Scottish Country Cottages
Be careful of getting stuck in a contract, for the best part I have found Scottish Country Cottages very professional.
Unfortunately this year @'ve been very frustrated and disappointed with them and their performance for 2007. I put Hillview cottage on their books for 2007 season with great expectations of many bookings. I paid my annual fee of about £150 and agreed to their 23% + VAT commission rate (takes it close to 30% with VAT added). With these kind of charges you would expect them to make sure you got a lot of business.
So to cut a long story short Scottish Country Cottages have so far (18th September 07) sold 5 weeks.... The very frustrating part of the contract is I have to pay English Country Cottages every time I make a booking as I used my owner allowance. I think I have paid in the region of about £2000 extra in fees for the work that I did selling my own property. Now this sounds crazy, well it is, but normally I guess most self catering owners find English Country Cottages sells more weeks so you would not normally book so many weeks yourself. Unfortunately due to their lack of success marketing my cottage I had to aggressively sell my cottage through other channels like Google Adwords (cost me even more money).
Scottish Country Cottages have suggested the reason they did not sell more weeks is because I booked them earlier, so I did a test and purposely did not accept any bookings for September. Long and behold English Country Cottages still did not sell any weeks.
So in a nutshell I pad a fee to be in their magazines, I paid them commissions for weeks they sold and the real salt in the wound I also paid them for weeks I sold.
I got in touch with ECC main office as I hate talking negatively about other businesses, and gave them the chance to discuss about all these crazy charges. They said I could not talk to anyone in head office as you have to start with my local contact. So I did, the regional manager for EEC got in touch and said she would get her manager to get in touch with me. That was 3 weeks ago... So I got sick of waiting and thought the best thing I could do is make other people aware of these contracts with Scottish Country Cottages and of course other similar agency.
I have signed up with Wilderness Cottages for 2008 and already they have have booked 2 weeks for next year.... Nice work. They also have no restrictions on how weeks I can book and also their commission is about 50% of EEC's. I am also on holiday-cottages.scotland.org.uk which has been very good sending traffic to my site.
I will of course add any response I get From Scottish Country Cottages to this post as I want it to be a fair reflection and see it from their side.
Unfortunately this year @'ve been very frustrated and disappointed with them and their performance for 2007. I put Hillview cottage on their books for 2007 season with great expectations of many bookings. I paid my annual fee of about £150 and agreed to their 23% + VAT commission rate (takes it close to 30% with VAT added). With these kind of charges you would expect them to make sure you got a lot of business.
So to cut a long story short Scottish Country Cottages have so far (18th September 07) sold 5 weeks.... The very frustrating part of the contract is I have to pay English Country Cottages every time I make a booking as I used my owner allowance. I think I have paid in the region of about £2000 extra in fees for the work that I did selling my own property. Now this sounds crazy, well it is, but normally I guess most self catering owners find English Country Cottages sells more weeks so you would not normally book so many weeks yourself. Unfortunately due to their lack of success marketing my cottage I had to aggressively sell my cottage through other channels like Google Adwords (cost me even more money).
Scottish Country Cottages have suggested the reason they did not sell more weeks is because I booked them earlier, so I did a test and purposely did not accept any bookings for September. Long and behold English Country Cottages still did not sell any weeks.
So in a nutshell I pad a fee to be in their magazines, I paid them commissions for weeks they sold and the real salt in the wound I also paid them for weeks I sold.
I got in touch with ECC main office as I hate talking negatively about other businesses, and gave them the chance to discuss about all these crazy charges. They said I could not talk to anyone in head office as you have to start with my local contact. So I did, the regional manager for EEC got in touch and said she would get her manager to get in touch with me. That was 3 weeks ago... So I got sick of waiting and thought the best thing I could do is make other people aware of these contracts with Scottish Country Cottages and of course other similar agency.
I have signed up with Wilderness Cottages for 2008 and already they have have booked 2 weeks for next year.... Nice work. They also have no restrictions on how weeks I can book and also their commission is about 50% of EEC's. I am also on holiday-cottages.scotland.org.uk which has been very good sending traffic to my site.
I will of course add any response I get From Scottish Country Cottages to this post as I want it to be a fair reflection and see it from their side.
Labels: agents, directories, english country cottages
1 Comments:
To date the regional manager for Scottish Country Cottages was meant to get in touch, so far I have still not heard from them...
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