Lay My Hat

Me, I'm fed up with owners misleading people in the filters. I've seen quite a few gîtes stating they have a pool. You have to go right through the blurb to discover that the 'pool' turns out to be the municipal pool in their town. Sorry, but when a property states a pool, regardless if it's privat...

I've tried Pour les Vacances and A-gites this year - nothing but a couple of time-wasting enquiries from both of them...

We're committed to Gites de France but am quite happy with them to be honest - we pay one week's peak rent each year as a subscription then use their online booking engine, which is improving all the time. You pay 8% commission if you set up the bookings or 15% if they book direct. But then they han...

Well that's us stuffed then. I am tied to Gites de France for ten years after they subsidised the creation of our gite, so all bookings have to go through them. So I can't accept online payments. That's AirBnB out, and now HomeAway. HL/TA dried up for me about a year ago - so what's left? Seems the ...

Funnily enough about a year after we opened we had a delightful lady from Paris who came to 'prends l'air' of the countryside. First question she asked was "where is the autocuiser".

It's the only time it's ever been used!

Still 3 weeks left in July/August which is a first for us in over 6 years. UK enquires/bookings are down about 80-90%, thank God for Abritel via HomeAway!

And make sure you have that autocuiseur!

We're normally full for summer by now (just north of Paris) but currently we have August and September 2/3 full and nothing in June/July! Holiday Lettings now send no enquiries so we switched to HA and get most of our enquiries through them, albeit French ones via Abritel. UK enquiries have fallen o...

I've just given you another month Hells Bells as I figure it's worth a punt. We seem to be getting more French and Dutch guests now when we used to get 70% UK visitors. I've also renewed with France Voyage - their site is incredible! If anyone else wants to share the love and renew with AIPLV my cod...

I ended up talking to them on their online chat and the guy explained that if online bookings are enabled there will be a service fee added. So he's disabled that for me. I still don't understand how HA would get their money as I didn't have HA payments enabled; would they have invoiced me for it? ...

I ended up talking to them on their online chat and the guy explained that if online bookings are enabled there will be a service fee added. So he's disabled that for me. I still don't understand how HA would get their money as I didn't have HA payments enabled; would they have invoiced me for it?

I've just renewed with HomeAway (getting desperate!) and have had a reservation request for a weekend from them. When I look at the quote it includes a HomeAway service fee. I am on a subscription listing and don't accept HomeAway payments but have selected Credit/Debit cards as my alternative payme...

It's certainly depressing. I'm not sure what else I can do. Even Dutch enquiries from Gites.nl seem to have dried up. I see France in general is 17% down on last year, although EasyJet claims their French operation has returned to pre-Brexit vote levels. Where are they all going?

Our gite is in northern France, 2 hours from the channel. We have basically not had any enquiries (bar one) in the last 4 or 5 months! We're listed on HL/TA, HA, Gites.eu, a-gites as well as our own site - all of which have in the past been enough to fill our calendar. This winter and next year, we ...

OK, so I'm getting a clear message I think! You've all taken the wife's side! So, the next question would be; if we had a pool that we shared with gite guests how would restricting the usage work? Would it restrict our usage too ie they have it from 2-5, we have the rest of the time? Or do you say w...