The city of Nice is located on the French Riviera in the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur. Among its many attractions are its beautiful beaches, lovely seaside promenades, interesting museums and famous landmarks but perhaps it is best known for the Cannes Film Festival, which is usually held in the month of May at the Palais des Festivals et des Congres. Renting a villa in Nice during this period can be almost impossible but, providing you plan ahead and have some inside information, you can find a beautiful and relaxing place to stay at a reasonable price.
How do I find a Villa?
Well, the simplest method of course is to go online and find it using a search engine but that may not be the best way to do it, simply because there seem to be so many different organisations and agencies representing the villas that are available for rent. It is far better if you try and contact the owner of the villa directly, that way you can get the best price and actually get a 'feel' from the owner as to the villa's suitability for your purposes. It might also be much easier to negotiate a discount with the owner, especially in today's troubled economic climate!
How do I find the Actual Owner of the Villa?
Well, we unfortunately have to come back to the magical search engine, but it is by far the best method these days; start off by typing "villa rental nice" (don't type "nice villa rental" in as will get a long list of rather fetching villas around the world!) into your preferred Search Engine (Google by far is the best for this) but make sure you have selected the 'world' option. If you want to make sure you are speaking to someone in the same language as your own, then narrow the search to your country of origin. That will usually, but not always, work. You will then see that your search returns a long list of agencies and holiday companies. They're easy to spot with a simple examination of their domain name.
The next step is to pick one of these at random and click on it. Depending on the organisation involved, they may have listed the names of every villa available and the website of that particular villa. If they have done this, you're fixed! But this is quite rare, so here's what you do: Write down the names of any of the villas that you are interested in. Then enter a new search, entering the actual name of the villa itself. Rather frustratingly, you will probably be returned a long list of agencies again, but if you sift carefully through the results, you will find the actual website that belongs to the Villa owners.
Voila! Give them a call and negotiate away! Another way of finding the actual owner is to use something like Yell.com. If you conduct a search in yell.com using the villa name then very often there will be a direct link to the owner's website or at least give you a telephone number; the owner can then tell you their website URL so that you can see how it looks. Alternatively, if you are a good French speaker, then call the Nice tourist board (get their current telephone number by conducting a web search for "France government tourist information office"; they are listed number one on Google) and ask them to give (or email you) a list of villas available to rent. Good luck and enjoy the film!
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