El Roble Holidays Official Blog

The weather in Alhaurin el Grande has really heated up this June / July and we are enjoying life with clear blue skies, temperatures up to 40 degrees and our (unheated) pool feeling like a warm bath at 31 degrees!!

We had thought that the well publicised sinking pound, the world wide  recession and even the more recent Swine Flu would effect the holiday rental bookings for 2009 – both in our Spanish hot tub and pool villa holidays, El Roble Holidays, and even could drop the 93% occupancy we had enjoyed last year in our Award winning Chester holiday apartment, Chester Canalside Holidays.  

However, after a very slow start, generally, with the Spanish bookings -  we did had some May / June bookings that had been made a year ago! – this has now picked up and we are enjoying near normal booking levels.  Usually we have the main Summer season booked out by the end of January……………. this year the main Summer weeks were finally all booked out by the end of June – just a week ago!

El Corcho Villa now has only one week available until 2nd October quite an acheivement in this economic climate – surprisingly though the missing week is NEXT WEEK, a special July late holiday offer, so maybe at this stage we will have to accept it might not get booked out, ………………. We could lie by the pool, enjoy the refreshing jacuzzi and relax taking in the wonderful views…….in fact be guests for a week!

La Bellota is also empty next week -  is everybody working next week surely someone can take a weeks holiday - after that it is booked until the 29th August………although while I write this blog I have just taken a call to possibly book next week ! You never know…

The main change we have seen is the nationality of guests, we now get around half our bookings from Spanish nationals, this suppliments the drop in the British guests – which has been very noticable. Although we are now getting calls from the UK about holidays in Summer 2010….. are British people going back to Summer holidays abroad for 2010?

Our Chester 4* gold Wharton Lock Apartment,  meanwhile, benefitted from the publicity that to stay in the UK was best idea for a holiday. It has maintained its full calendar, resulting in us now passing almost all enquiries across to other owners in Chester. It is fully booked until October and hold some bookings after that as well!!

Sandra is enjoying a Raynauds free time and its hard to believe seeing her like this that Winters can cause her so much pain and problems. We have never regretted the move and enjoy the Spanish relaxed way of life, it gave us an opportunity for a career change and the chance to work together in the holiday rental business. Over the seven years the business has become well established with guests returning time after time and this has certainly helped in the current climate.

Sadly all too many UK people who moved to Spain as retirees have found the last 12 months very difficult and some are struggling to sell up and are trying to return to the UK. This is a very sad situation for them however, it is certainly not the situation for the majority of ex-pats in Spain who, like us, are perfectly happy with our move to “a better way of life” in Spain.

In the last week we are pleased to see there have been two blog posts about Chester Canalside Holidays on the Directory of Chester website.

The first blog on the Directory of Chester website credits us with our new Gold grading for our 4 star gold Wharton Lock Apartment - a great achievement to be chosen by Enjoy England as one of their very first Gold graded self catering holiday homes. In fact we are the only Gold award holiday home in Chester – something we are very proud of and it cant go unmentioned that we attribute part of our success to two Chester companies that work with us -  Poppies Cleaners, who keep the apartment immaculate, and Simon Tiplady, who provides us with website development and hosting for Chester Canalside Holidays.

The second blog by Directory of Chester is in support of self catering holidays and what city centre apartments can offer as a place to stay in Chester. Our luxury self catering apartment, 4 star GOLD Wharton Lock Apartment, is a fantastic alternative to a city centre hotel  and offers greater flexibility for family holidays in Chester or a romantic city break and this is backed up by our guests who enjoyed their stay in Cheshire.

Many thanks to Directory of Chester for both of the blogs!

However in all this we must mention the recent article  in the Evening Leader about our fantastic cleaning company Poppies, together with our award winning 4 star gold Wharton Lock Apartment.

On Friday 5th June we flew to Chester to attend the tourist board Awards Dinner at the Chester Race Course and we were very pleased to be presented with the new Gold award for our Wharton Lock Apartment, the ONLY gold award self catering property in the City of Chester and one of only two in the whole of Cheshire!

We got back to Spain last night after 4 rather wet, but eventful, days staying in Chester.

On Thursday, we spent the day at Simon and Lisa’s new house just outside Chester – someone had asked if we were going to help them decorate …………however they are still at the knock down and clear out stage! Graham had fun smashing a very pink bathroom suite, our 6 year old niece says its very pretty but Simon and Lisa have understandably opted for a more traditional white one!

Friday brought a rainy morning and a trip to the tourist board offices of Visit Chester. As Wharton Lock Apartment is one of the 4 finalists in the Chester and Cheshire “Self Catering Holiday of the Year 2009″ we were to meet the judge  Kate Simon, Travel Editor of the Independent on Sunday.

