Friday changeover day

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moray_cottages
Posts: 19
Joined: Mon Mar 19, 2012 12:18 pm
Location: Forres
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Friday changeover day

Post by moray_cottages »

OK for purely selfish reasons we are considering changing our cottage from completely flexible entry days to a Friday/Monday with weekend/midweek breaks.
Flexible entry days have worked well for us over the past 5 years as we’ve had other cottages with Saturday changeovers so it’s spread the work out a bit - but we’ve just got the one cottage now so a bit of routine would allow for easier planning of other things.
Cottage is just a 1 bedroom in the north of Scotland so a lot of our visitors are older with no kids and travel from central Scotland - so I don’t think arriving on a Friday would necessarily prove to be a big problem but just wondering if any one has any words of wisdom or insight?
Joanna
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Joined: Thu Aug 23, 2007 3:12 pm
Location: Chester, North West England & Sidmouth, East Devon
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Post by Joanna »

We've gone for Friday/Monday changeovers in our Devon house because that's when our cleaner is available. It's generally worked quite well for us & suits us because when we go to stay ourselves we usually want to arrive on a Friday evening & leave late on Sunday.

Outside of peak season we accept arrivals/departures on any day, but the cleaning is still done on Friday or Monday. Sometimes we tweak the price slightly to compensate for the fact that there will be gaps, it depends - in the quietest months we wouldn't have end to end bookings anyway.

The only issue is when we used to use OTAs a lot - they can't cope with having 2 changeover days - it's either one specific day or any day. It did make things quite complicated and one of the reasons we wouldn't use instant booking. These days we take most bookings direct and just use OTAs to fill gaps so it's less of an issue.
Jo

Joint owner of Baker's Cottage in Chester & Chandler's Cottage in Sidmouth
moray_cottages
Posts: 19
Joined: Mon Mar 19, 2012 12:18 pm
Location: Forres
Contact:

Post by moray_cottages »

Thanks Jo - I think we probably just need to bite the bullet & make the decision before we get too far along with bookings for next year.
Joanna wrote:We've gone for Friday/Monday changeovers in our Devon house because that's when our cleaner is available. It's generally worked quite well for us & suits us because when we go to stay ourselves we usually want to arrive on a Friday evening & leave late on Sunday.

Outside of peak season we accept arrivals/departures on any day, but the cleaning is still done on Friday or Monday. Sometimes we tweak the price slightly to compensate for the fact that there will be gaps, it depends - in the quietest months we wouldn't have end to end bookings anyway.

The only issue is when we used to use OTAs a lot - they can't cope with having 2 changeover days - it's either one specific day or any day. It did make things quite complicated and one of the reasons we wouldn't use instant booking. These days we take most bookings direct and just use OTAs to fill gaps so it's less of an issue.
Norfolk Canary
Posts: 93
Joined: Wed Sep 07, 2016 9:03 am

Post by Norfolk Canary »

We have a Friday changeover by choice in Norfolk. We went for it because we hoped we would get a better service from our cleaning contractor. After 4 years we have no regrets. Having said that we are a one bed with virtually all clients being over 60, so many are retired.
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