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Do your guests leave it clean and tidy?


JJ
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[quote user="Judyc"]

Pun

You may not be trying to preach to anyone, but you are making a jolly good job of it!  As Itf says, many of us have been running gites for a number of years and have learned from first hand experience. 

You remind me of my working life when every year a new university graduate would arrive and immediately tell us where we, who had been doing the job for years, were all going wrong.  After all, they had  a degree and had learned it all out of a book.   No doubt they had valuable contributions to make but to think they immediately knew everything and we were all numbskulls did not go down well. I am intrigued to know what your job was that makes you so qualified to lecture to us idiots?  Obviously something not requiring spelling and grammar.

Many of our guests (and us included) have stayed in places where there were rules and regulations and lectures and beauracracy, and guess what....they invariably hate it and never go back.  Ditto Itf again - when our guests arrive, they are shown the gite, (including the fridge with the wine and cold beer) shown the pool and told how the alarms work and shown the file that contains all the information they could need.  Then they are offered a cup of tea or a cold beer and made to feel welcome.  There are fire alarms in our gites, but I certainly don't feel the need to show them they work.  We have tested them and know they do.  The guests will correctly assume they do.  Perhaps we are lucky (or not) that we are on site.  The guests can and do come to us for all sorts of information and help, and we have done everything from booking restaurants, to accompanied visits to doctors and dentists to dealing with the sudden death of a guest. 

I am concerned from your posting that you think pool checking is a once a week thing?  I hope I am wrong.  A pool can turn extremely quickly, particularly in the thundery weather and if it happens on any day other than a Monday, to tie in with your regime, you could be in for a nasty shock.  You say you are sure that your guests don't want the owner to be there every day - I am sure they would prefer you to be there for pool cleaning and checking every day, than be swimming in a cloudy pool.  Mine is cleaned and checked at 7am every morning, at no inconvenience to the guests.

And guess what?  Guests don't always do what your rules/lectures have told them!!!  Wait until you are up to your arms in s**t trying to clear the fosse pipes because teenage girls ignore the notices not to put anything except what nature intended into the fosse.  Plastic cotton buds followed by an half a loo roll is not fosse friendly and has a nasty habit of blocking everything up.  Wait until you see the abuse your gite will get from people who are just thoughtless with other people's property.  I spent ages one winter sanding down and varnishing the kitchen worktop in a gite.  It looked beautiful.  We were then invited into the gite for a drink early in the season, and watched in horror as the guest cut up a lemon on my worktop, having ignored the chopping boards right next to him.  The customer may be king, but even kings can be a royal pain in the ****.

Every guest brings a new situation or problem that you learn from and sometimes you might want to scream with frustration.  It doesn't mean we don't enjoy what we do.  We have been running our gites for eight years, and consitently have a repeat/referral booking rate of more than 60%.  We must be doing something right, and if we are it is through talking and listening to our guests, talking to other gite owners and reading some of the excellent advice given on this forum.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion on this forum.  But please, don't try to teach granny to suck eggs when you have only just finished reading the book about where to find them!

 

 Hang on a minute, by telling your guest how to use the pool security system and showing them the cool wine in the fridge.

is in your words not a lecture but if I say it  to  my customers, in your book im giving lectures,

ref your long term service to the gite world, the new" by  french law" pool regulations only came in two years ago, and Im sure more new laws will also come in during the future, will this give you old hands some sort of  "I was here first so no body dare tell me of any thing new"

This thread is for every member and no body is speaking to you alone,

If I felt the need to have a word with you only, I'd use the P.M. system. ( But I dont.)

The day you feel you have no more to learn is the day to put the mirror away and tell the world you know it all.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Bottom line is that its about balance.  I would not dream of leaving the place a mess on departure, but neither do i expect to spend 4-5 hours of the last day, up to my neck in cleaning, doing what essentially is teh gite owners job, in preparing for the next customer. Is it really reasonable to expect to do nothing for your money.  The absolute p*ss-takers deserve having a levy charged to them, but as a gite owner i think you need to expect to do something after each departure.  I think it is also about differing standards.  I have been to gites where myself and wife have had to clean before we unpack, but the gite owner obviously thought it was good enough to move into.  My suggestion, up your rental costs to include a fee for cleaning.  Sometimes it will be needed other times not.  If not, as a goodwill gesture you could surprise the last rentee by sending an unexpected refund for leaving the place tidy....seems like a good PR stunt to me.

As a guide, my standards when departing are:

Empty all bins into binliners and put binliners out for collection. Toilets are clean, personal rubbish such as newspapers, magazines etc are packed or thrown away, curtains opened, windows opened for fresh air, cutlery and plates washed or dishwasher loaded and running, outside areas tidied and anything used put back where i found it. Beds stripped and sheets piled for collection.  All told less tahn an hour of effort.  If you want it gutting, you need to do that yourself...im on holiday :-))

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[quote user="Chief"]Empty all bins into binliners and put binliners out for collection. Toilets are clean, personal rubbish such as newspapers, magazines etc are packed or thrown away, curtains opened, windows opened for fresh air, cutlery and plates washed or dishwasher loaded and running, outside areas tidied and anything used put back where i found it. Beds stripped and sheets piled for collection.  All told less tahn an hour of effort.  If you want it gutting, you need to do that yourself...im on holiday :-))[/quote]

That's exactly what I would like all my guests to do, I wouldn't expect anymore than that. Most do.

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  • 1 month later...

[quote]You kind of sound like the customer from hell who thinks that his money gives him the right to behave however he likes...[/quote]

Wow, Claire...make assumptions much?

For your information I do no such thing. And I've put up with some pretty crumby service but never really complained...just vowed never to go back.

And yep...this thread is for B and B owners and gite owners etc....I am speaking as a customer. Any industry that just wants to talk amongst itself and not refer to the consumers is doomed to decline.

The customer IS king. No ifs . No buts. What else is a gite for? Without a customer staying in it its not a gite...its an empty house. And it would STILL need cleaning.

And of course like everyone I have found aspects of jobs distasteful and not much fun. And I have got cross and frustrated about those aspects. There are customers/clients/ colleagues that have had me spitting feathers. HOWEVER. I have never felt inclined to do my whinging about it on a public forum where those customers....or even worse, would be customers....can read it.  As I said before...you won't change people. You will continue to get good ones and bad and all shades inbetween. If you are in a service industry you simply have to suck it up and slap a show-business smile on even though your teeth are gritted. Unless real damage is done to your property its really just a bit of cleaning.

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