Our Inns

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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.

Popularity: 90% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

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.

Popularity: 92% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Who among us hasn’t felt themselves drawn to a very old property that we felt would have been the ideal place for us in its heyday?

Well, those old properties can be restored to their former glory but don’t make the mistake of underestimating the time or cost that this will entail as Becky will attest.

The history of this particular house goes right back to 1136 when it was part of a grange and owned by a monastery. Ownership passed through Henry the eighth when he disolved the monasteries and subsequently sold in 1557 to the Kemeys in 1601 who carried out some building work from then ’til they sold it in 1793. The Howard family then bought it in 1793 and kept it until 1941 when it was split into apartments before being sold to developers in 1970. By 1972 it was scheduled for demolition but subsequently saved from that fate by the McLeod family who kept it safe until it was acquired fairly recently by Becky who has completed the restoration started by the McLeods. Becky has much, much more detail on the history of the estate.

As you’ll appreciate from this lengthy history the first question that arises is simply what to restore. After all the house changed quite significantly over the period from the initial construction. Naturally, there are no plans and few drawings or paintings to guide any restoration for any truly ancient period.

Since this building was scheduled for demolition, clearly the first task is to do whatever work is required to stop it actually falling down. For example, whilst the ivy looks cute on the house, it’s destroying the fabric of the building and left unchecked will demolish it therefore it has to go and the brickwork behind it needs to be repaired. All really old buildings are unique in the problems and challenges that they present. Here it’s ivy but others may have watercourses to deal with or perhaps trees undermining the foundations.

As Becky says, the cost of restoration using period materials and methods can be astronomical. However, it’s necessary to restore the building with those older methods because old and new often don’t mix well. For example, old buildings didn’t have damp courses and therefore needed to be able to get rid of rising damp in different ways. If you use new techniques on an old building you’ll end up with all kinds of problems arising from that particular difference in approach.

That massive cost of restoration has led to a number of owners going down the DIY route and therefore there are a number of courses that are available to owners who wish to carry out the restoration themselves.

It’s important to remember that you’re not alone in taking on restoration projects like this: help is out there. To start you off, I’ll shamelessly pinch the list of links that Becky has:

1. Period Property and Building Conservation have all kinds of resources for this from for sale listings, forums for owners, specialised property insurance, a directory to find the materials and lots more;
2. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and SAVE are there for a little handholding (SAVE lists some beautiful properties in need of someone to restore them).

Even if you’re not quite ready to restore a whole building by yourself you can help those who’ve got one of these properties in their upkeep and stay in a truly historic property.

Popularity: 32% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!