Foreign Perspectives

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We don’t get an awful lot of group bookings but, whilst welcome in terms of the money, they’re consistently very disorganised in comparison to either normal bookings or what you’d expect from an “organised” group.

For example, we’ve one group of 12 at the moment who booked nearly two months ago. They’re here for a very popular local festival which tends to fill up all available accommodation for miles around and puts severe pressure on the tourism infrastructure as a consequence of the scale of it. Everyone knows that and therefore books the various components necessary for their trip quite early. This lot? Well, they arrived and wanted to rent a car. There was one 2+2 seater sportscar left in the rental car park so they’ve ended up spending around 6 hours a day ferrying people back and forth to see the festival. Taxis? Nope, all at the festival and refusing to do any short runs at the moment. Meals? Well, it’s hard enough to get 12 people booked in at the best of times so I’m guessing they’re living on pizzas.

The other summer group was that made for a family wedding held locally. They started out with 2 rooms for 3 nights and ended up with a total of 29 room nights. Family weddings are a bit of a nuisance at the best of times as the people rarely eat anywhere except with their family so you often don’t even sell as much as a breakfast and they’re always wanting a discount. Since they’re usually held at the height of summer, we could easily book the rooms with people who’d be taking breakfast and meals and wouldn’t ask for a discount. The bunch this year went even further though as the wedding didn’t go too well and decided that that must have been our fault and that they’d like to get all their money back (this despite us not even knowing that they were here for a wedding ’til they arrived!). Net effect? Well, we’ll be cancelling any reservations in future that look as though they might be for a wedding: it’s just too much hassle for no real reward.

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In big hotels towels and whatnot go “missing” and it’s classed as wastage basically because it would be pretty difficult to identify who’d made off with things as so many different people are involved.

However, in our place which is very much at the smaller end of the scale, there are very few people involved so it’s easy enough to identify the culprits. For example, just this morning a family checked out and made off with four of our towels. Sometimes you wonder why people do that but in this case it’s pretty clear: they had ordered four breakfasts but only ate one. Therefore in lieu of the three breakfasts which we’d charged them for they thought that they’d take two little towels and two big ones.

Net effect? Well, they’ve been charged EUR 40 and received an e-mail letting them know we’ll refund it if we get the towels back next week.

Now, what they’re going to say is that they didn’t do it and obviously it must have been our cleaning person. Well, as it happens I’m the person who both puts the towels into the rooms and takes them out again. I put six in and took two out therefore they took the other four.

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That’s one of the negative comments that we received recently. Slightly ironic though in that the comment was from a German family of which only one of the four could speak any French and he couldn’t speak much.

However, we’ve now reached the point where we expect that French guests will criticize us for not being French. At least that is if they come from the Dordogne where we can understand their opposition to English as it’s often treated by the English as though it were the far south of England. Somewhat more peculiar though are those from Alsace who are historically German of course but who are, by now, more French than the French with a lot more depth to their French ancestry.

What’s also been a feature this year is that we’ve had a LOT more Germans, Dutch and Spanish than normal and have around 90% non-French for quite extended periods sometimes. That’s given rise to criticisms from some of the French guests that French isn’t being spoken in the dining room or rather that English is being used by everyone else but them.

That’s something that we’d never thought about before. After all, in the majority of hotels around the world, it’s English that’s used between guests of different nationalities and, on the whole, it’s the language you’d most commonly hear during breakfast. Yet, in France the French expect the most common language to be French. Weird.

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