Our Inns

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One of the most useful things to do to attract people to a holiday property is to write about what’s in the local area in terms of places to go and things to do. In addition to the Internet version of this many people also place a pile of brochures on the local attractions in the property itself.

However, this falls down in three main areas. Firstly, on most websites you’ll get at best something to the effect that “there are many chateaux in the area” when they should be naming each one that’s there and saying a little about it. Why? Well, naming the chateaux means that people can find your site by searching for “accommodation near chateau versailles” if you’ve named it. Name everything that you can from beaches to zoos as you’ve no idea what future guests will be interested in.

Secondly, there’s the problem of updating the information. The majority of sites seem to operate on the basis that the local attractions never change. If it’s an historic chateau that may be largely true but it’s not completely true as there are often pageants associated with chateaux and they do change from year to year. More modern attractions change much more frequently with possibly the extreme case being the Disney parks where they seem to be constantly announcing new rides. Any photos you use should be updated on a regular basis and usually you shouldn’t be using a photo of something that’s more than 3 or 4 years old if you can avoid it.

Thirdly, there’s the business of organising the information which is often largely neglected. Guests do take apart guides left in a property and reshuffling things is a pain but it’s something that needs to be done because the idea behind producing a guide in the first place is both to make your guests’ stay an enjoyable one but also to give them ideas to either stay longer or come back to see things they missed. How you organise it depends to some extent on your place and what’s around in terms of attractions. Some places do themed guides so they’ll group all chateaux together, all beaches together and so on. However, that ignores the time required to travel from your place to the various attractions: clearly someone staying overnight isn’t going to be interested in travelling several hours to some chateau. Therefore, it’s probably more useful to organise the information by distance from your place so, for example, everything within 20 minutes (ie just around you), up to an hour (effectively a morning/afternoon excursion) and finally day-trip things (up to a couple of hours drive). What we do is follow the themed approach for the website and the distance approach for the guide in the property.

What’s important though is that your guide doesn’t gradually become more and more out of date. Whilst you could use Marco Polo’s book to explore China, it wouldn’t be an overlly practical guide.

How do you avoid the archaic guide syndrome? On the Internet site the ideal plan is to re-examine all the sources of information that you used to create the guide in the first place and apply updates as required. If you originally worked from actual guide books then you’ll need to purchase the new editions of these (usually they come out every 2 or 3 years).

The “pile of brochures” is a different matter. For a start, don’t make it a pile, organise it in a folder. Our own guide is organised into a section covering the surrounding area (basically everything within 20 minutes of our place), another covering the local region (within an hours drive) and finally one covering day-trips (up to around two hours drive from us). Thus if they’re only staying a day they will find something to do in the surrounding area, a couple of days lets them explore the region and longer lets them do day-trips. This works quite well and is fairly easy to get back into order after guests have pulled it apart. Although you may need to keep ones up to a year old to enable you to collect the latest version for regular festivals and the like, you should weed out anything more than a year old.

This is very much a winter season task although you’ll generally need to have taken the photos for your update during the summer. Incidently, forget about using camera phones for taking these photos: at the very least you need a good compact camera. See our camera guide for more on this.

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I read an article a while back in the Connexion about integrating yourself into French society and one piece of advice was to speak French to the kids and ban English TV which set me thinking.

That’s the path to full integration into French society for your children and, to a lesser extent, for yourself. However, before starting down that path it’s best to consider what the result might be, say, 20 years down the line.

The most obvious aspect of that approach will be that your children won’t be able to speak English unless they can already speak it and even then, depending on their current age, their fluency in English may drop off substantially. For example, a child that is five years old when you move will only ever speak like a five year old at best and, if you’re very strict about not using English, probably not even as well as that.

The effect of this approach is to rob your kids of the chance of being bilingual. Moreover, it’s strategy that is trying to be “more French than the French” because a growing number of the French are finding that speaking English is an advantage in todays world. OK, France as a country may not like that situation, but that’s the reality.

As well as the obvious effect on their language, this approach also robs your children of knowing about your culture.  In effect, they will grow up to be French rather than British/French and to them the UK will be a foreign country. Whether you think that a bad thing or a good thing it’s something that you should think about now rather than years down the line as many people tend to.

