Our Inns

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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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You might think you’re doing a pretty good job with your guests but then you start receiving unexpected comments either in the guest book or, more likely, on various websites that have been set up to collect complaints.

Almost always you’ll find that what’s written in the guestbook is broadly good. They liked the place, liked the area, and so on. However, whilst people seem very reluctant to go public with bad comments in the guestbook, they will do just that on a variety of websites which may take you by surprise.

What’s very common is that you’ll get a dreadful comment about a particular room and the next comment will say that the same room was excellent. The thing that has changed in this case is often outside the room and indeed outside your property: they had a duff holiday for some reason and they take it out on you. So, for example, we had a group staying recently for a wedding that didn’t go particularly well so we took the hit for that. Yet the very next night someone whose car had caught fire and who had a really awful day thought the room was fantastic. In a similar vein in the peak season you’ll often get people staying who really wanted to be staying somewhere else so obviously they’ll rate you pretty low on your location and indeed on any point where you fall down on in comparison to the place they’d wanted to be in.

Somewhat odd these days is the assumption on the part of a number of French guests is that everyone in the place will be French. Obviously the majority of French holiday accommodation is French owned but one would have thought that they’d come across non-French owned places before. However, even more peculiar were a couple of criticisms to the effect that in the breakfast room nobody else was speaking French. This was because everyone else that day was German, Spanish or Danish. But the gold star for the most bizarre comment in this area was from a German couple who complained that we didn’t speak French to them. What’s really odd about this one is that we didn’t speak French to them because they couldn’t speak French!

Then there’s the surreal eg “there was nobody at all in the hotel and nobody at reception when we arrived or checked out”. That was on a night when we were completely full. What’s even more puzzling is how they thought they received the room key and paid their bill without seeing anyone. Obviously I had been wearing my Cloak of Invisibility that I keep for special occasions!

Finally, what you may also get from time to time are comments which are out and out lies. The surreal one above clearly falls into that category and you’ll get many others that are seemingly politically motivated. For example, some incredibly negative comments we’ve had are from French guests who basically hate the English (although we’re not English they assume that we are). Essentially their underlying criticism is that you’re not French. Ironically, the worst of these recently was from a couple from Alsace who were of German descent and actually less French than we are as our family is originally from France!

That’s not to say that all guest comments are crazy because we have taken up a considerable number of suggestions from guests over the years. However, what you need to bear in mind that people will more often criticise than praise and that these days they tend to criticise in public.

What you will find though is that the majority of the websites that accept these critical comments won’t remove them even when you can prove that they are wrong or are from “guests” that you didn’t even have. Some will let you respond to the comments but many won’t. The only thing you can do to counteract these is to respond when the facility is available and perhaps to create an online version of your guest book to give people a more realistic view of what your place is like.

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Many places tend to treat repeat customers specially through offering discounts, extra services, or whatever.

However, they remain customers and one of the key things about that is that you need to get money off them for whatever goods or services that you sell, even if they are both a repeat customer and a large one.

One trap to fall into is to be more lax with the payment terms. Unless you habitually offer credit then you shouldn’t offer it to even the best of customers as sooner or later it’ll just cause needless friction between you and a good customer. If it’s pay on delivery for everyone else then that should be the case for even the best customers too as your sales contract probably doesn’t allow for any credit in such circumstances: a recipe for trouble collecting the cash if ever there was one.

So, yes, offer better discounts to better customers. Yes, offer, additional services to better customers. But, NO, don’t change your payment terms.

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