Disrespectful guests

From the moment they step through the door your bookings become guests, and their experiences determine whether they ever come back.
tavi
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Post by tavi »

Wow AngloD. Poor you.

Sounds like an bunch of accidents waiting to happen, or lawsuits against you waiting to be launched.

I would do more than verbally warn the parents of the dangerous dog and the unsafe trampoline.....I would put it in writing.
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AngloDutch
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Post by AngloDutch »

Bunny wrote:AngloDutch, I would definitely charge for your additional cleaning time and damages. As others have said, I forego minor damage, but when there is a long list or hidden, I would definitely charge and am beginning to charge more often, when I would have previously let it go.

With regard to your current guests, I've twice had damage within minutes of arrival caused by unruly children, which went totally unchallenged by disrespectful parents. The last time it happened I also had their little darlings running riot in our own garden, helping themselves to our personal things and leaving them strewn across our drive. A large flower pot was also knocked over. I came so close to cancelling the booking there and then, but said nothing. Sure enough it was left in a dreadful state. I charged and they disputed it. However, I stood my ground and eventually they accepted it but decided to give me 'some advice' about how I was 'in their face'. I've decided that if it ever happens again, I'm going to cancel the booking and be done with it. If they behave like that on arrival, nothing will change, so I see no reason to give them the opportunity to cause more damage. I don't see why we should put up with such blatant disrespect. I'll use the clause in my T&Cs about 'not causing noise disruption or nuisance to the owner or neighbours.'
Maybe we have to put up fences between them and us, Bunny, because some guests just don't seem to have any understanding as to where the boundaries lie. I think many of us who have been renting holiday homes for a time have quite a few horror tales to tell.

We only collect security deposits from the agency guests and bookings via our own Dutch-language website (so, again, mostly the locals). We do not collect any security deposits from our British, American or Canadian guests booking via OD and HA. The reason being is that from experience, it's very unlikely that we'd have any problems with guests booking via these sites. Why that is, we have no idea.

I will discuss with my OH tomorrow and decide how much from the security deposit we should deduct.

As for the current guests, we will see how they behave tomorrow. If they misbehave again I think I will open the gate myself and whistle for the rottweiler....
Bunny
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Post by Bunny »

AngloDutch, we soon realised that we had to fence off our own private space and couldn't continue with an open plan arrangement, despite defining the boundaries, which were pretty obvious anyway. I once had a guest open the patio door and walk straight into our lounge! The guests already had their own private fenced off garden, so it was beyond me why they thought the rental would include the use of our garden too. Despite this we still sometimes get guests wandering into our own garden, through a latched gate. I've recently resorted to putting a 'private' sign on the gate. So far, so good, no wanderers, but we'll see come school holidays.
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Mouse
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Post by Mouse »

I think tavi's idea of putting it in to writing is a good one. Concentrates the mind and they can't dispute that they've been told.

Regarding invasion of privacy. Some friends who move in to a casita when renting out the big house actually had a guest walk in through their front door just as Mrs Owner was walking out of the shower in to the living room naked (it was August) :shock: :shock:
She said thank god it was the Friday and she only had 1 more day to be embarrassed before they left.

Whateve happened to knocking or calling out!

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Essar
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Post by Essar »

Mouse wrote:Regarding invasion of privacy. Some friends who move in to a casita when renting out the big house actually had a guest walk in through their front door just as Mrs Owner was walking out of the shower in to the living room naked (it was August) :shock: :shock:
She said thank god it was the Friday and she only had 1 more day to be embarrassed before they left.
Whateve happened to knocking or calling out!
Mousie
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How awful having to stay naked for the rest of their stay - fortunate it was just the one day!
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annedab
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Post by annedab »

Essar wrote:
Mouse wrote:Regarding invasion of privacy. Some friends who move in to a casita when renting out the big house actually had a guest walk in through their front door just as Mrs Owner was walking out of the shower in to the living room naked (it was August) :shock: :shock:
She said thank god it was the Friday and she only had 1 more day to be embarrassed before they left.
Whateve happened to knocking or calling out!
Mousie
x
How awful having to stay naked for the rest of their stay - fortunate it was just the one day!
:lol: :lol: :lol:
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AngloDutch
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Post by AngloDutch »

