Our Inns

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.

Popularity: 78% [?]

One of the perennial issues when you take over an existing business is whether or not you should put up an “Under New Management” sign or not.

If previous owners were putting off guests then you probably should put one up. After all, people may decide to book somewhere else based on all the bad reviews that your place had been getting (if this seems likely, you should also change the name).

However, in the majority of cases, the previous owners aren’t really that bad. Putting up a sign when the previous owners were anything from average to good means that you’re likely to lose customers because some people will book because they were the owners.

Where you can come unstuck is that if your marketing image is significantly different from that of the previous owners you have effectively put up the sign anyway which is something to be wary of. You might think that your new image for the place is absolutely wonderful but the last thing you want to do is to lose the existing regulars which, in some cases I’ve seen, can amount to over 25% of the guest list each year.

It’s more difficult of course when you’re in the situation where you will be running the place significantly differently from the previous owners. In these cases you need to make it clear in your marketing what you do. For example, if the previous owners offered airport pickups but you don’t, then it might be better to state that explicitly. On the other hand, be positive about the extra things that you do as well eg if you’re an award winning chef and the previous owners weren’t then say so.

So, unless the previous owners are truly dreadful, don’t erect a sign as such but do be clear in your advertising where you differ from them.

Popularity: 32% [?]

When you’ve been marketing your property for a while you’ll find that you begin to get what eventually becomes a flood of fraudulent bookings.

In some ways, that’s a good thing in that it’s an indication that your marketing is working. However, it can quickly become a major pain.

Replying to these people has the disadvantages that they now know that they have a valid e-mail address and secondly that it wastes time that you could be spending on getting real guests. Therefore it’s worthwhile considering how you can weed them out.

The first action of most people is to activate a spam filter. This does thin out the numbers considerably but it has the major downside that it also blocks e-mails from genuine guests. Now, granted it lets the vast majority of genuine e-mails through but you obviously don’t want to block any genuine enquiries ie in activating a spam filter you need to accept that you will lose genuine bookings.

What’s considerably more effective is a two stage process for most people. First, change your booking e-mail address and then replace any references to your e-mail address by a link to an encoded form. For example, to e-mail me you can click here and anyone listed on the OurInns sites can do the same thing. This has the advantages that 1) your e-mail address is never displayed on the site and therefore can’t be captured by automatic scanning programs and 2) e-mailing via the form is difficult to automate ie it’s less likely that you’ll get spam that way. The OurInns system provides adds automatic blocking of bulk e-mails and a check for the location of the sender.

However, regardless of what you do, you’re still going to get some of these fraud bookings coming through.

Once you’ve seen a number of them you’ll get a feel for what’s real and what’s not. For example, many will be from some (usually) religious organisation, there will be major grammar errors in them and they’ll use free e-mail addresses such as hotmail or yahoo. That said, organisations obviously do make bookings, real people have dreadful grammar and they use hotmail and yahoo addresses but, on the whole, it’s an overall view of the enquiry that’ll ring bells for you.

The other type of fraudulent booking that you’ll get is from people who require a visa to enter the country. Generally speaking you’ll get these if you offer an instant booking facility on your site because they require proof that they’ve booked accommodation to get the visa. The characteristics of these are that they are 1) from nationals of countries that require a visa and 2) they are usually for unusually long periods for your cheapest room. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to separate these out from the real bookings: clearly you can’t just reject bookings from, say, non-Europeans as that would include a great deal of real bookings. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to reject unusually long bookings as some people from distant countries do stay longer than average.

What you need to do in these cases is to add an extra paragraph to your booking conditions requiring all visa nationals to 1) provide you with a copy of their passport and their visa and 2) charge them the full balance upfront on a non-refundable basis. Most European countries require you to record the passport details of non-Europeans that stay with you so legally you’re fine on the first point and it simplifies any required visa application if they can prove that they’ve paid a non-refundable deposit so genuine guests are OK with the second point.

Finally, you’ll usually find that the number of fraud bookings increases dramatically in the peak season. Clearly that’s the most lucrative time for most of us and we don’t want to be holding rooms for duff bookings so over the peak periods, it’s usually best to ignore any bookings that you’ve any doubts about as the rooms that you’d have to hold for them will be taken by real people making enquiries that you’re happy with.

Popularity: 32% [?]