Hospitality

From Country Holiday Lets

For quality and value holiday cottages
01568 612467 for more. info@countryholidaylets.co.uk. Useful for new cottage owners: http://www.countryholidaylets.co.uk/about-us/landlords-homeowners-info-pack and
http://www.holidayletsforsale.com/advice-cottage-owners-info-pack/

This blog will continue for a few more weeks but will be replaced by our new combined blog now published at www.holidayletsforsale.com/blog  Why not take a look?


The Market so far in September.

The CHL booking value index is around about 100% for September so far but we have had to work at getting some bookings.  Commercial enquiries are increasing but these have to be handled with great care.

Groups of sales people are normally best avoided unless you know the company very well, an appropriate security deposit is taken and tight control applies. 

We are seeing an increasing number of white collar guests who are supervising building and other activities.  It seems that the rents and quality of holiday lets are now preferable to the costs of small hotels and other previously used facilities.   Change is rolling in.

Reading books and seeing films

Up to now, for the last 50 years or so, I found it very difficult to read many of the literary classics.  My short term memory.. perhaps my attention, just was not up to the job.   Discovering them now has had the same impact when I was learning about the gutsy French films and other classic cinema from the 1930s.

The first Vigo film I saw was 'Zero de Conduite', followed by 'L'Atalante' before moving on to those of others such as 'Les Enfants du Paradise' and 'The Cabinet of Dr Calagari'. 

The last film was bought by a self made multi-millionaire who had risen from nothing in the capitalist industrial city of Manchester to become a Cabinet Minister under Lloyd George in the Edwardian age.  This Samuel Smiles figure saw three of his children slaughtered in WW1.  As a small boy, I explored the house he owned, Berrington Hall, and found several reels of 9.5mm film of the Cabinet of Dr Caligari on a shelf, hidden away by the back staircase.

The film was continental, German, and a clear comment on the lunacy and destruction of WW1 that had engulfed his family and carried off three of his children.  For all his success as a Cotton King, the war was so appalling that he went out and bought something totally unexpected.   Most would have thought it a million miles away from the sort of thing a brutal, Victorian, rags to riches industrialist politician would ever think of acquiring.

Even, today, this film has a radical and disturbing impact.

All of us share fundamentals.  Hospitality and good hospitality is one of the greatest things to give and take in the course of life.  Events made a similar point to that Capitalist... we are not so different from one another in many respects, particularly in ourselves, as individuals.

As I was reading A Tale of Two Cities, the intimate description, only a few lines, of the inside of the coach as it struggled up Shooters Hill and onwards to Dover, followed, later, by a couple of lines about the Coffee Room brought back my years of travelling on business, as if they were yesterday.

Mr Lorry is described as being motionless as if posing for a painting as he waited for breakfast in the Coffee Room in the Dover hotel.

Anyone thinking of running a holiday lets must understand and value hospitality.  Also, to a slightly lesser extent compared to those souls providing bed and breakfast, it is important that you like people.

01568 612467 for more. info@countryholidaylets.co.uk. Useful for new cottage owners: http://www.countryholidaylets.co.uk/about-us/landlords-homeowners-info-pack and
http://www.holidayletsforsale.com/advice-cottage-owners-info-pack/