Cost of holidays in Lanzarote

I met a 30-something Irish couple late last year who were reasonably happy with the cost of their Lanzarote flights and accommodation. They paid roughly €450 for return flights for the two of them and their 11-month-old son. Self-catering accommodation for 12 nights set them back approx. €400.

I was bored the other day when this chance meeting sprang to mind and just to be nosey, I checked out similar flights and accommodation for the same time (mid-October) this year.

Flights would now cost them €550 with Aer Lingus or €520 with Ryanair. The accommodation is roughly the same price (€420, "incl. discount"!). This means the same holiday in recession-hit 2010 would cost roughly €100 more (€850 compared to €940) than it did in 2009.

Pardon my ignorance on all matters of economics now, but this strikes me as slightly odd. The recession gets worse, people have less money, but consumer prices go up!

Whatever about the inner workings of Aer Lingus and Ryanair's pricing strategies, I assumed accommodation prices in Lanzarote would have come down. Or at least would be negotiable - is it not better to have someone in your apartment/villa paying even 50% of the landlord's mortgage rather than having no one at all there?

If someone could enlighten me, it would be much appreciated.

Spain 'not foreign enough' for Brits

I saw this and had to smile...

http://www.independent.ie/and-finally/spain-not-foreign-enough-for-brits-2066605.html

But it's sad in a way, as Lanzarote appears to be guilty of the same charge: too many Irish and British bars in the resorts, with the local supermarkets increasingly stocking produce to make the holiday-makers feel at home.

Lanzarote: Home from home, just with better weather!

The present and future of Lanzarote tourism

I recently met a 50-something couple from my original neck of the woods while they were on holiday in Puerto del Carmen. They had been to the other Canary Islands as well as several popular spots on the Spanish mainland, but this was their first time in Lanzarote.

And their verdict of the island? They reckoned Lanzarote will become their regular holiday destination from here on - "having tried the rest, they've now found the best" was the gist of what they thought.

This is not the first time I've heard such sentiments from holiday-makers. (Though there's others I'm sure who don't like the place and vow never to return - these seem to be few in number, thankfully.) Another two couples I know from "home" who are in their early 30s were over at Christmas for a week. They too said they would now become regular visitors to Lanzarote. One of the couples even looked at some properties with a view to buying a holiday home here.

Let's not get into a "I-love-Lanzarote" promotion though here - suffice to say that there is and hopefully will continue to be a steady stream of people who arrive in Lanzarote and fall for the place. If the current drop in tourist numbers can be survived, then perhaps a happy balance between the number of Irish and English bars and holiday-makers will be found once again.

Tweeting and posting about Lanzarote

To get the name/location of this blog "out there", I created a Twitter account and decided to tweet about Lanzarote.

Thus far, I'm following 10 people and have 5 people following me. Not great figures after almost a month in the Twitter-sphere, though admittedly I haven't tweeted that much.

I can only conclude that many people on the island have better things to do than tweet themselves and read the tweets of others. This is probably a good reflection of Lanzarote. Why would anyone want to sit in, logged on to the Internet, reading about life in Lanzarote, when they could be out there living it themselves?

The number of Lanzarote tweeters is tiny compared to the population of the island as a whole - similar to Ireland and the UK, one imagines. Of those who do tweet, you'd have to guess that they are logged on to the Web as part of their job anyway. Again the same as Ireland and the UK.

This situation is reflected in those who post on Internet forums also. They (we!) represent a small section of the overall population. There's some consolation in this fact for anyone who innocently asks a question on an Internet forum and is ambushed (and usually insulted, to boot) by the regular posters on that forum. Unfortunately, I've seen this behaviour on both the Discover Lanzarote and Lanzarote Gazette forums. It does the forums and the island itself a great dis-service.

Perhaps the world of Twitter offers a more useful "forum" for those newbies who are looking for information about Lanzarote and every other kind of info they might seek.

Perhaps I'm not finished tweeting just yet :-)