Warning – credit card losses from impersonation

We’ve received the following email from the editors of Holiday Villas and Cottages magazine, which is relevant to all people who advertise their property on villaseek.com and any other web site or magazine:

Please be aware that a number of advertisers in our publication Holiday Villas & Cottages have recently received calls from sales people improperly claiming to work for, or on behalf of, the magazine.

In a number of cases individuals have been persuaded to hand over credit card details after being offered renewal of their advertisement booking at a low price, subject to immediate acceptance of the offer and payment by credit card. Their card is then debited in that amount, often several times.

No written or email confirmation is supplied until after payment has been taken.

Any advertising supplied as a result appears to be in a freesheet style publication, not in a bona fide magazine.
These calls are not in any way connected with Holiday Villas & Cottages, Merricks Publishing Ltd, holidaycottages.cc.

Calls to our advertisers are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone advertising in any publication or on any website could be called by these people.

If you receive an advertising sales call seeking a repeat booking in any publication/website and you have any doubts at all as to whether it is genuine, ask the caller for his/her name and the name of the company and publication, then call that publication (making sure you call the genuine number, not one that you are given on the pretext that ‘the switchboard is always busy.’) In our case, the number to call is 01458 274447.

Allegations of improper sales activity of this sort have been covered by the BBC and discussed online, for example:
here and here.

If this has already happened to you, call me, Hamish Watson-Grey, or e-mail info@merrickspublishing.com and we will advise what steps you can take to recover your funds.

With kind regards

Hamish Watson-Grey
Managing Director
Merricks Publishing Ltd

A few of you have been asking us for the ability to login to your admin area using your VillaSeek / Holiday Villas reference number, rather than having to type out your email address each time. We’ve now implemented this… it will save some of you a bit of typing!

Let us know if you have any feedback / issues with signing in to your VillaSeek customer area….

Tom
VillaSeek website team

We’ve just heard that angry Ryanair passengers are refusing to get off a flight that was finally cancelled after a five hour wait on the tarmac for de-icing. The flight was waiting at Birmingham International, bound for Tenerife. More news and pics when we have them…

We spotted quite an in-depth and useful article on planning round-the-world trips here. It gets pretty detailed and geeky, but makes a valid point — for planning a trip with lots of stops, getting a round the world ticket can work out much better value. It also allows you to visit places which would normally be very expensive to get to. And most round the world tickets allow you to spread your flights over a year.

Hi everyone

We’ve added a few more feature icons to the Villaseek Villa search pages. We’ve added icons for villas with barbecues, for whether the villa has air conditioning, and for whether there are bikes available at the holiday property.

Owners can turn these icons on for their holiday properties, by logging into the villa management area of VillaSeek, clicking the holiday property they’d like to edit, then pressing the edit villa link.

If you have any other ideas for icons you’d like us to add to VillaSeek, or for any other features you’d like us to add to the villa info pages, just let us know in the comments!

Tom K

It’s been a week dominated by flights news — and by one airline in particular, Ryanair.

First, Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary suggested that costs could be cut by getting rid of the second pilot on flights. It’s been dismissed as another attempt to get column inches, though – a bit like his earlier attempt to charge customers for using the toilets on Ryanair flights.

Also this week, Easyjet stepped in to offer £10 flights to Ryanair customers stranded in Belfast. And French workers began a national strike which may affect flights between France and England.

We’re expanding the Greek villas section on VillaSeek. We’ve split it down into several regions – so that you can go directly to holiday villas in Crete, Corfu and Paxos, Skiathos and Skopelos, and many of the other Greek islands.

We also list some holiday villas on the Greek Mainland. We’re always adding new villas, so keep checking back for new holiday destinations.

Holiday-starved Britons are splashing out on longer, more expensive peak season villa holidays for 2010 following last summer’s holiday cut-backs. Newly-released figures from holiday company Villa Parade suggest that January saw some of its highest-value bookings ever,.

The company’s January sales trends show that longer duration holidays of 10,11 and 14 nights are more popular in 2010 compared to previous years – up 30 per cent on last year, when the seven-night short holiday was the most opted for choice.

With the recession having officially come to an end, it seems that people can afford to commit to spending more on a family holiday as they’re booking for peak-season, in advance, instead of waiting for last minute breaks, as in 2009.

Nick Bartholet at Villa Parade commented: “January has seen much more interest from customers booking peak-season breaks of a longer period compared with 2009. It’s a great start to the year as we had our highest value booking in our trading history in January.

“We’ve been hearing from customers booking this year, that they missed out on a big holiday last year, due to the effects of the recession and many who usually book villa holidays for half-term or the Easter break are choosing to splash out more this year on a longer summer holiday.

“Because of this demand for longer holiday periods, we’ve increased the amount of properties which are available for durations of between 10 and 14 nights and have also added Friday as a turn-around day to provide more flexibility for customers and to coincide with cheaper air-fares.

“It seems that booking patterns we were used to seeing before the recession have come back with a boom – a great start to a new decade for the luxury villa holiday industry.”

Villa Parade are offering some good-value spring deals – for example, villas with outdoor hot-tubs from as little as £595 per week.

Villa Parade say they’ve seen increasing demand for villa holidays over the past couple of years. Back in September, they added 40 new mediterannean properties to their portfolio.

You can save £25 through VillaSeek by using saving code HVVP1 online at Villa Parade’s website, or call 0844 72 00 40. Villas are available from £395 per week, excluding flights.

Just heard from Croatian Affair, whose Croatian villas are listed in the Croatia section on VillaSeek.

They are offering half price car hire (on category A and C hire cars), when you book any of the following villas before 20th February:

Villa Folio
Walnut House
Andigona
Graziela

Here’s a list of the discounted car hire prices:

Hi everyone

I’ve been working on some more individual / tailored pages for the villa directory on VillaSeek.com. The eventual aim is to get an easy-to-navigate page for every region that we list, which links to articles here on the blog, and pulls in some more useful info about the region. If anybody has regions they’d particularly like me to focus on, drop a comment on this blog and I’ll add those… within a couple of weeks there will be a tailored page for every region.

As an example of some of the pages I’ve got up and running take a look at the listings pages for luxury villas in the Caribbean, and holiday villas near Disney…. Do drop me a comment and let me know any improvements… I’ll be working on getting all these up and running in the coming weeks.

Tom