You check your property at the end of a rental and find some damage. First of all you decide if you’ll accept it as normal wear and tear and simply fix it; put it down to experience and add the renters to your blacklist, or whether you will make a claim on the damage deposit. The judgement call is yours and for many owners it’s not a big deal; it’s part of the risk of the vacation rental business, and the occasional disappointment is balanced against the majority of great renters they have had. For some though, even the slightest infraction of the rules of departure assumes monumental proportions, creates lots of stress and can result in some nasty correspondence and threats of legal action.
There’s often a clue there will be an problem, and that’s where the renters call you on the morning they are leaving to tell you about a ‘few issues’ they had. We experienced this last Sunday with a group of 30-somethings at the cottage. The call was to ‘let you know there was a leak in the roof and we’ve had to put some towels down to soak up the water, and by the way, there was hair in the bathtub so we couldn’t use it all weekend, and all had to use the other bathroom’.
OK – the leak’s a nuisance. It happened last year in a thaw and we had contractors in to fix it in the spring. There’s been no leak since when it rains, so we thought it had been fixed, but there’s some ice damming around the eaves troughs which has obviously caused the problem. I don’t understand about the hair in the bath though! I cleaned the place after our last guests and usually pay particular attention to bathrooms, so I’m not sure how I missed that, but to decide it was not usable seems a bit odd. We do have a note in our guest book that asks them to let us know if there are any problems, within the first 24 hours, to give us a chance to rectify, but they obviously decided to take the path of least resistance and boycott the offending tub.
Or….they know we are going to be mightily upset about the state they have left the place and are creating their case in advance. This is what we call a COLIC situation – Check Out List Ignored Completely. The griping complaints are just the precursor to the undoubted mess we will find when we get down there.
So, it was with great trepidation we made our way to the cottage on Sunday after checkout. And yes, the place had not been left as we ask in our checkout list. In fact the list had not been read at all. We ask that the heating is turned down – it was as high as it could go; the temperature on the hot tub should be reduced – it was not; the place was generally a mess. Just a bunch of little stuff but showing little respect for our Terms and Conditions.
When I started out, this situation would have caused a significantly different reaction to the one I have now. I’ve learnt over the years to take the rough with the smooth; to appreciate my repeat guests who always leave the cottage spotless and write lovely things in the guest book, and to accept there is a new generation of people who have never learnt to tidy up after themselves or follow instructions, however gently and politely they are put.
Image by Addrox
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Heather,
I have found that guests that take the time to write a few comments in my cottage guest book tend to leave the cottage a little cleaner at the end of their stay than those guests that don’t. Maybe this is because when they read the guest book during their stay, they realize that previous guests appreciated arriving at a clean cottage and that they have a role to play in order to ensure that the cleanliness standard is maintained.
I also agree different renters will clean the cottage at the end of their stay to a different standard.
I have a sliding scale system that I use when I inspect the cottage after my renters have checked-out. A 10 on this scale means that I can not tell whether there was anybody staying at the cottage. A 1 on this scale indicates that it does not look like the renters did any cleaning before checking out. I have found through experience that most rental groups fall somewhere between a 6 and a 9.
When I find that a rental group starts scoring a 5 and below during my post-rental walk through, I start taking steps to document the unacceptable conditions that I find within the cottage. I take photographs that show my areas of concern and start to keep track of the time it takes me to return the cottage to an acceptable standard. I determine a reasonable hourly wage for the time I spend cleaning the cottage and then forward this information to my cottage rental company. They can then apply my cleaning and damage charges against the renter’s security and cleaning deposit that they collected during the cottage booking process.
We might not be able to do much to influence the “new generation of people who never learnt to tidy up after themselves” but as my mother would say, “they are never going to learn any younger”.
Some great points here Glenn. You are right about the guest book too.
Love the “Colic” acronym for this condition Heather – it would certainly leave me manifesting bouts of “uncontrollable, extended crying”too, if I were an owner on site and saw the state our second home is sometimes left in! I wonder what this year’s guests will be like? The usual mix of rough with smooth I guess!
I love the COLIC acronym, too, Heather. Thanks for educating us all.
I have decided not to rent this year. It was just too frustrating for me. With bigger and bigger machines, and noisy, disrespectful renters, it spoils the beauty of Muskoka.
Jennifer Jilks’s last blog post..renting your cottage
@ Jennifer – so sorry that it got too much for you. I’m really surprised because I hear so rarely of problems with renters. They are usually very respectful. Will you be at the Cottage Life Show? If so, stop by our booth and say hello.
We’ve always dreamed of owning a cottage, and yes, dreams do come true! In order to off set some of the reno’s we had to do (that’s another story on contractors in the Muskoka’s) we rented out the cottage last summer/fall and have already booked for this coming summer. The guest book is filled with wonderful words and shared memories. All but 1 (they were an 8, so not bad) left the cottage just as clean as I had left it. They all washed and folded the towels, sheets, vaccumed and washed the floors. Watered the poted plants – it’s a joy to rent! Why??? I left the place spotless, put fresh flowers in almost every room, left a good bottle of white and red wine, a wooden muskoka game for the kids to take home, a list of events happining, places to eat (some menu’s from the local eateries), a hand written welcome note and yes, a list of how things work. The whole basket of goodies, $150. A small price to pay not to have to clean myself. It works everytime! Efforts are returned in kind