Bunny wrote:AngloDutch, we soon realised that we had to fence off our own private space and couldn't continue with an open plan arrangement, despite defining the boundaries, which were pretty obvious anyway. I once had a guest open the patio door and walk straight into our lounge! The guests already had their own private fenced off garden, so it was beyond me why they thought the rental would include the use of our garden too. Despite this we still sometimes get guests wandering into our own garden, through a latched gate. I've recently resorted to putting a 'private' sign on the gate. So far, so good, no wanderers, but we'll see come school holidays.
After 11 years of having an open plan arrangement, we are now looking at ways to split the grounds in 2 (probably one third for the guests and two thirds for us), as we too now have arriving guests wandering into our living room on a regular basis. This never happened so often before as now and it always occurs when the rest of the party arrives later on when its dark.
It happens regularly with agency bookings and occurs we think because ony the lead party reads the description on the agency site. Knowing that the agency wasn't communicating everything as we would like it, we started in 2007 sending out emails with extra information as soon as we received the guest details.
Unfortunately the email address is almost always from one person/family in the group and the fact that the guest accommodation is the front farmhouse doesn't get relayed.

A couple of weeks ago, we were sitting peacefully watching TV, when the door was pulled open, the curtain swished aside and with a loud 'We're here' in Dutch, a group of 4 guests fell into our sitting room with all their baggage. 'Wrong house', I said. 'I'll show you where you have to go....'

So, we think it really is time to construct fences across our grounds, which will be a pity.
Last edited by AngloDutch on Mon Apr 04, 2016 3:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.
FelicityA
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Post by FelicityA »

AngloDutch wrote:
So, we think it really is time to construct fences across our grounds, which will be a pity.
I don't know how you can stop them wandering into your house, apart from locking the door but how about having an inconspicuous ELECTRIC fence (with a loud box ticking) across your boundary 8)
Bunny
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Post by Bunny »

Yes agreed, most problems occur with group bookings. Either the lead guest does not pass on information to the rest of the group despite me requesting that the information is shared, or when guests do not arrive all at the same time, they don't share anything that I tell them at the meet and greet. :roll:
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Post by GillianF »

A couple of weeks ago, we were sitting peacefully watching TV, when the door was pulled open, the curtain swished aside and with a loud 'We're here' in Dutch, a group of 4 guests fell into our sitting room with all their baggage. 'Wrong house', I said. 'I'll show you where you have to go....'
So, tell me - just how polite were you when telling them where they could go ................... :lol:
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AngloDutch
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Post by AngloDutch »

tavi wrote:Wow AngloD. Poor you.

Sounds like an bunch of accidents waiting to happen, or lawsuits against you waiting to be launched.

I would do more than verbally warn the parents of the dangerous dog and the unsafe trampoline.....I would put it in writing.

I wish we had had the opportunity to do that, Tavi but the guests were out most of Saturday and the whole of Sunday. We were also away for most of the weekend as well. Unfortunately for us, after the damage and state the farmhouse was left in over Easter, this next group has been much worse.

Their children eventually broke the gate (the metal bracket has actually been ripped away from the wooden gate). This must have happened either late on Saturday night or very early on Sunday morning before they went out for the day.

On Sunday morning the guests went out very early and we saw that the gate was again open with the plank removed and placed against a tree. When we got closer we could see that the gate had been completely broken. We tried to block the access by jamming the gate into the entrance with the plank, so as to stop the neighbour's rottweiler from getting through to our property. The plank is 5 metres long and had been placed vertically by us onto the gate to prevent access. What did the guests think the meaning of having the plank there meant? Because it was an adult that removed it each time :shock:

We had to go to a neighbour's birthday party on Sunday morning and when we came back the guests were still away. They returned only to hand in the keys and all the grandmother said was 'here are the keys' and nothing else. I looked at my OH and said to the woman, 'Can you tell me what has happened to the gate?`The woman looked a bit sheepish but did not reply. Instead she went over to the remainder of the group that were not already in their cars. Her husband shook his head and said, 'Not our problem. The gate is rotten.'

