Our Inns

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OK, perhaps not yet but we do hope to be eventually

Seriously though, thanks to all the guests who booked via our sites over the last year and thanks too to all those accommodation owners who supported us throughout that year. We hope that we provided y’all with a service that you felt was useful.

Over 2008 we grew quite a bit in size, just about doubling the number of listings during the course of the year and adding a number of new countries to our fold. We’ve also added property sales to our little empire on the same basis to try and help people regain control of the sale of their properties from the estate agents. Finally, of course, this blog was born too and we hope that it’s provided people with information helpful to the marketing of their accommodation properties.

What’s in store for next year? Well, we’ll likely be adding a few more countries over the year I expect. Lots more new property listings too, of course. In amongst that we’ll be adding some more improvements to the sites and probably adding a few more domains to our stable to help us to reach more guests for our owners. We feel that we’ve pretty much completed the initial reference entries for this blog that we were aiming to do when we started so it’ll be starting to move into different areas over the coming year.

And for us personally there’s a relocation coming up as we move operations from entirely France based to a UK/France split. That doesn’t directly affect the listings sites which are currently hosted in the UK and America but it will likely have an impact on the content of the blog entries in due course.

Finally, we’d like to wish the global economy the best of luck in getting out of the current mess. I’m not so sure that the measures being put in place by the various governments around the world will be enough to pull us out of what sometimes seems like a tailspin into oblivion so we’re gonna need a little luck to get us through.

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Let’s face it, most people don’t get terribly organised on their holidays and figure that everything will work out fine in the end.

However, ’tis the owners of the various establishments that they come in contact that need to organise that “working out fine” bit and in a lot of cases that falls to the places that they’re staying with. That’s YOU, so what do you do about it?

First off, remember that it’s not your responsibility to sort out everything for them. Yes, you’ll try to help but you need to make clear where your help will run out. This is very important as you’re unlikely to be able to sort out everything.

For example, we had a party of 12 that arrived during a very popular local festival recently who booked about almost two months in advance, quoted an invalid credit card, didn’t book any transport as we advised and didn’t book any meals. The invalid card meant that we cancelled their reservation and they were lucky that we still had enough rooms to accommodate them. They arrived and said they’d like to book a car yet found that because of the festival there was only one four seater car available. No meals booked and the festival falling after the end of the main holiday season meant that we weren’t in a position to provide any. Net effect of this was that they spent nearly six hours per day ove four days ferrying everyone back and forth to the festival in a EUR 200/day Mercedes sportscar.

It’s usually easy to pick out the dis-organised people: they’re the large groups by and large. Yes, there may be a group leader but we’ve found that whilst the leadership skills might be fine (”let’s go there”), the management skills are distinctly lacking (”em, can we get a car without a driving license?”).

That being the case, it’s usually best to add that little bit more to your acknowledgement e-mail for group reservations with a view to highlighting as many of the potential problems that a large group might find. For example, there are usually lots of small cars available but fairly few minibuses (which may need special driving licenses) therefore groups need to book their transport early. Also highlight limitations in the services that you can make available. For example, our group came with 12 separate laptops and our internet connection couldn’t cope with that many at once. Likewise, whilst we offer an airport pickup service we can’t realistically deal with more than 3 or 4 people at once.

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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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