But what about you? How integrated do you want to be? You might think that even if you watch French TV constantly, read French papers, etc. that you won’t lose your English. Well, it’s true that it’s unlikely that you’ll lose it but it will become dated. For example, consider if you’d moved in 1988. How much has the UK changed since Thatcher? You don’t fully understand French taxation now I’m sure, but with a 20 year gap, would you understand UK taxation? I think not. Scotland didn’t have it’s own government then but it could even be a separate country in 20 years time: how much would that change UK culture? Even if you’d left as little as ten years ago, chances are you’d not know the English terms for e-mail and the like and be quoting your Minitel address to people. But you get the idea - the longer that they are out of touch with UK life, the more it will seem like a foreign country.

Whilst you may love the French culture and have moved to France to live it, you need to consider whether or not you want your children to actually be French. Being French means that your own country will be foreign to them. They may even grow up unable to speak to their grandparents. Don’t forget too that this can happen quite quickly if your children are young and that many people return home after several years. For your children that may no longer be “home” and you could find that they need to go into remedial English classes before they can even go to school.

So how French do you want to be? How French do you want your children to be? How French do you want your grandchildren to be?

They’re not easy questions to answer, but you should think about them.

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Perhaps the most obvious assumption they make is that Wendy is Superwoman.

Contrary to the received wisdom of guests, it’s not actually possible to remake rooms the instant that the previous guests vacate them. Even if we dropped everything the moment a guest walked out the door it usually takes 30 minutes or so to prepare a room for the next guest. We have a relatively early checkin time of 3pm but others are as late as 6pm but the time from check out to check in is there to enable the owners to prepare the rooms for the next guests. A checkout time of 11am definitely doesn’t mean that you can check in from 11am too!

Of course, we are rarely in the position to drop everything anyway as we’re generally keeping the breakfast room running first thing, checking out guests, clearing up the breakfast room and checking to see if there have been any more bookings during the night. Therefore, it’s generally into lunchtime before we have most of the rooms ready.

Related to this, there is sometimes the assumption that the owners are 100% available to each and every guest. This falls down because there are more guests than there are of us and therefore we can’t be working constantly with one guest to the exclusion of all the others. Most of the time that’s fine but since we don’t have a 1:1 staff to guest ratio on (fairly) rare occasions it doesn’t when several guests want our undivided attention at the same time.

Then there’s the assumption that because we live on the premises, we’re available 24 hours a day. That one falls down because, unlike Superwoman, we need to sleep and therefore we don’t run a 24 hour reception and neither do we serve food at all hours of the day. Yet despite that we have received complaints that we wouldn’t do breakfast at 5am, that we wouldn’t spend 2 hours ferrying people to the train at 6am and that we went to bed before 2am. Clearly, there’s some flexibility in our opening hours but not to the extent that we can constantly stay open well after midnight whilst reopening for breakfast before 6am.

Then there is the assumption that because they have paid for a breakfast that everything is theirs. For example, we reuse unused jams to reduce the cost of providing the breakfast and we also don’t buy enough baguettes to enable guests to make up sandwiches for their lunch. If we were trying to cover the takeaway lunch as well we’d need to increase the breakfast price at least 50%.

There’s also the assumption that no matter how large the booking is, it’s still possible to cancel as though you were cancelling a one night booking. Group bookings are very different affairs to normal ones and it’s rarely possible to rebook the rooms that a large group leave if they cancel early and therefore different charging rules often apply.

Perhaps most interesting is the assumption that you can book on one website because the price is lower but take the advantages of the better conditions listed on another site. Thus we get people booking through systems which cost us 15% commission plus VAT whilst simultaneously looking for the 10% discount that they’d get had they booked directly with us.

Naturally, accommodation owners are all mind readers and/or fortune tellers. Somehow we are supposed to magically know how a guest will be coming, which plane or train they’ll be taking and when they’ll be getting here. Some guests have even discovered facilities to book meals on websites which are hidden to normal mortals yet oddly these facilities don’t seem to reveal to them the times that we’re open for meals.

Finally, there is the assumption that “if it’s not nailed down, it’s to take away”. We spend quite a while preparing a guidebook which we place in each room yet now and again we get people attempting to walk away with the whole thing. Similarly, we pretty much ran out of teaspoons and hand towels over the last year which, in large businesses would be called wastage, but which we call theft. Perhaps most peculiar in this area was one couple who between them managed to get through 28 toilet rolls in a week; quite how they managed to pack them all in their cases is beyond us to this day.

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