Quality Assurance (Star grading)

[Buckie]

On reading through many of our member's sites in France, Italy Spain, etc. it would appear that there is no grading on self catering establishments in these countries. We in UK (Especially Scotland) have a very comprehensive system where we get graded each year. What are the thoughts of the LMH members on this issue?

[Alan Knighting]

Buckie,

The Gites de France organisation runs a grading system of its members properties. Otherwise, I am not aware of any.

A grading system might be useful to some visitors but, as an owner, I would be totally opposed to it. To allow bureaucracy into the self catering holiday market, for any reason, would be the first steps towards licensing and control. Inevitably, owners would finish up being told what to, when to do it, how to do it and how much they could charge. I can envisage an inspectorate being set up to control us and it would all come at a substantial fee.

No thank you! My life is over-regulated and over-taxed already. I don’t need more.

Just a personal view.

Alan

[paolo]

I'm with Alan!

[alexia s.]

So am I.

[la vache!]

Me too - an example of the illogicality of the grading Gites de France do is that in one of my cottages which is over 300 years old, there is a beam in the living area which is slightly under the 2m high specification set by the organisation. On that basis alone my cottage can't get any sort of grading at all, despite the fact it is charming and probably a lot more comfortable than some of the graded gites of G de F.
I think that with the advent of advertising on the internet, people can see clearly by the photos what sort of place they are getting, therefore grading is less important than it used to be. The lack of grading doesn't seem to impact on my bookings!

[cromercrabholiday]

I have sympathy with your views, but how can you tell a top-grade villa from a falling-down ruin next to the abbatoir?

Our cottage is ETB 4-star. Each year the bar seems to rise - this year, it was somewhere to put on your makeup in every bedroom, mirror with light and chair/stool and towels. Up to now, we have not provided towels and, having bought a pile of them, nobody has requested them so far. You have to remember that people drive to our cottage and putting a few towels into the car is not a hassle.

What is annoying is that our next door neighbour is also 4-star despite having no off-street parking, bed linen that you can shoot peas through (seen on change-over day) and external paint-work so overdue that there are window sills rotting. We can only hope that their come-uppance will arrive soon. We have inherited a couple of their guests who have seen the different standards we offer.

On the whole, the English grading system works for us and helps our business but I hate to think what French bureaucracy would bring to it.

John

[Alan Knighting]

John,

I have sympathy with your views, but how can you tell a top-grade villa from a falling-down ruin next to the abbatoir?

I can do that terribly easily and I don't look to someone else to indemnify me if I get it wrong. My sympathies are with those who can't tell the difference and expect someone else to indemnify them for their own mistakes in life.
From what you say about your cottage and that of your next door neighbour, the English grading system is not working at all. How can two adjoining properties be so different and yet both have an ETB 4-star rating?

No! I would much rather rely on my own judgement than that of some nameless bureaucrat who is only trying to justify his very existence.

When I was referring to bureaucracy I was referring to it as a whole, world-wide. France, like most Western countries, suffers from an overload of bureaucracy but, despite the rather parochial perception that some non-residents have, bureaucracy in France is a flexible animal. This contrasts very strongly with UK bureaucracy which I think is totally rigid and unbending. Having lived in both countries for many years I think I am more than capable of drawing the contrast.

You may think I am prejudiced against bureaucracy, but you would be wrong. My attitude is not pre-judged (that’s what prejudice means), it is based on the lifetime experience of a lawyer dealing with bureaucrats every day of his working life.

Alan

[Guest3]

It would be a total nightmare to set up a grading system for rental properties in Spain, especially the Costa areas! I can only assume (and hope) that the administration costs to implement and maintain such a system would far outweigh the need. Also, there is enough red-tape and bureaucracy over here without the need to add more to the system.

[Alan Knighting]

It would be a total nightmare to set up a grading system for rental properties in Spain, especially the Costa areas! I can only assume (and hope) that the administration costs to implement and maintain such a system would far outweigh the need. Also, there is enough red-tape and bureaucracy over here without the need to add more to the system.

You are winding me up but here I go again. Until politicians and bureaucrats engineer the power to control my ability to think and to express myself I will continue to think and to speak for myself.

By creating an administrative nightmare (which they would) these creatures will invent, and need to invent, an existence for themselves. The costs of implementing and maintaining such a system is quite irrelevant to them - they don’t pay, you do. “Need� is not part of the equation – manufactured need is a fictional excuse allowing them to interfere in the daily life of real people.

As a supplier or as a consumer, I would much rather rely on market forces to determine the success or failure of an enterprise than have some inept bureaucrat having anything to do with it at all.

I make no apologies for having these views or for expressing them. They are my views, right or wrong.

Alan

[Guest3]

The costs of implementing and maintaining such a system is quite irrelevant to them - they don’t pay, you do.

Alan, didn't see it from that point of view, ....well let's hope this rental grading system doesn't become enforced on us here in Spain...

[Alan Knighting]

Crystal,

Whatever the arguments might be, I don't want it either.

Alan

[Ju]

I agree with Alan to some extent, hoever I do think it would be useful to be able to distiguish ourselves from alot of the lower quality properties out there. The problem with the GdF rating, and come to that clevacances, is some of their criteria is flawed.

For example they have a limit on Bedroom size, I can't remember the exact limit but alot of our bedrooms are not big enough. However there is no such limit on kitchen or living room size. I think they are tying to impose B&B criteria onto Gites. If you are staying in a B&B or a hotel the only space you have is your bedroom, so it needs to be of ample size, but when you are staying in self catering accomodation most of you time will be spent in the living areas, and so the bedroom size is not so important.

I think my bedrooms are amply sized, and we've never had anything but praise. My kitchens are huge which everyone appreciates. To rate properties properly you need to judge each idividually, and add up the merits and downsides. The trouble with this is that it would cost money, and it would be us who paid.

Ju

[alexia s.]

"How can two adjoining properties be so different and yet both have an ETB 4-star rating?"
Maybe you can buy a rating.

[cromercrabholiday]

"How can two adjoining properties be so different and yet both have an ETB 4-star rating?"
Maybe you can buy a rating.

It's only a matter of time (we hope).

[Buckie]

I seem to have stirred up a hornet's nest!! We have lived with grading for many years when we had the Scottish Tourist Board, now Visitscotland. It has never been compulsory but to be a member of the tourist board and be listed in their advertising, one had to be graded. It is interesting to know that 90% of the annual complaints received by the tourist board were concerning non graded properties. At present about 75% of self caterers in Scotland are in the grading scheme. This figure is getting less as there has been a big increase in self catering operators. There are several reasons, one is that the govenment is encouraging farmers to diversify and there are a lot of barns and byres being converted to self catering units along with this is a large movement of retired/semi retired people from England moving North and a lot of them build chalets in their back yard thinking that this would be an easy way of supplementing their income, they soon learn!! Due to the recent, about two/three years change in the Visitscotland way of marketing the tourist industry there is a great lot of dissatisfaction in the industry and many well established operators are seriosly thinking of leaving but it is now possible to get a grading without being a member of Visitscotland. It will be very interesting to see the way things go. It would appear that our customers in UK have been used to graded holiday accommodation for many years whether by AA, RAC, Egon Ronay and others and still take note when booking self catering. I note that John is not happy with inconsistant grading from ETB, I can assure him that many of us in Scotland feel the same but this can never be completely ratified as long as individuals are the graders and human nature and personalities come into the equation.