Cornwall!!

[P0larexpress]

why do people pay stupid amounts to holiday here?
I nearly spat my coffee out in work today. A co worker has paid £1600 for a week in st Ives, last week of June!

she showed me it! It’s a pretty basic, one bedroomed cottage. Wtf!!

i have booked flights and an Airbnb in greece for just over £1000. I’ll admit I never holiday in the uk, because it just doesn’t feel like a proper holiday to me, but if I do it’s always a deal/ bargain Airbnb type thing.

what’s the attraction of Cornwall?
By all accounts it’s overcrowded cost a fortune to park , and eat out, and a pretty mediocre experience all round!

Totally agree with you on your other points though.

So you think cleaners in Cornwall earn £41k p.a? (40hrs per week)
YOU might be paying an agency £20 ph but the cleaner will be on min wage, the average wage in Cornwall is 18kp.a.
Tesco are recruiting for 2 cleaners in Redruth, both below 18k.

Carers are still on less than £11 ph.

I think our definitions of a "Living Wage" are very different.

People got '000s of pounds for a hols rental property and in my area, then rented them out long term.
Plus these properties rocketed in value, a lot of the CV help was completely abused and thats before we get onto 2nd home owners who registered them as a business, claimed business rate relief and avoided and tax.

No of course they aren't. They don't work 40 hours a week because it doesn't work like that. In holiday cottages they mostly do changeovers on a Friday and Saturday and there is no time to do more than one changeover ( 5 hours max) per day. Most cleaners work around children and caring responsibilities. They can't start any earlier than 10am or finish later than 4pm.

So glad you know my life better than me. I don't use agencies, I have two cleaners who work for me. They get paid £60 for 4 hours but that's the limit of the hours they can do that day.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the housekeeping are profiteering from the holiday industry. The people who own the properties, however … and the people who own the big letting agencies and the cleaning companies.

Same with the hospitality industry. It’s not the (absolutely lovely) waiting and bar staff who are raking it in, or the person who cooks the food.

So your particular cleaner earns 15 ph , which isn't exactly the same as pretending all cleaners in Cornwall earn 15 to 20 ph.... vast majority of cleaners in Cornwall will be on MW... same as most low skilled workers down here.

I pay my holiday let cleaner £70 for 4 hours. Sometimes she does it less (some folk are cleaner than others, some folk strip the beds and empty the dishwasher).
But she does a great job whatever she's faced with

Clicked post too soon.
Sometimes she does it in less than four hours but I still pay her £70. It's for the job.

This thread is about holidays and the cost, so I was commenting on holiday let cleaning and how it is a big expense. I don't think I was pretending about anything?

I would imagine eaners in hospitals all over the country are paid badly, not just in Cornwall.

I'm sorry you tarr everyone with the same brush. Just because some people who are second home owners were paid the grants during lockdown you seem to think nobody deserved them. My holiday business is my only income, the grant meant I 'earned' 40% of what I would have had I been open, and that is two people's income. Do you really think hospitality businesses should have been allowed to go bankrupt during the pandemic?

Sorry, that should read cleaners in hospitals.

There's always confusion between holiday let owners and holiday home owners. The latter absolutely shouldn't have taken any grants. It was wicked. The former were entitled to. In our case however we only applied for the first one. That enabled us to pay our cleaner for the sessions she was booked to do. Otherwise due her particular kind of self employed status she'd have got nothing. We didnt apply for the subsequent two - they were much more off-season and because we're not bang on the coast we rarely fill those weeks. I know others who had fewer scruples though....

To answer your question OP, people pay stupid amounts to holiday in Cornwall because of competition for holidays in the area drives up the price between July-September. Same as anywhere else. St Ives is one of the most expensive areas in the county. If you were to stay in a less touristy area it would be much cheaper. I wouldn't live anywhere else.

Having recently been to Greece, prices are
much higher for eating out and alcohol. Really significantly higher. Food is much reduced in quality and quantity too in restaurants.

I don't even live in a touristy area and here the going rate for a cleaner is about £17 per hour. But that's not through an agency. That's self-employed.

New batch of visitors arrived in my let in Friday. Down from Manchester. Two couples and their toddlers. Sunshine and blue skies since they arrived. They've never been before and are knocked out by where they are. They're having a lovely time. This makes me super happy.

Plus I'm enjoying the sun too - lovely swim yesterday. Beach BBQ for a friend's birthday this evening.

OP you can eat red meat and drive a car abs still live a low carbon life

Er, no @mudgetastic Eating red meat, driving a car, and having children are all pretty high carbon life.

you can eat meat - just not lots , more once a week than every day, avoid beef

you can drive a car - but keep your mileage under 5k a year

you can look up what “ acceptable “ per person carbon budget would be and it doesn’t exclude things - I think BernersLee or the carbon trust have both done such exercises

I used to go to St Ives a lot as had family living there. Cornwall is beautiful! There’s so much natural beauty and culture, history.

It is very expensive now, and busy, and the transport isn’t great so I can understand why people avoid it - you can get cheaper holidays in Europe than the UK for sure. But OP is being obtuse if can’t understand why some people love Cornwall and choose it for their holidays.