Newchester Farmhouse B&B

David and Goliath in the B&B world

Ab — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:57:29 +0000

Most of the major online travel companies pay no tax in the UK. Or in the US for that matter. They are often based in very low tax countries like the Netherlands, regardless of where the bulk of their actual service is being used. Whatever the moral questions are around this, and people have their own views, this in practice means they have a lot of spare cash to spend on marketing, and by god, spend it they do. In billions. And this draws browsing customers straight to their sites. Fair enough, you might say, if they are profiling a small setting who no one would have heard of otherwise. Certainly the price comparison sites Expedia and Booking.com – which together garner 80% of online bookings, can give valuable coverage to small businesses. But their practices can also take customers looking for a place by name to their site, when they played no part is raising awareness of that B&B. One of the ways they do this, charmingly, is a practice called brandjacking. By registering with them I have to agree with their deal with search engines that anyone putting in my B&B name as a search term will be taken first to the OTA (Online Travel Agent) listing, not my own. There’s no algorithm that I can influence, however successful my website: it’s a straight up deal between the big giants that puts them first. So even if a neighbour puts in my B&B name in order to go to the site to make a direct booking, my listing on an OTA will come up first. A B&B in Yorkshire had an even worse scenario after winning multiple awards. They were so well known they no longer needed to register with the big multinationals; they could rely on a steady stream of people who heard of them through media and reviews. But then they discovered that a big OTA had set up a fake page with a photo (not of them) and a description (not written by them) of their B&B, but with the warning that no prices are available for that B&B so unfailingly directing customers off to other listings (who do pay the commission).

It isn’t just in search engines. It works between the big companies too. I used to pay TripAdvisor around £600 a year to have a listing with my contact details on it. But they have a deal with Booking.com that anyone coming across my listing on TripAdvisor would then see an advert telling them the best deal for any room would be through Booking.com, and off they go, leading to a jolly £15-18 fee I have to pay to Booking.com for snatching my customers. Because of course it was never true that the best deal was through the OTA – their terms demand that you don’t offer a cheaper deal on your own site (they track and link to your listed rates), but no one in their right minds would put a cheaper deal on a commission based service. But it was legal for them to make the claim, somehow. For a hotel or B&B to get their own website to the top of the search results – above Booking, Expedia, Tripadvisor – they would have to pay over £900 a month for pay per click views.

What started as a wonderful and useful service has proved profitable, and greed is growing. TripAdvisor have now changed their terms and conditions so all of their partner settings have to agree that TripAdvisor can harvest ANY of the text or images from our websites at ANY time, and have perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, transferable and sub-licensable rights to them. So I can pay a photographer, or use my own images for my site and Tripadvisor can not only use them for free, for any purpose, but can also sell them on to whoever it wants, and we don’t get a penny.

It doesn’t feel like a fair fight.

So, like so many scenarios, we’re just left with stark choices. Be exploited by the big companies or go it alone without the cash to compete. I chose to come off TripAdvisor (which used to be a free and freeforall comparison site, but now is heavily committed to settings paying to be listed, and paying more to be listed with their own contact details) and stick to Booking.com where most of my browsing guests were being sent anyway. I am now choosing to come off Booking.com too, because I find it sticks in my craw that someone can be told about me, puts my name in a search engine, and Booking.com get the booking because we all know that the first viable result gets the hit. It’s how it works. If it were just a service where I paid for a listing, but I could compete independently, or have some equal and respectful relationship with them it would be bearable, but it is enraging, because the demands and costs increase the more you become trapped in. It all works through software, so they don’t even have to pay someone to set up my details. They listed me as being in Hinton St George, the neighbouring (delightful) tiny village, and not my own. They put the nearest transport as some random hour away airport, and not the local train station. They recommend places to go that are bonkers places, miles and miles away, not at all what I submitted in my registration. Will they talk to me about their misrepresentation of my B&B? No, because the listing isn’t done by humans. It’s a software thing, so thought it’s all wrong, misleadingly so, that’s what stays. There I am, stuck, looking like I’m trying to pass myself off as a farmhouse in a hugely photogenic village when I’m actually very happy where I am, in my own beautiful, thriving, happy village, thank you very much, with some stupendous places to visit and eat just down the road, rather than Weymouth. (For the record, I’ve nothing against Weymouth, it’s just that I prefer not to drive for an hour to eat out, on the whole).

