The second best place to advertise your gîtes

[SC]

AND the best place to ensure that we all have improved bookings in the future:

 

We currently have bookings for twenty two weeks for our three gîtes for 2006, nineteen of which are by guests who have stayed before, some coming back for the second time, others for the third, fourth, and in one case fifth. There will be more. The cost to us? Making sure that our gîtes were built, furnished, decorated, and equipped to a high standard, are thoroughly cleaned between guests, that everything works, and that they and their situation is as good as we advertise it to be.

 

Of four of our guest families who took a two-centred holiday last year, one stayed in a faultless gîte in the heart of the Dordogne (feel free to e-mail me, I’ve kept their website address), another stayed in Poitou-Charentes and spent a fortune on phone calls to the UK trying to get some hot water in a generally grubby gîte (an hour from the sea, advertised as 20 minutes), a third rung us up asking if they could stay with us after a freezing night in a gîte black with mould, and a fourth arrived at their gîte near Ploermel in Brittany to find it (including the beds) so dirty they left immediately for the UK, losing a week of their summer holiday.  All the gîtes were British owned.

 

A letter in the current December LF, headed Holiday Dismay, chronicles a family’s decision to holiday elsewhere in future after failing to find a clean, well equipped cottage with a pool in different regions of France over the past six years.

 

Some of our guests go back to see mucky gîtes where they had stayed on previous years and complained about to their owners, to find exactly the same situation wrecking the holiday of another family staying there. Think about it, you plan and choose your holiday, you and your family look forward to it for months, and when you arrive its way below what you expect. Dismay is the right word.

 

Brittany Ferries’ Owners in France’s advertisers received a letter earlier in the year outlining an anticipated fall of 18% in trips to France (all operators) for 2005, on top of a 4% decline in Brittany Ferries passengers during 2004.

 

What worries me is that new customers may be put off booking decent gîtes like mine by their bad experiences elsewhere, evidently with a sizeable number of owners, and it is only a matter of time before UK consumer programs pick this up and publicise it with disastrous results for all of us.

 

So, if anyone reads this who doesn’t get at least a few guests returning to holiday with them, you’re doing something wrong - forget extra magazine and website advertising, spend the money in your gîte, clean it properly between guests, and reap the rewards afterwards.

 

Steve

[Owens88]

I agree that making your customers happy is the best long term investment. We invest and overhaul before each season.

We have recently initiated a quality survey to our pool of renters. This after 3 seasons?

Does anybody have comments, such as doing it more frequently etc.?

Is this something that a third party (such as Living in France) could do for us, if only for neutrality but also to  generate benchmarks ?

John

 

[[email protected]<P><STRONG>Ross Elder<BR><STRONG><a target=_blank href="http:www.holidaylettings.co.uk"><STRONG>www.holidaylettings.co.uk<STRONG><A><P>]

I'd recommend two things.  Firstly ensuring that you have a guest book at the property for visitors to make use of during their stay.  Secondly, have a standard email that you send to all visitors upon their return to the UK asking for feedback and checking that everything was OK.  This way you get all the comments and suggestions while they are fresh in peoples minds and tackle any issues early.

Having all this feedback in writing is also useful for your marketing as you can use the best comments as testimonials/ references on any advertising to improve its effectiveness.  Good photos and feedback comments are the biggest two contributors to an effective piece of advertising material for a rental property.

One final recommendation is that you get a good relationship with your cleaners/management agent so that they advise you as soon as possible about any problems with the condition of the property - both in terms of maintenance issues and problem tenants.

Finally, best of luck with your rentals!

[SC]

John - the photos on your website make it clear that your gite is furnished and equipped to a high standard with good furnishings, and the books, pictures and toys make it so much more welcoming than gites with just the bare essentials, which in my experience often signals a more general lack of interest in the guests after their money is in the bank. The views from the terrace in particular, make me want to pick up the phone right away! I assume that with a UK phone number you must be relying on cleaners to handle your changeovers, and I think therefore that your quality survey is a very good idea - it shows your guests that you care, even after they've returned home. It's not surprising that you have a 'pool of renters'.

Ross - Owners can just pick comments from the blue and say they're quoting from their guestbooks. I know that guestbook comments often appear in adverts, but does anyone really believe them? I suppose if one uses the 'my favorite beach', 'we had a fantastic time at...', sort of comment, then it helps to set the scene. I wouldn't want to upset any of our regular guests by not using their comments on our website though, as you can be sure that they'd be looking out for them! You've made me think about it though, thank you.

I never found out if the comment in one of our guest books 'Don't go to Damgan in the mornings, because the tide is out' was intended to be funny or not!

Fortunately we do our own cleaning, and knowing how long it takes us, I dread to think how much we would have to pay someone else to do it to the same standard.

Steve

[Quillan]

Re guest books.

The thing about a guest book is that it is a tool for the owner and can increase business if used correctly. As most will know I don't have gites but I do have a B&B. It has never occurred to me to falsify our guest book although some have passed comment about the good comments we receive and how long did it take me to create it what with all the different styles and colours of ink .

What we do is scan our guest book, well actually we photograph it and put the pages on our website, we have never had an objection to this. After all they are probably the best form of advertising one can get.

We do at some point during their stay ask people what they think, if there is anything more we can do to make their stay better etc, usually after a meal and a few bottles of wine, loosens their tongue a bit. There have been one or two good ideas gained from this. Perhaps gite owners could phone their guests during their stay and ask them if all is OK? It's providing that personal touch and indicates you are interested in them, not just their money.

One of the questions we ask, other than how they found us, is what was the main reason for choosing us. Since putting the guests comments on the website the answer has been the ability to read what others have written. This year we have had the biggest ever growth in bookings which would suggest that the guest comments are helping.

Good photo's are, as has been said, very inportant. In the cae of B&B's, photo's of the bedrooms helps a lot as this is after all where the guests will sleep and they want to know they are going to be sleeping somewhere nice.

If you use staff to clean, which I guess a lot of gite owners do, then their selection is very important as are spot inspections by yourself wherever possible. A 'bad hair day' for a cleaner can mean the loss of a lot of money in return bookings. It takes only a minute to destroy your relationship with a guest but it could take months/years to get it back, if at all.

Part of the business is state of mind which should always be 'can do' and never say no. To many their holiday can be something they have saved for all year and is a very precious time for them. We always tell our guests to ask any question they like (however stupid it may sound), if we can't answer we will know 'a man that can'. We also tell them that we know their holiday is precious to them and anything we can do to highten their enjoyment of their holiday we will. Hardly anyone ever asks but it's nice for them to know they can.