Project Bom Dia has 300 reasons to celebrate!
Thank you all 300 for your LIKES! These clicks are very important to us, we really appreciate the love.
In the meantime we also have a lot to celebrate at Monte-Bougainvillea where business is picking up swiftly.
The sun is out, brighter by the day. The pool is cool. Flowers blooming and birds a' chiprin'. Summer is here.
As you might recall our first series of pictures of the interiors were only published once all the renovation works were done. As this was quite late in spring we had to take our pictures in a hurry even if the apartments were not fully decorated. They still are not all fully fully decorated but they already look nicer in reality today now than in the pictures currently published. So we are working on a brand new series of pictures inside out and all around. We hope you drop by our web site to check them out.
During these updates it's occurred to us that the mobile version of our website is a bit out of whack. Please accept our apologies for this. The mobile version is generated automatically from the main website. We do not fully control how the transformation process modifies what people can or cannot see on the mobile version. Hopefully we'll get a better handle on this very soon. We'll let you know as we would not miss an opportunity to brag if we can fix it :-)
And while we are updating all our pictures on our website we are also updating all the pictures on our 3rd party listings : AirBnB, HomeAway, TripAdvisor and Booking.com. In fact the some of these recent photos of the villa are already visible there. Then we reduced our minimum stay to 3 nights (without car). We are happy to have met demand.
We must admit that much to our surprise Booking.com may charge hefty commissions, but they do provide bookings. We've enjoyed a steady stream of daily bookings for over 10 days now. Along the way we've gotten a booking for a far away as May 2019 and our first booking from the USA. This is very encouraging. We are also very happy to see the wide range of nationalities among our guests. Old habits die hard and having been manager of quality and performance monitoring in an ex-life we cannot help but dream up interesting statistics to look at. We'll share some from time to time but for now we are proud to report that our main KPI (Key Performance Indicator) : "Happiness" is dark green at 100%. Perks that come with our new jobs are priceless. Example, our after work commute is 100m from our kitchen to the pool and so happy hour can have 90 minutes and we can safely walk home ;-)
Another piece of good news to celebrate: the pool just got bigger :-) Well... somehow during the purchase process for the villa we noticed a discrepancy between some of the paperwork where the pool was sometimes stated as 12m*7m and sometimes 14m*7m. We'd actually mentioned this as part of our arguments in the last negotiation round. We got the price reduced so somehow subconsciously thought the pool was indeed 12*7. Now it appears it is a little bit more than 14*7. This is particularly good news for us as this size pool can no longer be constructed according to current building laws unless you are an outright hotel structure. We are a small local accommodation structure. With a BIG pool. And it's a salt pool too.
And as summer starts to heat up and the Algarve gets abuzz with tourists all over the beaches and golf clubs, we learn about our surroundings and experience a new way of life that we can celebrate every day. Sylvie has had time to make a couple batches of incredible strawberry jam. We put a jar in each apartment for week bookings and already had people ask for more:-) The fruit is fresh, very local and wonderfully sweet. Her jam is exceptional. Having good fresh local produce of great quality helps more than a bit. This is a guiding policy for us: buy local, buy Algarve, buy Portugal, buy Europe, in that order of preference. For the food the choice is all the more obvious once you've tasted it. Portuguese food is like it's produce: undersold. It's priced to perception, or worth rather than quality or value. Yet the quality if often better than 'intuitive' leaders. Portugal as a whole is a good deal right now. Not just for tourism. It's easy to see and taste why.
Won't you come and try?
Until then, Thank you all for the Likes, and remember: The Best Way to Like is to Share! Can we get 1000 please?
Hope to see you soon,
Sylvie & jc
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