So I’m going to try a summer without them. And I will spread the message that the price comparison big agents don’t list everyone, just those who have agreed to their terms, so try a few different searches when you’re looking. And I’m going to ask if at any time you’re looking for somewhere to eat or stay, that it would be a very welcome, when you find somewhere appealing through an OTA, run as a tiny operation among tens of thousands of others, if could just put that specific name in Google and check the results, and see if you can’t run down the listings and find the one that isn’t an Ad, or via a huge tax avoiding multi national, but a direct site, probably built with the help of a local design company or coder, or possibly with a lot of sweat and tears the DIY way; run by someone who pays their local council tax which will then support the local community, and other businesses. And which, when some profit is made, pays income tax that will help pay the refuse collectors, and the health service, and the grants that have helped so many of us survive this year, and that will do something towards helping those who have not been so lucky this year. Because the truth is that most small businesses do pay their tax, and do their share in their local communities through helping out, or volunteering, or collaborating with other small businesses, or just sending business on. And when you have no local community, and pay people to find ways to cut costs and get things for free, you get more cash to get a bigger share of the pie which gives you more cash .. … So somehow bypassing the OTA signposting systems even if you use them seems a reasonable way to behave. It’s not how the biggest Online Travel Agents are designed to work, but it’s legal, and a choice. Now that I’ve started doing it wherever I go, I’ve found it deeply satisfying taking those extra few minutes to search, and have a little moment of pleasure in booking direct where I know I am going to be paying David, and not, for once, Goliath. Goliath will be ok. It’s not, on this occasion, a mortal blow.

ps. I know that the image doesn’t really have much to do with the article, but not having TripAdvisor’s large free image library, I was getting desperate. Please think small is beautiful, rather than focus on the fact that aphids are really annoying.

Life with Hens

Ab — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:02:10 +0000

I got hens at the urging of my sister, a long-standing Black Rock devotee. They’d be useful for lovely eggs for breakfast I thought, and took up her offer of a delivery of 8 in the first few months of our arrival at my first B&B. We had had hens as children, but then they barely registered in my world. They were just a curse – we both shared the grass, and they made all our lawn games hazardous. Handstands, chase, throwing yourself down in the grass; all suddenly became more perilous. In our absorbed children’s games, chickens were just an annoying distraction.

But now my handstand days are gone I have discovered a whole world of joy. Life is slower now and it is so appealing to stand and watch them when tasks send me out into the garden. From the first days when they started exploring their world, edging each other nervously down the chicken ramp, necks stretched out to see what was around, all unwilling to step off into the unknown, there’s always something to observe, some new discovery for them. Now they know the garden well. And, if I’m honest, the neighbour’s. In the morning when the fence is opened they RUN out, off to check the food opportunities by the kitchen door, and then to do some lawn pootling before a dust bath in my flower beds. They’re transfixing, once you’ve got the bug. It’s true that if you haven’t spent much time with them, there is a look you give others when they start talking about the joy of hens. Polite, but incredulous. The kind of look you’d give someone when they started speaking about their love of tarantulas. ‘You WHAT?’

But one of the unexpected pleasures of a hen is her love of human company. They drift over when anyone heads outside. Partly in the hope of food – always an eye to the main chance – but when food is not forthcoming they’ll stick around, foraging, preening, sleeping. They’re not bothered, as long as they can stay close.

In a world where the most common animal sound we hear as humans is alarm calls – ALL life is scared of us – it is ridiculously pleasing to have your company sought out. We dig the garden together, prune, tidy, water, cut flowers.

On a sunny day one autumn I lay for a nap on the bank after hanging out the washing, and woke 30 minutes later to find every chicken asleep or dozing next to me. Laundry takes on a whole new dimension when you have a hen alongside you.

