Blog Dia 46: Seasons in the Sun

Sitting in the car waiting for Sylvie who popped into the supermarket for some cheese, my eyes wandered upwards to the apartments over the shop. The sight made me laugh out loud. Then, in an instant, I felt a full year older.

Through a third floor window I could clearly see a Christmas tree, blinking in broad daylight, on this, the 30th of November.

Last year went by fast and turned out to be a record year. This year went by faster, and turned out even better. By all counts. Thank you very much. We didn't just have more bookings, or more revenue. We got better bookings, more non-refundable bookings, more direct bookings. We got bookings throughout the year with an increasing number of return guests and an increasing number of new guests at the same time. We saw increased bookings in each season for each apartment.

It makes it all the more interesting that not only were we busy on the rental side, we also managed to clear the land and gardens of the entire property. It had taken us a few years before we could say we cleared/ cleaned every corner of Monte-Bougainvillea. Now it's done within the year. All of it.

So it has been a very gratifying year. Business is running well, the place is groomed and tidy, just regular maintenance to uphold. Almost autopilot. Sylvie and I still do 97% of the work. All of it. Inside and Out. All business included. From cleaning the apartments to making beds to running the laundry to doing airport transfers and all the guest relations all the way to waste management. Then there are the gardens and the pool. Two People.Yes, it's a lot of work. But obviously it is feasible considering we also maintain a score of 9.7 to 9.8 out of 10 on Booking.com. The epitome of working from home is actually working at home. It's amazing how much more you can get done by not being stuck in traffic 3 hours a day.

Our targets have been achieved, twice, so our goals for next year will not be to make more but do less. We now only do transferts during daytime hours 8 to 20 and we no longer offer the car and transfers on Booking.com. On the other hand we are not increasing prices. A big part of the original business plan was about lifestyle. We've established the life, now we might work a bit more on style. So much so that even the 3 cats now get along quite well, with each other, and with Dixie. It seems to us that major progress steps happen with each change of season. In fact this is how we know the season has changed.

This realisation all of the sudden that it's already time for Christmas trees made it all come to light in a flash. We are almost fully booked for Christmas week with only one apartment still available. We are already ready. We didn't see it go by because we were too busy getting there. And now here we are. Along the way we amassed an eternal summer full of great encounters and happy moments, all in rapid succession. As the years go by so do the eternal summers. All in rapid succession.

We call them eternal summers because that is mostly what the weather is about in the Algarve. 300 days of sunshine means more than 8 of every 10 days are sunny. Winter is like Autumn in the North, and Spring is like Summer in the North. The rest is Summer. 300 days of summer, or almost, are spent complaining there is not enough rain. The rest is spent saying we've had enough rain knowing it's never enough. Then it's almost summer again.

Now that it's Algarve winter, the next step will be Algarve almost summer. That's right around the corner. In fact we've already booked a quarter. The universe is expanding while our time is contracting, all at the speed of light. That fast. So fast in fact that sometimes we get a couple hours of summer right in the middle of a winter day. As soon as the sun is out, it gets warm.