COMMENT For instance, if they wanted to use the gas
The price of happiness
Being charged for ‘extras’ can really spoil your holiday WORDS ALAN COCHRANE ILLUSTRATION STEPHEN DAY
T
his column has discussed before the thorny subject of how welcoming we should be to our tourists, or ‘paying
guests’, to use the old, but accurate, expression. Differentiating between proper service and servility has always been a problem for we Brits, and for Scots in particular. However, this month I’d like to tackle a subject even closer to the heart of my compatriots: value for money. How generous should we be towards those
who pay to visit our country or rent our houses or rooms, and how do we judge how much their money should buy from us? The question arose when a friend returned
from a very expensive week in a West Coast mansion he’d rented with a number of friends. It’s in such demand that it has to be booked at least a year in advance, and costs a couple of thousand per week – not too much when shared out among all the families. What did stick in their craw, however, was the ‘extras’ – items that any reasonable person might have thought would have been included in the rental.
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Alan Cochrane is the Daily Telegraph’s Scottish Editor
barbecue at this particular house – let’s call it Château Despair – the sum of £50 was required. That’s a helluva lot of gas and a massive amount of hamburgers. If guests wished to use the wood-burning stove, meanwhile, a further thirty quid had to be stumped up – that worked out at something like a pound a stick. I’m certain that this grasping attitude isn’t
typical of the majority of people in Scotland with houses to let to tourists – I’ve stayed in some smashing lodges where all the hot water you can use and all the logs you can burn are included in the price – but there are quite a few Château Despairs around too. The most dispiriting sight in my holiday
renting experience has been that of the electricity meter, with its seemingly insatiable appetite for 50p pieces. The venerable editor of this publication tells me that he spent almost an entire holiday feeding 50ps into one such meter – and he doesn’t take kindly to that sort of expenditure, I can tell you. Convinced that we Scots are more stingy
than our foreign cousins, I decided to compare and contrast while in France this summer. We’ve found it’s much cheaper to rent houses from French (or Belgian or Dutch or German) owners in the South of France than from British owners abroad. That said, there is no doubt that you get a lot less ‘stuff’ in your maison de vacances if you rent from a foreign owner. This year we rented from a Belgian, and to
say his property was Spartan was to do that hardy race an injustice. There was no oven for a start; if you can’t afford to eat out every night, which we can’t, an oven is essential, if only for heating pizzas. On top of that, and in no particular order,
there were hardly any knives of either the table or the cutting kind, not enough glasses of the wine variety, no jugs, milk or otherwise, and hardly any bowls. There was no kettle and only a threadbare mop. And there was only one corkscrew, which always seemed to be missing – thank God for my trusty Swiss Army knife. Our teenage daughters thought we were making too big a deal of the missing ‘stuff’ and suggested we add ‘no cheese grater, no gravy boat and no decanter’ to our list. I suppose they have a point. Do guests
expect too much? Or do owners and renters try to get away with providing as little as possible? There surely has to be a happy medium. But who decides how much ‘stuff’ each of us needs to have a happy holiday? Perhaps the best maxim would be the oldest one of all: ‘Do unto others …’ Still, everyone’s needs are different. Chacun à son goût, as we say in Dundee.
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