There was a time, after a fox attack, when I went henless. Life got SO much easier. Not getting up early every day to let the birds out. Not rushing back on a summer evening to lock them up. No scrubbing of hen houses, or crawling through undergrowth to find eggs, no anxious research to identify the malady of a crestfallen bird. It was so very, very dreary.

I realise this new found love of birds has put me firmly into the mad old woman category. People look askance, children hurry by. But reassuringly I now realise not that they are in the know and I have slipped off the range of normal, but that they just haven’t learned yet.

Thoughtful moment

The Young

Ab — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 20:12:19 +0000

This is the time of year when the new fledglings are off and independent but constantly getting caught out by inexperience. I have had three young robins trapped in the house in the last week (or the same stupid one?), and another flew into the van and couldn’t find her way out. Lots are finding their way into the polytunnel, and there’s much panicky flapping and beating against the wall when I walk in, but at least there they can find their way out.

I have learned a good trick now for catching trapped and panicking birds, which is to hold a big cloth in front of your face as you try and corner them to catch them – a tablecloth is good: something light and cotton. Though I’ve had to make do with a thick woollen blanket, which is more challenging both for bird and rescuer, as it’s harder to see where you’re going, and rather heavy on the bird, as the trick is to cover your face and body as you get closer and the birds stop flapping and panicking. They just watch the approach of the curtain with bewilderment. Once close you can use the cloth to drape over them and hold them while you pick them up and then carry them outside. Once you have them in your hand you can dispense with the cloth or it rather gets in the way. As long as they can’t see your face they stop that awful banging against the windows trying to get out.

This young bird I found outside the garden room. I imagine it flew straight into the window, possibly after a fight, which there are a lot of at the moment. Sometimes they’re stunned but all right, but this one didn’t make it. I’m not sure what the casualty rate is from windows. Probably nothing compared to cats, but still, another human-made hazard. Poor buggers.

B&B Breakfast

Ab — Sun, 14 Jul 2019 17:12:40 +0000

A lot of people have commented on the granola I make here. In a nice way, I should add, not from choking or as they surreptitiously feed it to the hens. I had planned to keep it secret, as I didn’t want to lose my unique selling point and find everyone was making it themselves and staying away, but I’m now prepared to accept that sometimes they might want to travel too, so I’m putting the recipe here for others. Possibly only 3, which is I think the reach of the website, but as the recipe is not mine, but the lovely Ottolenghi, who is known for his fabulous healthy salady delicious savouries and yet has a book full of the best sweet recipes I know (see below for image of the cover, and make sure you also make the carrot cake which is utterly delicious and perfect for those of us who do gooey better than light and fluffy).

Granola:

Oven at 140ºC/Gas Mark 1 (or higher if you’re in a hurry, but PUT THE TIMER ON)

300g rolled oats
60g almonds
40g Brazil nuts
40g cashew nuts

or whatever you have in those sorts of quantities.

60g each (a big handful) of pumpkin and sunflower seeds
Mix all up together and put aside

Heat up in a small pan:

3 tbsp water
2tbsp rapeseed oil
2 tbsp sunflower oil
big pinch of salt

120ml maple syryp
120 ml honey

When it’s runny pour it over the oat mix and stir.

Line a large, or better still 2, baking tray with parchment and spread the mix out evenly – make sure it’s not too thick or the bottom layer doesn’t cook properly.

Bake for 40 mins, stirring occasionally until a honey brown, or as dark as you prefer. It will be soft until it cools, so use colour rather than texture as your guide.

Take out of the oven and leave to cool – when it’s still warm add:

100g dried apricots, roughly chopped
60g dried cranberries
60g dried blueberries

Buy this book

This is Ottolenghi’s recipe, but so many have asked about it, and I’m putting it up to encourage others to buy his books. The new Simple is fantastic and less time consuming than some of the earlier ones, but this recipe is from the plain Ottolenghi Cookbook and is full of lovely things, and brilliant breakfast/tea stuff. (I’d make more muffins if guests could fit them in after a full fry up).

Above is the Ottolenghi carrot cake, made with oil, not butter, but delicious for all that. I am not a good cake maker, but this is a failsafe recipe. I am not putting it up here. You have to buy the book.

