Our first guests are hoping to travel from the UK for late July and hoping by then that the quarantine will have been lifted, otherwise they won’t come.
With the cool weather I thought I’d pop down the garden and look at what needs to be done and start to tidy up and decide what I need to remove from the cottage as “non-essential” and what must stay and therefore must be cleaned and disinfected.
I found myself looking at the pegs basket and thinking OMG, every single peg has to be cleaned and disinfected because I won’t know which ones have been handled by our guests - “decontaminating” individual pegs just feels like the last straw - what a crazy world we are in right now! Four guests - that’s a peg each isn’t it!
More seriously, I also won’t be offering to clean mid-weekend because they won’t want me in the place and I won’t want to be there while they are. Also, I won’t be bringing down a change of bed linen that mid weekend either. All the linen for their two weeks will have to be down in the cottage already before they arrive and then they can decide if they want a change and do it themselves. Oh Lord, two complete lots of bedding to iron at one go!
and you’ll have to wash/defug… whatever… the linen whether they use it or not… I suppose.
We have developed a system of swaps. So half the pegs go in the gîte, while the other half “rest” for a week. Same for lots of other things (quilts, cushions, guide books, CDs) and people are told to ask if they need extra anything.
And we have a linen bag that they put dirty sheets etc in and put outside the door, and get a basket of clean washing in return.
We’ve come up with an agreed cleaning routine with our clients and that will just have to do, I think that once we’ve been through the first changeover things won’t seem so daunting.
Why not use a disinfecting laundry wash? Toss the pegs in a tied pillow case with the rest of the wash, add a splash of the disinfecting laundry wash (I think it’s aimed at re-usable nappies/soiled baby clothes) and bingo, job done!
Ok for pegs, but hard to do with CDs, guide books, DVDs, board games and so on!
Cleaning mid-week is a personal service, which is not really allowed in self catering places.
It is one of the rules which have been imposed by the hotel lobby which has always had the ear of the Minister, they don’t like competition!
A fair point well made, but the thought of travelling to stay indoors listening to someone else’s music or being stuck in front of a TV is not for me. I probably only watch 2-3 DVDs a year and the only TV is to keep my son company whilst he watches cartoons or David Attenborough.
On a more practical level it’s not impossible to either store the music in a library on an MP4 player in a sound dock or provide a streaming system on wifi then there’s only one device to clean ever, no CD cases to take up room, dust off every changeover etc.
Guide books can be replaced with a tablet, just save all the URLs in favourites etc, or get a stack from tourist office and give a new one every changeover.
Board games I admit are trickier.
Ray, my oh my, there is much for you to learn about the lives of our gite guests. One family - our Harry Potter DVDs every night over the fortnight - ie they watched it all twice.
Another family by the pool - would discuss with me which of our DVDs they would be watching that night and then discuss with me the next day what they thought of it. Often it would be one or another of their old favourites. 
Yes Sue, you have hit the nail on the head.
Internet in our bit of rural France doesn’t support streaming films, and many families with kids enjoy films. Others want sports. And we have clients who would actually be happiest with a turntable but make do with a CD. We know they are well used as they are always out of order on changeover, and people like the fact that we provide a wide selection of world music and appreciate trying something new. Last year’s hit was Klezmer music which few people knew of. Cheap and cheerful and doesn’t run the risk of broken tablets.
Our “guidebooks” are serious books on geology, botany and local architecture and crafts. Which is what suits our clients. We have some walks digitally, but most on paper.
Sure we get the throwaways from tourist office and have laminated them as the idea of dumping them in the bin is unpalatable to us. But that sort of superficial thing they can get themselves anyway.
Generally anyone who has been in the gîte business for a bit will know their client type, and will know exactly how much leeway there is in the profit margin for new things (and this year particularly every penny counts!).
Laminating the tourist brochures is a good idea. There are some that are only single sheet, back and front and are for the stuff that people always want to go to, like the big chateaux and the water lily nursery. I’ll be saying to guests by all means pick up your own brochures but if you do you must take them away with you or throw them away. First week of all this, I tried to disinfect the lidls catalogue - was not a success!
Jane I didn’t know that. In fact, although I offer it, only one family in the six years I’ve been doing this took me up on my offer and that was because they went away for the middle weekend.
Are you near Latour Marliac? Lovely place…we went there on our way home from holidays last year and it was the last day of the season so everything was half price. The poor dog didn’t have much room for the rest of the journey!
Yes we are
Unfortunately, self-catering means just that and offering any other services is forbidden.
It is one of the restrictive practices forced upon anyone daring to challenge the hotels, whether people want to stay in hotels or not.
I read that as lamenting… Oh what a different world we used to live!