It is all happening now!!

We have had a few very good rains and the Barapole river is in the full spate…Rafters of the world — be there!!

Yesterday, we had Suresh babu and team at the Barapole, of the 12, 9 decided to go for it. We had three rafts hitting the water, guided by Dhawa, Mahendra and Rana. The fourth guide Subash joined our team of Rakesh, Manju and Mukesh in our raft.

Our raft guided by Dhawa was the lead and rescue raft — While we were at it, we decided to try something unique .. In our raft were three Nepali speakers.. Dhawa, Subash and Mukesh and the others Manju and Rakesh do manage a smattering of Nepali so it was decided that today, All rafting instructions will happen only in pure Nepali language. And we did it perfectly too

For the first time in his life, Dhawa guided a full raft giving white water rafting instructions in pure Nepali

What can I say, we love to do stuff..:-)

Well, our rafting head count is now 12.
To know more about white water rafting, please go to
http://www.bethelestate.com/rafting.html
or you can contact us at the following numbers for bookings and any help
Anish: +91 9972361564
Rakesh: +91 9972362052
Rakesh: +91 9448201771

The tariff is Rs 1000 / head

Vivek who was with us last weekend and was the first to go rafting this season has given us a review. Check it out here.
http://www.raahi.com/hotel-reviews/the-bethel-home-stay-coorg/close-to-nature-22740.html#rev

At Bethel, we have a darn good team, in terms of service quality we are as the best in Coorg where homestays are concerned. Today one of the biggest problems we face are ones that are nice to have..we are more often than not completely full and very often direct folks to other homestays.

A year ago, the story was completely different. We were struggling, we never really ran empty but every full weekend was a bonus and generous discounts would leave us with nothing, but we were still happy that the show was going on!!! We had only one sales channel, old guests who had known Rakesh or our friends / family who wanted to come to Coorg.

The only advertisement we had was the word of mouth from our guests.

Then we moved to the Web, we made our website http://www.bethelestate.com, started listing ourselves in HolidayIQ and any and every travel site that we could find and who would list us . In the beginning it seemed like a big waste of time and money, a month or so passed and we never got any inquiry from the web. Then we got a call from Priyanka, that was the first drop, the drop turned to a trickle and the trickle now is a full stream (can’t call it a flood just yet). Today almost 60 % of our guests are new and coming from the web!!

We spend quite some time on our online real estate, we have Google analytics enabled to see how we are faring over time, Google webmaster tools to analyze our website content to see how we stand in Google rankings and now for the first time we have put out an paid listing in Raahi!!! (We get listed as popular properties in their website bed and breakfast section) and soon we will start with Google AdWords (and maybe even Google AdSense, have to decide on that yet)

We realize we turn up in quite a few unexpected places!! for example, about.com has an article titled “8 Romantic India Getaways” , which lists the “rustic jungle cottages of Bethel Estate” as one the places that people can visit in Coorg. Now, how on earth did we get in that article!!! (Well, we don’t mind it at all )

The same way, few of our guests have blogged about us or have uploaded pics, here are a few links in the web that point back at Bethel..

http://www.arvinsharma.com/nggallery/post/weekend-at-coorg/

http://www.yeeeeee.com/2009/04/16/my-beautiful-trip-to-india-30-pics/

http://koide9.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-travel.html

IMG_1671_new.JPG

One of the photographs taken by Moinak at Bethel homestay
Posting directly from Flickr

Our Cottage @ Bethel

One of the photographs taken by Moinak at Bethel homestay
Posting directly from Flickr

One of the best aspects of our work is the people we meet,we have crossed paths with several very interesting people. More often that not, folks we meet have very little online presence.

Moinak seems to have both. He is a self-styled geek who makes his own OpenSolaris distro (belenix) and has a regular blog. He sent us the links to the photographs he took on his trip to Coorg and from that he seems to be a pretty good photographer too!!

Moinak was with us on the 7th of March, with his wife, Rima, mother, his father-in-law, Mr Bose and daughter Titli. They were all nature enthusiasts. The 72 year old Mr Bose also managed to do our sunset trek!!

The links to the complete set of photographs are here and here. They include some very good animal photos and some great macro shots..

“If I were to boil down a recommendation for creating cultural competitive advantage, it would be communicate, communicate, communicate!!” — From the book “What I learned from Sam Walton” by Micheal Bergdahl.

Sam Walton (1918 – 1992), for the folks who are not aware, was the founder of the american retail giant, Wal-Mart.

In our line of work, the importance of those three words, cannot be overemphasized. We run an off-beat homestay, in an offbeat location, compete against 166 other homestays (according to HolidayIQ, that is the number of homestays in Coorg as on date) at all possible price points. Communication is our lifeline. To that effect we throw quite a lot of resources into it, we have a website, www.bethelestate.com, this year I’ll add www.bethelhomestays.com (which is work in progress now) to it. We have 5 telephone numbers where we can be reached, we are listed in a number of sites, we have two blogs, our photographs go into a number of online sites..all of this online real estate, just to make sure we reach out to folks

Then, We have a well defined process that we follow with our guests, it starts from the time we make first contact on phone/email and ends with the final email thanking our guests and requesting their feedback. With that last email we ‘close the circle’ on our execution. Thereafter we try to put blog posts and photographs so that we can have a more permanent connection with our guests and the time they had with us.