I had already filled in an insurance claim form in duplicate from Belvilla (the agency through which they had booked) and took it and walked over to them. I told them that the gate was old and that it was an authentic part of the farmhouse but it had worked perfectly up to this weekend. Again they said that it was not their problem, that it was rotten and could have fallen apart anytime. I said that it did not look like it did now on Friday when they arrived. They didn't have an answer to that.

I asked them to sign the form so that we could claim the insurance back through the agency. They refused to sign. The grandfather was grinning and shaking his head. He began to take photos of the gate from all angles as though he was readying himself for some kind of courtroom defence.

I went back inside and told my OH that the guests were refusing to sign. OH went ballistic and stormed out into the grounds.

‘What is the problem? First of all you break the gate, then you don’t say anything to us and now you say that it’s our fault because it was rotten’ said my OH.

‘You should have put a ‘no access’ sign on the gate if you don’t want anyone to go that way’, said the grandfather.

‘The gate is in OUR garden. You asked when you arrived which part of the grounds belonged to the holiday farmhouse and we showed you, and that did not include our garden where your (grand)children decided to play football. As we said, there is a field at the bottom of the bicycle path running alongside the house where they can kick a ball. Your children were in our garden and went through a gate which was blocked off and entered a neighbouring property, which does not belong to us, in order to retrieve a ball,’ OH almost screaming at this point.

‘We’re not paying anything and we’re not signing anything,’ shouted the grandfather.

‘Just go’, said my OH, (turning to me), ‘leave them…if they want to pay the damage using their security deposit, then that’s fine’.

One of the wives said, ‘We didn’t say that we would not sign. If we sign, will the insurance pay the damage?’

After explaining to them that they have paid €15 during the booking process for damage insurance, I said that if they sign the form in duplicate I would give them a copy as well, so they could see what they have signed (it was in our interest to get them to sign the form because we did not know what the cost would be to replace/repair the gate – as we only have €200 in security deposit of course).

‘And there is also a dangerous dog on the other side that chased my grandson as he tried to get the ball. He had to come running back through the gate and only just made it,’ the grandfather continued.

‘Yes, there is a sign showing a picture of a Rottweiler with ‘I am on guard duty’ which you would have seen if you had tried to get the ball via the neighbour's front drive’, I mentioned.

They duly signed the forms and I told them that I would send the form on to Belvilla and that all correspondence would be through the agency. After telling me that my OH was extremely rude, they left.

Last night I emailed the claim form and photos to Belvilla and heard from the agency this morning that they want an official estimate of the gate’s current value, if we couldn’t produce the original purchase receipt (the gate came with the house which dates back to 1839. We are sure that the wooden gate is not that old :wink: , but it was put in before we purchased the property in 2004).

We have just had a carpenter come over to have a look at the damage and a new gate is going to be put in for us tomorrow morning. We have another group of guests arriving this Friday and the important thing is that next door’s dog will not be able to access our property. The estimate we have received from the carpenter is in ‘the region of €200’. So, if Belvilla doesn’t pay out (we have not yet checked whether their insurance covers damage to something which is not part of the holiday rental), then we should be covered by the guests' security deposit.

I need a holiday already and it's only April....
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Post by GillianF »

How very unpleasant for you both. And all so unnecessary if the guests had listened to information and behaved accordingly.
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AngloDutch
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Post by AngloDutch »

GillianF wrote:How very unpleasant for you both. And all so unnecessary if the guests had listened to information and behaved accordingly.
Gillian, for us it's a complete 'slap in the face'. We try so hard to be friendly, helpful and to provide everything holidaymakers would need, like most of us do. If a guest asks something, we always try and help them. But guests are constantly bending and breaking our rules.

For example, we tell guests by email that there is room to park three extra cars on the drive.
When the first car arrives, I ask, 'how many cars will there be in total?' Sometimes they will give an incorrect number and say three when actually six turn up, at other times they will just state that there are five cars in total. I will then reiterate that we have space for three extra cars. When we wake up the next morning and look out the window, there will be four cars parked in a line with the fourth car blocking our private access to the road, a fifth car parked on the grass and a sixth car parked half in our flower bed (plants and flowers crushed).
When we knock on their door and ask them to move half of the cars, we will often receive the reply, 'but we have x cars, where do you expect us to park them all?'

