uk (at the time of writing):

Brittany Gites – on first page, in 5th place.

Charente Gites – on second page, in 14th place.

Dordogne Gites – on first page, in 3rd place.

Languedoc-Rousillon Gites – on first page, in 2nd place.

Loire Gites – on first page in 1st place.

Lot-et-Garonne Gites – on first page, in 3rd place.

Normandy Gites – on first page, in 2nd place.

Provence Gites – on first page, in 2nd place.

Vendée Gites – on first page, in 2nd place.

Please note that search engine ranking changes regularly.  We optimise our pages and adjust them regularly to try and ensure they are ranked as high as possible.  We also use search engine optimisation software in our efforts to ensure you receive as many visitors as possible.

What do our existing advertisers say?

Remember that oft-quoted phrase ‘there are lies, damned lies and statistics’….   Well if you’re not convinced by the statistics above, consider some of the feedback we’ve received from existing advertisers:

“We monitor our traffic carefully and get more hits from France For Families than any of the more established Gite rental companies”

“Thanks for getting the new advert up so quickly.  We’ve had several hits and received our first enquiry already within one day of publishing”

“Many thanks for the featured advert, it looks spot on. I will let the owner know it is online tomorrow, she will be very pleased”

“We would like to continue advertising with France For Families please.  I'll get payment off to you straight away”

“By the way, we have just received our first booking from your site! All the way from Australia who put in a websearch of "france families"... they booked 3 gites for their reunion!”

Advertising options available:

Well simply put, we can do anything you want!  Whether it’s a free link to your gite’s website, a featured gite advert, a customised advert on our home page or a dedicated webpage for your gite (if you don’t have one of your own)….we can offer you it all!

Our advice for people with established gites / websites is to either have one of the free links or featured gite adverts (£20 per annum).  Not only will you get traffic coming to your site from France For Families, but also your site’s credibility with the search engines will be significantly increased with a link from France For Families (as we already rank highly ourselves – see above).

If you are setting up a gite business and you want to super-charge your enquiry rate then an advert on our front page is another option.  Due to the limited space available we have to charge much more for these (£200 per annum) but you can be assured that tens of thousands of visitors will see your advert every month.  And so far every customer who has advertised on our front page has renewed at the end of the first year so we believe it must be good value!

If you don’t have your own website, we can help here also.  Either by setting one up for you with an independent hosting company, or we can offer a webpage for your gite within the France For Families site (see example here).  As this is a more complex topic we would normally discuss the costs case by case.  It really depends on what you want.

There are also other options available – featured adverts for B and B owners, advert placements in some of our regional pages (for instance if you want to advertise cycle hire, or a restaurant) or…

If you have any other questions then please do let us know at enquiries@france4families.com.

Choosing a gite from a customer’s perspective

Here we’ve considered what would attract us to a gite.  It doesn’t guarantee your potential customers will have the same issues of course.  But with young children and teenage children we believe that we can represent the views of at least the “average” English family holidaying in France.

What would attract us to a gite for the first time?  The most important consideration is good photos.  We never book anywhere unless we can visualise what it is like. Interior photos are especially important, covering at least the kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom and the living area.  Information about the locality is also useful to convince us there is a lot to do in the area.  You can always add a link to France For Families for this kind of information!  Additional features like table tennis, garden for playing in…and of course a pool are also welcome.

Another important consideration is pricing - check other gites in your area and make sure you're in line with them.  Remember that good established gites will be able to depend on return visitors or referrals and so will be able to command higher prices than those just starting up.

How about encouraging return visits or referrals?  Well here we believe it is those extra touches that make you feel welcome and which help you remember the holiday.  For instance a welcome bottle of wine from the local co-operative (need not cost too much)…..a well cleaned gite…..a good information pack (not just a pile of brochures)…..  And why not contact your guests after their holiday to check they enjoyed themselves.  Find out if there was anything that could be improved.  And take the opportunity to invite them back next year!

We do hope this has provoked some ideas and that perhaps you will consider France For Families amongst your advertising plans this autumn.  As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

With best wishes from the team at France For Families!