Most of the times, things move like clock work, some time system gets stressed, some times it breaks.
In case of Vinod, who we sent to Nelgi, on the 21st of March, it caused him an extra hour’s travel. Vinod, a thousand apologies from Bethel team…:-\.

On the 21st March weekend, we were running completely full, so we sent Vinod to Nelgi homestay. On that weekend we had Abhinav Sharma, who was joining us, we also had Abhinava Bhatnagar who was an old guest planning to come again, but who had not confirmed the dates.

I made the mistake of saving Vinod’s cell number as Abhinav’s and send the same to Rakesh.

On the week end, we have Abhinav who tells me he is in Srirengapatnam and ‘Abhinav’ who tells Rakesh that he is in Hunsur!!! Suddenly our well oiled system has broken down completely and its panic all the way!! The first thought we had was that Abhinav Bhatnagar is joining us, we immediately started to act, I would find who/where is Abhinav Sharma and who/where is Abhinava Bhatnagar, meanwhile Rakesh would get a spare room ready. After some frantic calls, I was able to confirm, Abhinava Sharma was in Srirengapatnam. So we decided to focus on the other ‘Abhinav’, the other ‘Abhinav’ was guided to reach Kutta town where we would pick him up. In all of this we never for a moment suspected that the person whom we were referring to in our conversation as ‘Abhinav’ was Vinod!!! Surprisingly Vinod never corrected us whenever we referred to him as ‘Abhinav’ in all our conversations!!

Finally at Kutta the air was cleared, all this confusion meant that Vinod has to drive an extra hour and half to reach Nelgi where he was going.

All that was needed was, “We are expecting Abhinava Sharma today. Are you Abhinav Sharma? ” one question to Vinod and all of this could have been avoided. When in doubt, ask!, Talk, Communicate…

“Communicate, Communicate, Communicate…” — Sam was right, whether its associates or employees, guests or customers, not getting your communication right, is a recipe for disaster.

After the long extended weekend, we were lightly loaded for this week, which was a big relief for us. We had Manu,his wife Richa and the their friends Sanjay and Rakesh who joined us for the weekend.

Bethel home stay was referred to them by Murari who was with us last month.

Most of the crowd that comes to Coorg is from Bangalore,  Chennai ranks next, but on this Valentine’s day we had Sheela and gang from Mumbai. They are a group of eight, but only five, Sheela, Norma, Sambhav, Haseeb and Brandon, made it to Coorg.

They reached Srimangala by around 2 in the afternoon and were received by Arun, who took got them via the Tata Tea estate. By the time they arrived we had the food ready and waiting for them.  They rested till 4-5 in the evening and then went on our short trek to see the sunset. They were joined by, Manju and Murari, the other guests who were with us on that weekend.

Everyone was able to the mild trek comfortably, everyone except Sambhav, that is. Sambhav needed the classic trekker guide encouragement method, every time he would ask how much more to go, Rakesh who was their guide would say “Just two more minutes to go”.  Two more minutes, two more minutes, two more minutes ….till finally the exasperated Sambhav burst out that this two minutes were just never ending . To his credit, he did make it to the top.

The campfires were lit and ready when they returned from the trek. They had dinner and partied late into the night.

The next day morning they went down to the stream, and left after lunch to Bangalore via Dubare and Kushal Nagar.

Every now and then a group comes in that is fun loving and jovial  — this was one such group, constantly ribbing each other, friendly, it is a pleasure to have them around and very hard to not join the fun. Rakesh got himself a title of “Mr. Bhuddiman” from Sheela and Norma, whose full name  “Norma Mendonza”, Rakesh decided was too complicated to pronounce, became “Normal Samosa”

It was nice to have them around. Thanks for coming guys!!

Here are of the photographs of their Coorg trip, including Dubare and Kushal Nagar.

Due to personal and unforseen reasons..I have been out the whole of the New Year .. Well… A very delayed New Year wishes to all the readers of this blog.. While I have been away, Bethel has been busy.. We have been sending folks to other homestays ..making a lot of folks happy and .. in general having fun.

And before I forget taking “Not Having Fun”..because of the Truck and Fuel strike that was on in the first weeks of January — that was bad for us. They were hardly any vehicles available for hire, movement of people virtually stopped.  January 26th was long weekend we were busy and basically back to normal.

Ill be back blogging more on who all were here and what we did and photographs starting 1st of Feb, that is when I’m really back..

We also putting out a new website ..  http://www.bethelhomestays.com, it is very very much a work in progress,  the plan being to put together all the different homestays that we recommend so that folks can see all the option in one single website… ..More when I post next…