A problem shared
Communicating with your holiday home guests can sometimes be quite a challenge! Pete O’Grady shares some common areas where problems arise
R
enting 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
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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
Accepting a security deposit in cash is a no-no 64 FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS: September/August 2023
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.
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