Is it hard work running gites

Each year during March and April I have to tear myself away from the pleasures of the internet and check that our gites are ready for the coming season. This year we are having a couple of rooves replaced, in addition to the sundry painting and decorating jobs I need to do each year, so we are a bit disorganised at the moment.

As a result someone asked me this morning if it was hard work running gites. Sorry to say but the answer is no, it is possibly the easiest job in the world, unless your father founded the Hilton Hotel chain. Apart from a few busy Saturdays each year and a couple of weeks of maintenance in the spring there is not a lot to it really.

If your gites earn less than about 76,000 euros in total each year you can register as a ‘micro-bic’ and get an automatic ‘deduction for costs’ of about 71%. I’ll tell you a secret as long as you don’t tell the French tax authorities – real costs are more like 25-35% and that includes necessary furniture replacement, dishwasher repairs and so on. So if you have the money and the inclination to start gites in the first place they are a pretty good option.

Unfortunately to earn 76,000 euros a year you would need to own a small village, but the principle is good.

The same people then asked if we were concerned that holidaymakers would make off with out TV and sofas etc. Happily in six years with gites we’ve had nothing at all like that either. Glasses get smashed very often (too much sunshine and local red wine I suppose) and knives seem to go missing all the time (taken on picnics and lost perhaps) but we have little in the way of grand larceny.

Although we do now provide IKEA glasses rather than fine crystal.

We did have some people turn up with a couple of big dogs once that proceeded to eat a hole in the settee – the holidaymakers cunningly disguised it with a cushion until after we had returned their security deposit, so we no longer accept pets. And a bit too often people seem to smother their children in suncream and then tell them to lie on the settee. But really it is a very easy life.

The big challenge, that people don’t realise, is the marketing part. You can have the nicest gites in the world but if you don’t spend the time and effort enticing people in no-one will know about them. Trust me, this happens often.

So here is the hot tip of the day. I see many properties where an extra 500 euros on advertising would easily generate an extra 5,000 euros of income. If you are hoping to earn 30,000 euros from your gites this year you should be happy spending 1,000 euros or more on advertising. You’ve spent all that money on making your gites perfect, don’t try and recoup it on the advertising!