Stupid web business: number 38 in a series of millions

Like many people, I book our family holidays online these days. With young kids, we tend to stay within the confines of the UK and opt for a holiday cottage rental. Now there are numerous sites offering the ability to search for and book such a holiday cottage, covering the UK and beyond. They work by taking a fee from the owner of the cottage for each successful booking. They also seem to suffer from what I like to call the Tottenham Court Road effect whereby it used to be the case that you could not play one shop off of another in TCR when buying electrical goods because most of them were owned by the same people. So it is with the holiday cottage rental industry, the numerous differently branded services seem to come back to just one or two companies in the end. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we found our ideal little cottage snuggled deep in a forest in North Wales for the dates we needed and paid a deposit back in July 2007. believe me, to get the good ones you do need to book that early! The balance of the rental is due tomorrow, although Cottages4You do not seem that keen on taking my money.