Running a gite: Tips for communicating with guests

Communicating with your holiday home guests can sometimes be quite a challenge! Pete O’Grady shares some common areas where problems arise…

Renting out your holiday home in France requires some pretty good communication skills between owner/rental agency and guests. It never ceases to amaze us how many times you have to explain something to guests or how many mediums you have to use to actually get your message across. The team at Prestige have come across many scenarios, some of which we’ll share with you here, showing a typical life cycle of a guest enquiry and booking.

INITIAL ENQUIRY

This is where it all starts. No matter how clear your property listing is about only allowing, for example, minimum seven- day stays in high season, with Saturday as changeover day, for a maximum of six people and no pets, you will still receive guest enquiries asking if they can book for ‘three days in July arriving on a Monday, for eight people (they will bring their own tent for the extra two!) plus their two dogs’. They can sometimes get quite indignant when you turn them down!

INSTANT BOOKING

Instant bookings bring their own issues. A guest books your home for a week arriving on a Saturday and pays a rental deposit online without needing to contact you. The first you hear about this is when the booking channel, e.g. AirBnB tell you about this done deal. Your initial euphoria then turns to disbelief when the guest later requests that the same two extra guests and two dogs be allowed to come along. Although you tell them that this is not acceptable, you’re then on alert and will want to check how many people and pets actually turn up on the day. If you’re an owner who lives close to the holiday home then you can easily keep an eye on things yourself. However, if you pay a property manager to prepare your holiday home and they only return to the house once the guests have departed to carry out the next changeover once the departing guests have already moved on then you may never know – apart from maybe paying for extra cleaning courtesy of the dogs shedding their hair over your furniture and carpets. If this happens then you should be able to retain part of the prepaid security deposit to cover your extra costs.

ONLINE PAYMENTS

Sometimes guests tell us that our payment link issued to them does not work. This seems unlikely to us because we use Stripe, which is acknowledged worldwide as an established and simple online payment mechanism using a bank or credit card. We can log in to our Stripe account and see that they may have indeed tried to pay several times (highest number of attempts to date is 12!).

After lots of dialogue with the guest who is getting more anxious with each failed payment attempt, it generally goes very quiet and the Stripe informs us that the payment has worked. The guests then tells us that they have fixed the problem – this is more likely code for the fact that they finally followed the online instructions correctly!

CHEQUES FOR SECURITY DEPOSITS

We still encounter a few guests who want to use a cheque to pay for their security deposit, handed to the owner on arrival, and don’t expect the owner to cash the cheque unless there are breakages etc. These guests are usually French and they are surprised by our refusal to accept this payment method. As many holiday homes are accessed by the guests using keys stored in a keybox, i.e. with no one meeting the guests on arrival, then no one will be available to receive the cheque.

Like most agencies we require all security deposits to be either paid by card or bank transfer and in advance of the holiday. This puts us and the owner in the driving seat in the event of a problem downrange. Some guests even offer to hand over several hundred euros in cash on arrival. If this was accepted by a local owner then the owner must be prepared to check over the property before these guests depart and confront them face to face in the event of any issues or disputes. This is not something that many people are comfortable with.

RETURNING DEPOSITS

If a guest pays for their security deposit by card then they must be reminded that although we may authorise the release of this deposit back to them in a timely manner, it could take 10 business days before Stripe and their own bank complete the transaction. On occasions we have had to screenshot evidence of these details to guests who think we are holding on to their funds for too long.

If a guest pays by bank transfer, they should also be reminded that any bank fees/ charges incurred by us will be deducted from the amount returned to them after their stay. Otherwise, it can cost us, for example, €20 just to receive and return a €400 deposit.

CHANGING BOOKINGS

Sometimes the guest wants to add more people, beds, pets after they have confirmed their booking. This may be perfectly acceptable for your property provided that the maximum occupancy is not breached and pets are allowed (maybe for a small additional charge). However, we find that guests who make a request for specific beds to be made up in specific bedrooms often do so multiple times because they can’t make up their own minds about who is arriving, when, and who sleeps where. The most important thing is to remember to keep the owner/property manager up to date with all the changes or simply make up all the beds regardless.

ACCESSING THE PROPERTY

This remains one of life’s mysteries to us! We send guests a url web link for an online guidebook tailored to each holiday home. This comprehensive guide contains details of how to get there, how to get in, what to do (and not do) in the house, what to do on the last day of their stay, what’s in the area, all contact details for local and emergency services and so on. The guidebook is available in many languages and is mobile friendly so that it can be easily shared among all members of the guest party who have a mobile phone.

The link is issued to guests as soon as they have paid in full, again several weeks before their holiday starts, and yet again a few days before they set off on their travels. We send these links by email, SMS and Whatsapp. Despite our best efforts, some guests actually get to the property and then ring us asking for the key code. They claim that they have never received the link from us and that their mobile is currently out of battery so can we just tell them the code. It turns out that both of these statements are untrue – how did they know where to turn up for their holiday if they hadn’t received the link to the guidebook and the mobile number that we issued the links to is actually the one that they are ringing us from!

Obviously simple and clear instructions are needed for guests in this modern world of online bookings, card payments, bank transfers and email/SMS/Whatsapp, and these instructions should be repeated as many times as required to ensure that your message has been received. Getting the guest to acknowledge receipt of your messages is always best, and an advantage of Whatsapp messages is that you can quickly see what has been received and then read by the recipient.

Pete O’Grady runs Prestige Property Services, offering assistance for owners of second and holiday homes in France.

Tel: 0033 (0)2 97 22 99 12