Sadly we had not been able to show Kate around the apartment, as the guest who is staying there at the moment would not allow the apartment to be viewed during their stay – and in respect of our guests wishes we had made alternative arrangements with Lucy, from VisitChester, to meet Kate at their offices.

Hopefully showing our apartment “virtually”, with the help of our website, gave her a good idea of what we offer our guests…….and thankfully our new “Gold Award” certificate arrived in the post during our visit and so we were able to proudly show this to Kate during the presentation.

We then travelled to Tarporley, to celebrate Grahams mothers 83rd birthday with her.

Saturday and Sunday saw us back at the new house, Keith had by now joined us from Bristol and Christine, Lisa’s mum, was also there. In the afternoon Michelle, Lisa’s sister, Simon’s Uncle Richard, Auntie Anna and 6 year old Jennifer arrived too! Good job they bought a big house! There was dust, noise and many discussions on the plans…………..together with lots of cups of tea, bacon sandwiches and cakes!

Then back onto a flight to Spain and the peace and quiet…………..but it did remind us how we lived for the 13 months it took to build this house while we lived in a motor-home on the land!

Fantastic news announced today!

Wharton Lock Apartment has been presented with a prestigious Gold Award in self catering accommodation. 

The apartment is the ONLY Gold Award self catering holiday in The City of Chester and only one of two in the whole of the County of Cheshire.

This new award, launched in May 2009, is awarded annually to the top scoring properties in each star rating and is in recognition of the very best of the ”Enjoy England” holiday properties.

So next week we meet the judge for the “Self Catering Holiday of the Year” armed with both our 4 star certificate and our new Gold certificate as well. Fingers crossed!!

We are pleased to announce that we are one of the four properties that have been short listed for the Chester and Cheshire Self Catering Tourism Award 2009. This is the second year running that we have been selected as a finalist for this award.

Thank you to all the guests who wrote complimentary comments in the guest book, as this was used as supporting evidence in our nomination, and also to everyone else that supports us with the upkeep and maintenance of the apartment.

Particular thanks to Simon Tiplady for his hard work in providing us with our wonderful ‘Chester Canalside Holidays’ website and also to Sue and her team at Poppies who keep the apartment so beautifully clean.

There “fried” onto the control board was a slug, so always beware if your electric circuits stop working it could just be because a slug curled up for a sleep on it and got fried in the process.

Well what a change we have had over the last few months, Simon finally left home and moved permanently back to the UK, he now lives back in Cheshire and is getting used to the chilly weather again. Graham said it would never happen, but he hadnt taken into account the effect Lisa would have on him!!  

After years of him living at home and us chatting over breakfast and lunch about tweeks and changes to our websites it seems very strange to have to call him or chat on MSM about it. Despite this, we have managed a complete relaunch of our Chester Canalside Holidays website http://www.stayinchester.com we hope you like it. We have bookings for Wharton Lock Apartment right through to 2010 and have over a third of guests book a second, third or fourth holiday, so hopefully the new website will help us continue from strength to strength! 

On our last trip to Chester we enjoyed some wonderful sunny days with blue skies, so out came the camera and now we have some really lovely views on the website. Borrowing our 6 year old neice and giving her a loaf of bread to feed to the ducks certainly helped with the river and canal photos. 

Simon has really done a good job with the website, it looks so much brighter and behind the scenes we have a new backoffice system which makes our life a lot easier. So thanks again Simon for all your work. x x

We opened our emails a few days ago and found out that, thanks to our fantastic guest reviews on one of the Spanish Tourist Board websites, we have been awarded a “Top Rural” Quality Distinction Award.

We are now the proud owners of two metal plaques, one for La Bellota and one for El Corcho Villa, stating we are a “Alojamiento recomendado en toprural.com”.

So thanks to all those who submitted reviews after enjoying a holiday at El Roble Holidays……….the hot tubs certainly are popular.

Simon volunteered to “look after” everything and encouraged us to go away for a short break – we could even leave the laptop behind and he would deal with the enquiries and bookings. We didn’t need much encouragement, so after a quick look on the Internet we chose to stay at Hotel Cueva del Gato and what a fantastic place to stay!

We stayed in the “Gato” room, beautiful style with drapes over the bed. We could choose anywhere in the hotel and grounds to have our table for dinner and so chose a nice spot on the terrace, a peaceful area in the dappled shade of the over hanging tree. The food, service and wine could not be faulted – Dinner (wine and G&T’s included), bed and breakfast was just 104 euros!

The next day we followed a walk Graham had read about. It started in the village of Benaoján Estación just a short distance from the hotel and follows the train track and river through the beautiful countryside until you find you are in the sleepy village of Jimera de Libar Estación. We stopped at a venta in a converted train shed for a very welcome bottle of water, then had a walk around the very quiet village until the train came along to take us back to Benaoján Estación. It had taken us 2 and a half hours to walk there and the train got us back in just 10 minutes!!

All in all a wonderful break away – thanks Simon!