Of course, you must do what is right for you.
Sounds like these folk feel no responsibility. I bet they would dump the blame on you if anything “went wrong” during a rental… 
I think the challenge at the moment Jane is that it is not a “normal” clean between guests. For example, I would not normally put every single item from the kitchen into the dishwasher between each guest, which is what the protocol requires. I would normally check every glass, plate, item of cutlery etc and wash those that had smears or marks. Now, I need to do everything. And there’s no way I’m bringing anything into our house to wash it - everything stays in the cottage and gets cleaned there.
Also beds, not just a normal change of duvet cover/sheet/pillow case, but stripped down to mattress. Mattress hoovered (not ideal I know) mattress protectors changed and washed. Pillow protectors changed and washed.
I suppose if you are bringing the dirty linen out of the cottage and washing it elsewhere then that saves time, but as I say, I’m not bringing potentially contaminated items into our house. What gets contaminated in the cottage stays in the cottage and gets cleaned in the cottage.
Sorry to hear you are having problems Tim. I’m appalled at their selfishness. They are putting your and their guests lives at risk (and yes, I do mean lives!)
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By the way, by last night we’d had ten enquiries, mostly for the week of 8-15 august. I’ve decided next year I’m only going to accept 2 week bookings in July and August. Unfortunately I took the first enquirer who only wanted a week, whereas later on I had those wanting two weeks.
yes 8 hrs and 4 bedrooms but 2 are suites and cleaned with anti bac wip es etc normally.
Maybe my cleaners take too long
I found that the kitchen can be a mess especially the fridges need to be de cheeses and all the unused food taken away
the laundry is a separate matter and the garden and the pool
In the current scenario Barbara I’m asking our guests to take EVERYTHING they bring into the cottage away with them at the end, or into the bin. No food left in the fridge, no half used shampoo bottles, no books for the next guest, no tourist leaflets, etc - all of those are contamination risks.
what do you mean by walk away
It all seems to get harder does it not
that makes good sense
throw away all the contamination
everyone needs to play a part in safety
It’s very easy for remote “landlords” to say what they think needs to be done, got some friends in exactly the same situation. Just the threat of walking away would leave most of them shitting themselves.
We got our changeover done no problem, can’t get all the laundry done in the gite w/m, but never mind 
. Fortunately not got any double changeovers and a 3 week August booking, all French.
No, it’s not normal 
which is why it’s taking at least half as long again, changeover days are rather tiring anyway so will be fun this year. 
We are changing the whole bed, so duvet/pillows/mattress protectors etc get put in black bags, and three days later we air them for rest of week in time for next guests. Guests strip the sheets, pillow cases and protectors and put in another bag, again left for three days before being washed. Faster that way.
We are asking guests to use the hot wash cycle on dishwasher, and wash their hands before putting crockery etc away. I ask if they have done this. My view is that if all guests know what the cleaning regime is then their choice whether to trust it, or wash everything again themselves. We provide gloves and masks and cleaning materials.
They have to trust us that we had done things correctly, so not much different to trusting the previous guests. People have to accept that just by going on holiday they are exposing themselves to greater risk, and we will do what we can to protect them. But can give no 100% guarantees.
The leaflet says that if you leave it for 5 days then normal cleaning is ok. So booking alternate weeks would seem the most sensible option. Plus you have to factor in the time and money spent wiping coathangers with disinfectant etc etc !
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But when you already have bookings? And our contract says that if we cancel we have to pay them twice the full amount of the booking! (Why did we put that in!). So not an option, and since we already had back to back bookings for July have filled up cancelled weeks in August.
We have made our cleaning fee mandatory, and increased it to 60€ - so earn somewhat less than SMIC once factored in cost of eco-disinfectants…
yes Cat but Aug is the month to take some money 2 weeks is not enough
to host clients
The year of 2019 was great for us takings wise but one must realise the maintenance costs which have to be paid. Dangerous huge trees which need to be cut down by experts, leaky pool even though we had a new liner . We created a brand new kitchen to make life easier 10.000 euros.
But I enjoy my work and love the property
Thank goodness we have had clients who have taken their bookings forward until next year, except for one which is coming in September.
We thought that the best thing for us to do was to leave the gite untouched for five days and then clean as normal, though with the pattern of our bookings that would have been impossible as we had guests following on from one another.
With the way that people are reacting to release from lock down, who knows what will be happening even next year.
We will wait and see what happens. the other option is to sell as people from Lyon are looking for country houses in our area and we have two on the same piece of land with a swimming pool and enough land for a horse.
yes who knows what will happen next year exactly
I too have bookings for next year but oh but
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There is definitely a move from some French families who lived in towns to the countryside. Being cooped up with no garden was no fun for them. My work neighbour is one of them. They started looking after lockdown was eased up.
According to a on line site, the value of our house has gone up by 50,000 euros!
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We agreed a plan with every rental client - either a week’s gap or where that’s not possible (existing bookings for example) everything non-essential in the property is removed, a second set of bedding is sourced and on changeover day we carry out intensive cleaning involving more man hours, sadly two of the clients went back on their agreement after the bookings had started which leaves us in an awful position of either ignoring the Covid-19 cleaning guidelines and risking their guests health (and ours) or quitting immediately. Over the weekend we tried to persuade both clients to re-consider and either cancel the back to back bookings or at least try and get their guests to arrive a few days later but have had no luck as yet. To be honest we were expecting something like this to happen and it has made us re-think our business focus going forward.
Tim, it will probably people who may well bring Covid with them if they are so unreasonable.
Better off without.
I don’t think Tim is talking about the GUESTS Jane, but his clients, ie gite owners. The guests may be blissfully unaware of what they are walking into and entirely innocent in this.
Sorry, that make’s it worse. They should have some understanding of what is involved.