France Voila #33 - July 9 2000

This week

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1. Travellers Tips

There is a new feature on the site today , from the Index, look under "Travel Tip of the Day". This is a daily Tip by Mary Gallagher, a Journalist and TV presenter (Gallaghers Travels), never boring and very perceptive.

http://goto-france.com/newsletter/tips.html

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2. Trip Insurance

I am going to risk being boring by mentioning this each week. Trip insurance is a very important thing to consider. It costs about 3% of the total budget for your accommodation and tickets and I had assumed that most travellers did this automatically with their booking. This is clearly not the case. Travel insurance can cover you loss of luggage, any medical problems, missed, lost or cancelled flights or voyages and a host of other problems including lost deposits on rentals plus things which you really do not need to think about if you are on vacation.

Guests arrived this morning. We are delighted to see them again and happy they chose to visit us two years in a row from Austin Texas. They booked American Airlines through Dallas and had to change to Air France in Paris. The airline transfer bus got stuck on the runway and, through no fault of their own, they missed their connecting flight. Neither American Airlines nor Air France accepted responsibility and through some legal loophole it seems that our guests will have to pay for an expensive hotel in Paris. Not only that but some of their baggage is missing in the confusion and they missed a special party here last night. OK, insurance will not make up the lost time, but it will mean that all these expenses are covered. Some insurances will give 150% of the loss as compensation for the inconvenience. Please consider this insurance whenever you travel. I am looking into other deals and we have a page on the site at.

http://goto-france.com/insurance/

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3. Cost of Living in France

This year I have had a large number of people asking about buying property in France and the costs involved. I am publishing this letter and my reply which may give some answers to questions.

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Hello Tony

I would like to know about cost of living in France. My husband and I would like to retire to France - French Riviera. We would like to know how much money we would need to spend monthly on living expenses , food and everything else necessary for every day life. I would very much appreciate if you could give me an approximate idea on this subject. Thank you in advance.

Best Regards, Alena

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Hello Alena

This is a very good question which can have many answers. You have not told me where you are living at present as the "cost of living" is usually a relative question. For retirement, subjects such as health care, transport and services should be considered.

You mention the Riviera, a lot of which has deteriorated into a tourist trap in recent years and can be very expensive in comparison with the rest of France.

The first consideration is housing, in comparison with the UK, Germany and Scandinavia property prices here are still low. Local taxes are also low in comparison with these countries. In the high density tourist areas which is most of the Cote D'Azur and villages accessible from the Autoroute in the departments of "Bouches-Du-Rhone" (13), Vaucluse (84), Var (83) and Alpes-Maritime (06) prices of property have risen very sharply during the past ten years. Due to the popularity or these departments good and attractive properties are much harder to find.

There are some indications on real-estate sale prices on our site at...

http://goto-france.com/

Although you often seem to get more for your money, buying an older property has drawbacks, the main one is the huge cost of renovation of traditional stone buildings. Modern villas, on the other hand, are not expensive to construct and are built to very high standards. In over ten years of renovating medieval homes here I have discovered that the cost of restoration is at least three times the cost of building new and can be many times more expensive. A modern villa can be built to a superb standard, fully tiled, roman pillars and everything for 4,500FF per square meter.

Although this is the South of France, you need heating in your home in the winter. Electricity is expensive in France, solar panels are ugly on the roof and expensive to install. Central heating is usually oil or gas fired, there is nothing to choose between the running costs. In our home we have one log fire in our kitchen and this heats most of our house very well, ours is a very large house, about six thousand square feet of floor space, but our walls are ten feet thick and it was built a thousand years ago in a perfectly sheltered spot. The logs for the fire cost about 3,500FF a year, we burn about 10 tons of wood (oak) which is delivered or I could cut it for free locally.