Running a B&B – Hazards

Ab — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 12:30:53 +0000

Today I managed to knock over a cafetière FULL of newly made coffee. It’s hard to describe quite how far reaching coffee grounds in water can be when you haven’t squished down the top filter. And also how hard it is to try and pull boiling water soaked denim away from your leg while avoiding standing either on the pot on the floor or in the flood of gritty coffee and stopping the pancakes burning simultaneously. I was then at the stove drenched in hot black liquid with a lump of hot sediment in my shoe trying to keep the rest of the breakfast on track. Also, as is always the way, the day I drop the coffee is the day I have a family in, and, though I was just out of sight, there is no way that the 3 children didn’t hear my ‘Fuck fuck fuck’ shouted quite loudly out into the kitchen. I console myself with the thought that they were all over 3 and therefore are likely to have heard that language many times before, particularly if they go to school and spend any time with teachers. I know whereof I speak. That’s where I learned my bad language.

However, despite the burn, I did get the pancakes made, and consoled myself after breakfast by sitting down with 3 of my own so as not to waste the batter. This is very important. Though in truth chickens like leftover pancakes quite a lot.

This in a way is an easier mistake than dropping the poached egg on the floor. Easily done, as they are surprisingly slippery and if you haven’t organised the work top well enough for the poached egg plate to be right up to the hob, they can leap from the spoon in the most energetic way sometimes. It’s not quite so recoverable from – another pot of coffee can wait, but ALL the other perfectly timed (sometimes) ingredients are sitting waiting on the plate while you have to lob in a new egg and the sausages are never quite the same lush plump things when they’ve been sitting.

The most disruptive breakfast scenario to date was a few years ago when the bell rang during breakfast making with a neighbour coming by to tell me the ram had got out, and with the dire warnings of my shepherd friend that more people are killed by rams than any other farm animal in my head I had to sprint into the dining room to tell them they’d have to wait till I’d lured the ram back into the field. As he was getting no breakfast the guest came to help and we spend about 30 seconds getting Josh back into the field with the temptation of a bucket of chicken food, and another 20 minutes disentangling him from the fence that he tried to jump through. Still, all done, hard hard boiled eggs thrown away and new breakfast later the guest and I were greatly bonded by our animal rescue, so he was surprisingly generous in his thanks for the stay.

Managing time in a B&B

Ab — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 10:42:39 +0000

This is what I meant to do today:

Plant out the last of the seedlings

Mow the lawn

Water the polytunnel

Wash, dry and iron the bedlinen

Weed the front border

Sow basil and biennials

Make a cake

Work out how to fit up the rain diverters for the rainwater storage tanks

Clear out the garage to stack all the bike and DIY stuff on the new shelving

Put up the new shelving

This is what I actually did:

Show my 8 and 3 year old guests what a broad bean is, and how to split them open

Eat all the tiny tiny broad beans they then split open and offered me, having discovered that broad beans aren’t really their thing

Hunted for ripe strawberries among the green.

Fed the strawberries to the 3 year old, who was very clear that strawberries are much better than broad beans

Watered the poly tunnel, the surrounding area, some random weeds and hedging with the said 8 and 3 year olds

Made a daisy chain

Finished off the previous cake

Spent a long time looking for all the bits and pieces for potting up, then carrying all the seedlings, earth and a multitude of pots to the steps where we all filled the pots with compost, v e r y s l o w l y, lost the labels and potted up a now unknown selection of annuals while chatting.

Very little else.

There are days when plans go spectacularly awry and your life is infinitely richer for it, and this was definitely one of them.

Spring in Somerset

Ab — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 17:14:08 +0000

Despite the fact the rain is lashing the window as I write, and the drip drip of the blocked gutter I should be at is sending me slowly mad, spring is in fact coming, and the bluebells will be out next month. I don’t know why people head to the South West in the summer. August is generally much like this, wet and windy, but with only autumn ahead, and long long lines of traffic heading west, so SPRING! is the time to come. The leaves are creeping out, the blossoms fill the hedgerows, the evenings are light and there’s a spring in all our steps. The roads are empty and there’s a million places to go, all beautiful, all with their own particular draw. Tulips and cherries at Forde, borders LEAPING into life at the local gardens, empty beaches at Hive, and the green fresh woods all around. Doesn’t get better than that.

