Get me out of here
I received an email a couple of days ago, the second of its type I have received in the last week. :
Hi, I wonder if you can help. Family friends are currently in France and are extremely disappointed in the gite they have currently booked and do not wish to stay until the end of the week as currently planned.
I just wanted to check if you had last minute availability (starting tomorrow) for 2 adults and 2 children – they are flexible on the area – as long as they can find somewhere.
Many thanks for your help.
A little while ago I posted about ‘Does Your Villa Exist‘ but that is really very unusual. A much more common problem is the one above – where you turn up at your ‘attractive cottage in the countryside’ and find that it is quite horrible, for a bunch of reasons that usually include cleanliness, location or wildlife.
Really it is too late to do much about it in the first week of August – pretty much anywhere respectable will have been booked up long before, so I wasn’t much use to the unfortunate family.
I’m happy to say it’s never happened to me to find myself somewhere so horrible that I really couldn’t stay, although I’ve stayed in enough gites to know that standards, even in the same price range, can vary widely. Mrs B once stayed in a holiday rental where the lounge furniture was two deck chairs, to be taken outside if the weather was sunny.
Of course, expectations also vary – nature does impose itself in the countryside, and creepy-crawlies do enter the house, especially when all the doors and windows are thrown open all day, it just can’t be helped.
Last year we had guests who stayed in the spring and left all the windows open all day while they went out. They didn’t notice (I think) but two families of swallows promptly built nests and laid eggs on top of the roof beams in the bedrooms. If we hadn’t noticed (and in truth we don’t clean on top of the roof beams every week, so could easily have not noticed!) the next people to stay would have thought they were staying in a barn.
Similarly we had a family stay in one of our gites years ago who insisted on borrowing a mop and brush because the lobby floor was ‘very dirty’. We were startled, having just spent the day cleaning, but it turned out they were trying to remove 250 years of history from the floor – it is scratched and stained by centuries of use, but was not dirty! I think they gave up scrubbing after a while and spent the rest of their fortnight smoking heavily in every room in the house and trying to climb over the swimming pool fence.
Happily we have very few families like that – it is as hard for an owner to judge a holidaymaker as it is for a the person booking the holiday to judge the property.
But how to avoid finding that the place you book is horrible? It’s pretty hard to be sure but some of the advice in the previous article will help:
- Ask friends and family for recommendations
- Look at properties that have been independently checked in some way
- Take a good look at the owner’s website, and be sure you understand exactly what you are getting. If there are no pictures of the inside, or the garden etc or the site doesn’t say how far the shops are etc then ask, or look elsewhere.
Price will of course be a factor – if you pay £500 for your villa in the middle of August it will not be as high quality as one costing £2,000 (I hope) but there is always a chance that the owner is simply charging too much. Our main property is about £1,100 a week in high summer, but there are properties nearby the same size as ours that cost £700 and others that cost £2,000. Which would you choose and why? Living here and knowing the properties I know why, but looking at the internet it would be harder to understand the reasons.
If I paid £250 to the local photographer to take top-quality arty photos, and £250 to a website designer for a great looking site design, I could easily make our property look like a £2,000 a week property. Personally I won’t because we like to have happy people here (as do most owners) but I can well see the temptation!
If someone is clearly only receiving income of £3,000 a year from their property, how much do you think they will be spending on replacing worn out old furniture or bed linen? Clue: not much!
And my advice if you find yourself in the same postion as the original family?
(1) Go to the local tourist office and ask what they have available – gites, chambre d’hotes or hotels – and actually drive to any that are available and see if they look suitable before booking.
(2) See if there are any ‘holiday villages’ or ‘family campsites’ in the region – again you can take a look first, and then check if they have some availability (the larger places often will, even in high summer).
(3) Contact owners of other holiday properties in the area, even if you know they have no availability – many owners will know other owners nearby and be able to recommend something suitable.
(4) Contact sites like this one, that have contact with quite a lot of owners and who might just be aware of last-minute cancellations, or properties new on the market.
Happy holidays to all!
I like to see lots of photos. all rooms inside and the view from each aspect. I prefere for the owners to be near by.
Research, reasearch, research.
We have no problem with old just clean.
The National Trust in the uk have a good standard, anything less i would complain.
Looking for loads of photos and an owner that can’t hide 500 miles away sounds like good advice.
But don’t National Trust properties have teams of volunteers to make sure everything is spotless, windows are gleaming clean etc – it’s pretty hard to match that for a rental property when the owner only has access for 6 hours each Saturday. And I can’t help wondering if NT properties might sometimes have mice / damp etc that you would only know about if you actually stayed in the property for a few days…
the NT rent out cattages, light houses etc.it is run as a separate company
Over the years I have stayed in about 4 or 5 in various parts of the country and I have never had to complain. the best we had was the old school in durgan in Cornwall on the Helford River. It was in a spot right on the old harbour by the beach. Able to buy fresh lobsters off the local fishermen.
We had a family leave here for their second week somewhere else and they called after 24 hours asking if they could come back. As it happened, the group who had just arrived had to leave due to a family problem (they had been before and have been since, so this was genuine) so we could accomodate. I’m hearing a lot more in the way of discontented rumblings this year about sub-standard accommodation. Not good for the industry, that.
Johnny, I didn’t realise that NT did that, it sounds ideal – I doubt they let their standards slip.
I’ve been trying to think of ways on our website that we can ‘prove’ that we are for real but without much success – since photos, guest reviews, etc can all easily be faked or used very selectively.
We have quite a lot of photos on our website but following Johnny’s comments will probably add more if that improves customer confidence.
I agree Jon, my main concern is that people start losing confidence in direct booked holiday rentals if all they hear are reports of properties that don’t exist or are never cleaned etc. The majority of people, who had a good time in a decent property, are much less vocal.
This year I think lots of people are booking very late (we are still seeing lots of August booking requests) and wanting things at a bargain price without appreciating that bargain price doesn’t usually mean top quality.
On the other hand I know several owners with very few bookings, who are struggling financially, and who clearly won’t be replacing their furniture / towels / whatever if they don’t earn enough from their properties to pay their bills, so there is certainly need for ‘research, research, research’ when booking.
Keep the standards high. Keep the price fair. People tell their friends. Do your customers want your attention ? do other want to be left alone. Give some customers an inch and the take a yard. Difficult at times to know what to do.
I hope you have a good season
I am England-based.
Had an issue this year, first ever, where found it necessary to move on before staying. Property was not a holiday let, it was realistically a very personal holiday home – too personal (even the freezer was to full for our own purchases for Pentecoste weekend…….
We will now probably decide to rely on locally-based owners, which we haven’t previously and which will lock out some 40%+ of properties.
Incidentally we nearly always email AND telephone to check our needs etc., AND yes, will often ask for a tight price if still available with only a week or less to go – after all, do you want some money or no money?
That’s a very interesting thought – I know a couple of people who move out for the summer so they can rent out their homes, but always assumed it was an advantage. Never crossed my mind it would all be too much, too personal, to be comfortable.
Almost no-one phones us before booking, perhaps one or two people a year. Paradoxically it might be because I say on our gite website that people are very welcome to phone, demand proof of the property existing, speak to us for reassurances etc. I think the act of saying all that is perhaps enough reassurance…!