Our Inns

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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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Most people are finishing off their main guest season at this point and perhaps settling down to consider what lessons they might carry forward to next year.

One key thing is the idea of rightstocking. Whilst you don’t want to overstock perishable items over the summer you also don’t want to run out of essentials through understocking. Unfortunately, that’s not an easy balance to strike as often the end of the season comes quite abruptly.

For example, in our own case we found that this year we were running almost fully occupied right through to the final days of the season. Whilst the money coming in is obviously useful, that pattern of booking makes right-stocking very difficult indeed. All of a sudden we found ourselves dropping from almost 20 breakfasts in a morning down to four. Thus instead of going through half a box of sugar in a morning we were down to half a bowl and likewise for everything else.

That pattern is fine for things that have a fairly long shelf life but even cornflakes doesn’t come with a shelf-life of more than nine months or so thus the boxes of cereal that we have left are likely to last that little bit too long. Things like butter may only have a shelf life of a month or so which matters quite a lot eg in our case we went from using 20 butter portions a day down to just four so what we previously used in a day now lasts a week. However, even for the non-perishables such as wine you don’t want to be carrying too much stock over into the following year as it just ties up money you could use elsewhere and, of course, makes it more difficult to roll out any format changes that you might be planning.

For a change, we find ourselves almost exactly rightstocked this year with most things although more by chance than design if truth be told. In practical terms we’re lucky in that we’re small enough to be able to munch our way through the things that are likely to reach their sell-by date before any guests would get around to eating them but if we were just a little larger that wouldn’t be a runner.

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