Gardening at the B&B

Ab — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 10:23:44 +0000

My job for the morning is shifting seedlings round to maximise light and warmth. This changes hourly, and I worry that the poor things will be freezing one moment and burning the next. For compensation I go and pretend to work in the polytunnel, so we can all warm up together. Often I’m down to a vest and leggings and then set off out into the garden leaving shirts and jackets hanging from the hooks now rigged up around the frame (oh how proud am I of my tidy tunnel!) and then have to run back minutes later having underestimated the nip in the March wind. But I should be planning the new flower beds in the meantime. My dear and knowledgeable neighbour occasionally asks me, with a knowing twinkle in his eye, where is my garden plan? He suspects, I know, that what I have is a piece of paper with a blank outline and an enormous number of plant names scattered in the margin with question marks. This is in fact the case. But looking at this picture from last year I think at least I’ll start thinking about the colours for the bottom bed, and get the annuals seeds lined up with a plan in mind. The gaura was an unexpected success. It’s down as too unreliable in the Piet Oudolf book on special plants, but it LOVED its spot in the sun (though the whole garden is in the sun. There’s not a blessed shady spot anywhere, yet) and coped with all the sea winds blasting in from the Cricket ridge with not a care. And, by god, it’s still there this spring. So it’s staying. And I’m planting more. Fingers crossed. And fingers crossed I can find the 3 Munstead Wood roses that I bought bare root this winter and heeled in somewhere in the garden while I made my mind up where to plant them. EVERY time I think I’ll remember something important, and EVERY time I curse when I can’t. If I offer my neighbour a glass of wine one sunny evening he might be persuaded to help me in my ignorance on what else I can use to fill up that border, which I every so often dig a tiny bit bigger. Can’t have too many blooms, I say. Thank god for Higgledy Gardens.

The perfect cup of tea

Ab — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 10:10:28 +0000

I am slightly ashamed of the disappointment I feel when I sit down to breakfast in a hotel and get a pot of tea with only one teabag and there is NOTHING to be done except accept the sadness of tea the colour of dishwater. Although asking for an extra teabag would work, I suppose.

Because at home my lovely sister, Olivia, has sorted the problem of the perfect tea by bringing me a mix of tea her neighbour, Olivia, gave her because she hated it. This I have added to the fabulous Somerset Miles Wessex tealeaves for the PERFECT CUP OF TEA. Bloody lovely. So Miles breakfast and Darjeeling autumn or some other nonsensical named thing seem to be the combination that works best. Though in the cupboard, gathering dust, (packets we’re talking, not contents: no Dickensian grocery cupboards here) are all the weak teas for anyone so inclined. A bit like when you have sugar in your tea still, and go to visit friends and ask for sugar and they have to rummage around in the back of their attic saying ‘I know we had some sugar here somewhere’. So thank you Olivias.

Creating a B&B garden

Ab — Sun, 24 Feb 2019 16:45:14 +0000

The polytunnel is going up in an effort to have it ready for the spring planting. It’s a distraction in some ways as it’s meant a LOT of digging and levelling and hefting of wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows and wheelbarrows of earth, when I should be planning the flower borders. And there is a definite Newtonian law of motion that sends you back and forth from any building project, however well prepared you think you are, to the tool supply in the office to find the one missing thing you forgot, till you discover the next missing thing. Like a horizontal pendulum effect. First 6 times I took my boots off to look for the spanner/spirit level/drill bit. Now I’m giving up and will just spend the week washing the floor when it’s done.

It’s lovely working up there, with the outdoor gym in the village rec next door and the sounds of people laughing as they try and use the machines. It’s especially popular this week with grandparents and their half term charges. And to the south looking over the fields, just as I was wondering about how to contact the farmer and ask if I could trim the hedge from his side he appeared with the tractor and did the whole thing in a matter of minutes, so now I get the view over the hedge too.

I might move in here.