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Caithness

Started by garryh, November 06, 2019, 08:43:35 PM

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garryh

Was thinking of a trip to Caithness this year. Last time i was there i stayed at Oldhall caravans . Cant remember where but i recall reading somewhere that things were not as good as they used to be , has anyone been there recently and confirm or deny this . Or are there any good alternatives . There will only be the two of us so not much available under a roof unless it's a double bed. And we aint that good friends. lol.
cheers Garry
Education is important.
But fishing is importanter

johnsd

Was up a while back with Alex has changed owners i think a couple of times not as good as 10 or 12 years ago wee tip if you plan to put the lights on in the bedrooms take some bulbs  :D
yer going where

Hill loch gold

You could try thurso bay caravan site. We stayed in 1 of the caravans there on the friday night last year and it was good.....fairly new, clean and tidy with everything in good working order.

garryh

Thanks guys ,nuff said about Oldhall . good to hear about Thurso bay as i had my eye on that one.On with the plans .
Cheers Garry
Education is important.
But fishing is importanter

Fin

garryh

I booked the Old School House in Watten Village, for End of August next year  . (Next to the shop and Pub) :D

It is a 4 bedroom house and only £240 for 3 nights, so if it was more than just yourself going, work out pretty cheap.

It is a minimum 3night stay for this place. I booked it through WWW.HolidayLettings.co.uk and have been in contact with the owner so all seems great.

Give them a go as there are a few places around the wick area they do and some good prices.

All the best
Alan

caorach

Quote from: Fin on November 08, 2019, 01:33:31 PM
garryh

I booked the Old School House in Watten Village, for End of August next year  . (Next to the shop and Pub) :D

It is a 4 bedroom house and only £240 for 3 nights, so if it was more than just yourself going, work out pretty cheap.

It is a minimum 3night stay for this place. I booked it through WWW.HolidayLettings.co.uk and have been in contact with the owner so all seems great.

Give them a go as there are a few places around the wick area they do and some good prices.

All the best
Alan

If you can go direct to the owner rather than through the likes of holiday lettings as you may find you make a significant saving.

My girlfriend has a cottage that, until September, she rented for holiday lets. She did advertise with holiday lettings as they had a very high profile - basically they'd done a lot of messing with search engine optimization so it looked like they were the only source of holiday rentals and, therefore, most property owners had no option but to advertise with them or just vanish from the internet. However, they took a lot of money from people who made a booking, I think it added about £120 per week to her prices compared to coming to her direct. Also they "looked after" all the money so she never saw any money until the visitor was actually in the property. She had a few visitors that, because of changing family circumstances, had to cancel and she always refunded their deposit but with holiday lettings there was no option to do that as they controlled all the cash and she never saw the deposit so people coming through holiday lettings were actually much worse off in terms of the cancellation policy. I'm sure there are operators out there who are less reasonable than she was, but I'd guess there are a fair number who are also equally reasonable.

Also holiday lettings had systems in place to ensure that all communications between property owner and visitor had to go through their system and they would remove any attempt at exchanging phone numbers or emails from those communications ensuring that there was no direct contact. As a result contact was both more difficult, and less personal, during the booking process and this is really quite frustrating for the property owner wishing to provide a good and personal service.

With this in mind do some searching around to see if you can find a way to contact the owner of the property you wish to rent directly, you'll probably save cash and also you will have some direct contact with the owner as well. 

Fin

Thought this was good value at this price. There are 4 of us going and it works out at £60 each, so at £20 pounds a night each and to have a bedroom each and have two bathrooms, good kitchen, I am pleased. I don't know how much the caravans cost a night now but this seems okay.
If Holiday Lettings are taking  a good deal of the money, the poor owners can't be getting much if it's this cheap for a 4 bedroom house.
I might try and see if I can message the owner personally and ask for future bookings if I can go through him. It would be good to see if they cut that off before he gets before he could reply back.

Cheers Fin.

Hill loch gold

#7
Quote from: caorach on November 09, 2019, 08:13:35 PM
If you can go direct to the owner rather than through the likes of holiday lettings as you may find you make a significant saving.

That's what we do with the big hoose we stay in when we're in caithness. The first time we booked up it was through a holiday letting company. We met the owner up once we were there and before our holiday was , informed him we were wanting to book up again for the next year and would we be better to do it through him than the holiday letting people. It was a win win, we save £100 and he doesn't have to pay the fees to these companies, so no doubt is better off too.

Fin

Caorach

You were right about having to go through holiday lettings to contact the owner.
Will try and find direct contact details for future places to stay.
Obviously people let there places out through companies like this as it takes a lot of the work off and with the possibility of covering a wider market.

I still think it is a good deal though but hate the idea of people getting dominated & bullied by these sort of companies.

Cheers
Fin

caorach

Quote from: Fin on November 11, 2019, 01:35:44 PM
Caorach

You were right about having to go through holiday lettings to contact the owner.
Will try and find direct contact details for future places to stay.
Obviously people let there places out through companies like this as it takes a lot of the work off and with the possibility of covering a wider market.

I still think it is a good deal though but hate the idea of people getting dominated & bullied by these sort of companies.

Cheers
Fin

Sorry, I missed your reply Fin so I'm a month late to this one but...

The lettings companies have the market pretty much sewn up as Holiday Lettings are the same company as Trip Advisor so if, for example, my girlfriend had cancelled her Holiday lettings account then all her Trip Advisor reviews would have been removed and this would, effectively, have removed her from the internet. People don't realise that "independent" review sites are actually far from independent at all but actually depend on you advertising with a specific company - basically the company put Trip Advisor up and waited for it to become a "brand" that people went to for reviews and then they linked that to advertising on Holiday Lettings. In view of how "big" they are then a small operation that has only one cottage to rent simply has no chance of ever appearing on a search engine and so they are forced to advertise with the likes of Holiday lettings.

Cunningly Holiday lettings don't take much money off the person advertising, most of the revenue comes from the people making the bookings and it is a very big mark up indeed. Effectively this company is literally sucking millions of pounds a year out of the highlands, and making accommodation at least 20% more expensive than it needs to be for visitors.

Now some people are quite happy for Holiday Lettings to, basically, manage their business but for my girlfriend the whole principle of the thing was annoying as she wasn't able to provide a helpful, personal, service to her visitors plus they were paying over the odds for her cottage. I created a web site for her and did some playing with search engines etc. plus focused on the fishing as that was something that was always going to generate "hits" and so allowed me to defeat the big holiday rental operations, and that worked a little bit for her, but only a small percentage of her business over the years was fishing guests. Her cottage was on the first page, indeed sometimes was the top hit, when you did various searches on Lewis/Hebridean fishing. Most of the site content is gone now as the cottage is closed so clearly that is no longer the case.

So my advice when you see accommodation you fancy on a holiday rental type site or trip advisor is to do some searching, often cottages have names for example and simply typing that into google will take you to a web site or at least a source of contact info. Now some providers simply charge the same as Holiday Lettings to avoid the awkward situation of some guests paying more than others but others rent to direct customers at "their price" and let the likes of Holiday Lettings put their premium on top for guests who come through the agent.

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