Heat is usually needed in the evenings from November to April and often in the daytime in January to March. It is frequently colder to the East of the Mediterranean coast, especially inland, due the severe wind which blows from September to May, the "Mistral". This cruel wind blows 30% of the time during these months and is not to be treated lightly. Inland, in the quaint tourist villages of the summer it can be very cold with freezing conditions for many weeks. The region of "Provence-Cote D'Azur-Alpes Maritimes", which covers half of the Mediterranean coastline, does not have a good winter climate apart from a few exceptions such as Menton and Monte-Carlo which has astronomical prices.

If you move to the West of the Rhone Delta, the weather is milder. There are fewer coastal towns as the coastline is not as rocky as the Riviera but the inland villages, within half an hour of the Mediterranean, still have a some excellent older properties and new homes. We spent four years living in France looking for a home and could have chosen anywhere in the whole country. We quickly rejected the Eastern Mediterranean, it is a great place to go for a day or perhaps a week, if you like crowds, but not to live unless you have a lot of money and a large income. We found our village in a unique location sheltered by the central mountains yet 25 minutes from the sea.

Food, I am told by visitors, is much cheaper here than in the UK and Germany and is of the highest quality. All food is fresh and most is locally grown. Fish and especially shellfish is plentiful and cheap, we eat oysters as a cheap meal, a dozen large oysters cost 15FF to 20FF. Fruit and vegetables are wonderful. We find great bags of cherries, peaches, tomatoes, aubergines and wild asparagus hanging on our door many mornings as neighbours try to get rid of their surplus produce. We dread the "week of the courgettes" or the "weeks of the melons" when the glut of fruit means we have to smuggle the bounty of generous friends out to the car at dead of night and drive to the next village and leave the sacks at someone else's door. (I expect they do the same). Meat is again very good and is about the same price as in Northern Europe or the USA.

Wine, not surprisingly, is very cheap. Good wine "en vrac" (you fill your own bottles) is 8FF a liter, (about 6FF a bottle). You can eat very well in a restaurant for 55FF for lunch and 90FF for dinner.

The one thing I have found very expensive and with the poorest quality of service is the telephone system. I find France Telecom is the worst possible type of monopoly, expensive, rude, indifferent, unreliable and ignorant. I pay more than 20 times as much as I would in the USA for an inferior service.

It is not possible to put a value on the quality of life here. In over 11 years in France we have found the people intelligent, friendly, open, warm and helpful. We have found the climate mild and healthy, the food delicious, the wine unbeatable and the culture stimulating. I have not found anywhere better to live.

Please let me know if you have any more specific questions

best wishes, Tony

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4. Car rentals

You can book car rentals through our site at

http://goto-france.com/carhire.com/

I always advise to book and pay before your arrive here, I understand it saves money. Here is a letter from a reader which confirms this

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Hi, Many thanks for the useful information. I have just returned from holiday in Collioure and I thought that my car hire experiences for my French holidays in 1999 and 2000 might be helpful.

Last year I hired a car from Hertz in the traditional way. For example, I contacted Hertz in the U.K. and booked an economy car (Seat Ibiza) for one week at a cost of £160. This year I decided that I would contact Hertz in France via my Internet site. I booked the car with great ease (another Seat Ibiza) but at a cost of approximately £92, a saving by booking direct of £68. I'm sure that there are even better deals if one looks beyond the big multi-nationals best wishes, Jim

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5. New accommodation Page

If you look at the rental accommodation on..

http://goto-france.com/

I have spent many "happy" hours working for the perfect formula to list rental properties. I hope this new page is more useful. I am using all your advice and comments and there are more photos on the property pages. There is also a "pop-up" photo on the list and a local Department "pop-up" page linked to other sites which give local information.

Please let me know what you think and what you really want to know about the properties we list. I may have a solution to the availability problem soon. There are several on-line calendars which I am testing.

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Thanks for reading this week. Please tell your friends about the newsletter. Although I live and write about France, the travel information and most of our pages are relevant to all travel.

Tony