We explain to the first guests when they arrive that if there are more than three cars, then the other cars have to be parked across the road at the side of the property, or behind the property, where there are also parking spaces. But they don't tell this to the rest of the group, or make any attempt to tell the other group members that they have to park elsewhere when they see what is happening - because it just doesn't interest many of them, and they really don't care!

Several years ago, we once returned on a Saturday to find that the guests had invited family and friends to the farmhouse and there were cars parked up to our sitting room windows. When we went inside the farmhouse to find out what was going on, the family that had rented said that we should provide more crockery and glasses as there weren't enough for all the people who had turned up (at one time, there must have been 40 people inside). :x

Our farmhouse can accept 10 adults, 2 children and 2 bablies max. Because we know that people who book with the local agencies here are trying to squeeze the most people in for the least amount of money, we reduce the maximum to 10 adults and 2 babies in order to limit the likelihood of damage due to over capacity.
We started 10 years ago with a max of 8 adults and 2 babies, but then alot of accommodations opened up around us with the same capacity. We were forced to raise the number of people we could accommodate, as our bookings started to drop off because of the competition.

We have rid ourselves of many Dutch agencies over the years. There was one agency, Bungalow.net where they kept payment until approximately 5 weeks after the guests had departed, charging 25% commission and expected us to input all the rates as well. Guests that came from them were a complete nightmare, including in our first season, where we had a woman who booked the farmhouse because she had stayed in our village before with her late husband. When I asked at the end of the stay whether everything was OK, she turned and started screaming at me that there was no tomato ketchup in the property. She became so abusive that I walked off and retreated into our own home (locking the door behind me). Since then I have never asked anyone at the end of the stay whether everything was OK! :shock:

Another group from the same agency refused to pay the additional costs on arrival and we had to call the agency and hand the phone to the guests where it was then explained to them 'no security deposit, cleaning costs, etc, then the owners have the right do deny you access to the property'.
They grudgingly paid up, but complained about everything including, I remember that there was a noisy market in the village. :shock:

We had hoped that we would finally be able to rid ourselves of these Dutch agencies. In our first year of opening, every booking came via agencies (45 bookings a year). 10 years later, we were down to just around 10 bookings via agencies per year. Unfortunately, along came the changes at HA and OD and we see that the agencies are again filling the availability that is not being filled by the listing sites.
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PW in Polemi
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Post by PW in Polemi »

You really seem to be getting some horrible guests, AngloDutch. Reading your experiences, plus those of other LMHers, it makes me glad we only have a "sleeps 4" as it appears the greater the number of guests you accommodate in one party, the greater the risk of problems.

Would it be worth your effort to see if you could alter the accommodation into 2 x sleeps 4 and market it for smaller parties?
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AngloDutch
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Post by AngloDutch »

PW in Polemi wrote:You really seem to be getting some horrible guests, AngloDutch. Reading your experiences, plus those of other LMHers, it makes me glad we only have a "sleeps 4" as it appears the greater the number of guests you accommodate in one party, the greater the risk of problems.

Would it be worth your effort to see if you could alter the accommodation into 2 x sleeps 4 and market it for smaller parties?
Hi PW, yes, as other LMHers have said, we also find that there is much less hastle with smaller groups. Our farmhouse has 4 bedrooms upstairs, with 1 bedroom downstairs. The bedrooms upstairs are all off a central landing, so it's not large enough to split the property in two unfortunately.

If we were to limit the maximum capacity, apart from the loss of income from the larger groups, we would then face quite a lot of competition locally from properties that accommodate 4-8 persons. We do already offer up to 20% discounts for smaller groups as an incentive to book, which does give us a mixture of large and small groups. We get bookings for 6 people, but apart from the Dutch agency bookings (where most of the problems lie), we also get large families from Canada, the USA and the UK who are looking to accommodate up to 12 persons, as we are one of the few accommodations in the area with this capability.

We don't really see a solution to stopping the damage. We could increase the security deposit amount but often the problems just occur anyway and maybe often because of having a security deposit, where damage is being hidden.
Interesting discussion on whether to have a security deposit or not still going on here:

viewtopic.php?t=25211

As I said, we want to divide up our grounds, so we can keep them penned in, but I have an idea that we are soon going to resemble a zoo. :roll:
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