I know it can be difficult to have sympathy for anybody who owns a holiday let, but for me and my wife August is often a war between us and the holiday guests from hell. It’s an open season of refund-seeking, blackmailing guests and wild children whose parents think we operate a kids’ club in our gardens. And it’s only getting worse.
We got a flavour the week that schools broke up late last month, when a group of eight adults calmly sat on the terrace in the sun, swilling cans of beer and prosecco as their pack of six children began picking up heavy pebble gravel and throwing the stones at the windows of my elderly parents’ barn.
Many middle-class families have no idea how to behave on holiday or how to control their children
The barn is one of several in a courtyard that we have converted into holiday let cottages. The income is how we keep our Shropshire historic house and gardens – open to the public in the summer – operating. We have no subsidies and rely on these few cottages to pay for astronomical insurance (up by 20 per cent in two years), laundry costs (also up by 20 per cent this year), garden upkeep and house repairs (thanks to George Osborne, you can’t claim VAT back on historic building repairs).
My wife – an Airbnb ‘superhost’ – and I are unpaid estate lackeys, armed with mops, towers of loo paper, broken hoovers, stain remover and wasp repellent, helped by two saintly part-time housekeepers who do the ‘changeovers’. We make no profit and take no salary, but the income just about covers the maintenance of our historic money pit.
When my 81-year-old mother leant out of her courtyard window to ask the children (aged between six and 15) to kindly stop vandalising her house, after a window broke, they went on regardless like some clichéd hooligans out of EastEnders. She eventually had to interrupt the parents’ drinks party to ask if they could stop their children from throwing stones. ‘They seemed not to care,’ my mother said later as she drained a large glass of wine. ‘They just said, “Don’t worry, we’ll pay.”’
It has become increasingly evident that many middle-class families have no idea how to behave on holiday or how to control their children. And don’t think bad behaviour is confined to package holiday hell resorts such as Magaluf or Mallorca. Trashy and unruly drunken behaviour has arrived in British seaside coasts and shires, where – thanks to the expense of travelling abroad – middle-class families are choosing to spend their holidays now.
The final straw was a few weeks ago when a group who enjoyed ‘dressing up’ in Tudor outfits left their costumes, along with a lurid selection of rubber sex toys, by the bins. They had asked permission to use the church, and after they were gone I found a discarded ‘Order of Service’ which included a ‘hymn’ entitled ‘Lord of the Lash’ and another called ‘The King and 13 Virgins’.
To be fair, most guests are still heavenly (please come back!), but the increasing trend of bad guest behaviour at our mini-estate has meant that we have had to increase our deposit from £250 to £500. This increase came about after I took my family away on holiday to France last month only to get an email from my stressed mother – who was holding the fort – saying that the group-stay party for 16 guests was actually a lesbian wedding for around 45, some flying in from Australia. We are not a wedding venue.
The other issue we come across regularly are groups of guests, invariably younger, who seize upon something – anything – to demand a refund. I’ve had guests try their luck with a boiler malfunction, cobwebs, even a spider in the bath. These freebie hunters use the threat of a bad Tripadvisor review – or, if there’s a group, multiple bad reviews – to try to blackmail us into giving them ‘compensation’.
Some middle-class adults also have very odd ways of behaving in the country. Sometimes I knock on the door of our holiday let cottages on a Friday afternoon at around 4 p.m. to greet the guests, only to find the new arrivals have locked the door. These families are holidaying in the middle of nowhere, but they are often from a big city where the idea of leaving a door unlocked is ‘unsafe’. If the door is not locked, and I walk in to say ‘hello’ as their host, guests will sometimes complain about – and even demand compensation for – me ‘invading’ their space.
Part of the problem is that the new breed of staycation holiday means many of the guests are used to hotels, but can’t always afford them. They arrive with a room-service mentality, blurring the distinction between client and guest.
Much of the blame for all this must be put on the last Conservative government, when it came up with the idea of allowing local authorities to add a 100 per cent premium – it is 150 per cent in parts of Wales – on council tax for second homes. Band H second homes in places such as Cornwall, Dorset, west Devon, Rutland, parts of Sussex such as Lewes, and County Durham can now be charged around £10,000 a year or more. More than two-thirds of councils in England – including our local Telford (not known as a holiday hotspot) – have already introduced the levy, which came into effect on 1 April.
It is only now, in the summer holiday season, that the knock-on effect of this cash grab is being seen. To get around the charge, many second-home owners have changed the use of their expensive second homes to business ‘holiday let’ tax status as a way of qualifying for business relief and thereby not paying any council tax. To qualify you need to rent the property out for at least 105 nights a year, which means lowering prices and standards. In practice this means ever larger and rowdier groups, with neighbours complaining about nuisance behaviour.
To compete in this new market, holiday let agencies have advised us to install a hot tub to increase bookings, as they are popular with group stays. We have no plans to offer any such facilities. What we would find inside it on a Monday morning we can only imagine. Basic guest decorum, even when you are a paying guest, seems to belong to a different summer holiday age.
Comments