Hard times for the holiday let industry in the UK?

[user1477391263]

Seems like the post-COVID recovery, crappy weather, COL and other factors have dampened the situation for people owning holiday lets in places like Cornwall. On the other hand, perhaps (as the article hints towards the end) there will be an increase in long term rental properties coming on to the market.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/apr/07/britains-staycation-boom-may-be-over-as-bookings-dry-up?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1712464698

Anecdata from talking to friends tells me that many people are fed up with the rising cost of holiday lets in these places, more and more demands being placed on guest re cleaning etc., and the fact that so many local places like restaurants are understaffed; of course, part of the issue may be that locals have to an extent been priced out of the local housing market, meaning there are fewer people available to clean, mow lawns or wait on tables. It may be a good thing if the local housing market self-corrects in this manner.

Have you ever tried picking up the phone to any of these hotels to say 'we really love your hotel but we're finding the cost a bit tricky for our family of six, I wonder if there's some sort of sharing arrangement we don't know of? We hate using Air B and B but if feels like there are almost no other options.'

Just to see if they can help you on the price.

The reason I ask: during Covid, we were made homeless. We had 48 hours to pack our shit, get it into storage units and find somewhere. I phoned around a few hotels and hit on one who actually answered 'we have nowhere to live in 36 hours and we have no new rental to go for, so we don't know how long we would need to stay for, it could be a week, a month, two.'

They gave us a massive family room for £67 a night instead of £110-120 including breakfast; it was rammed full of motorway workers, so hardly desperate to flog the rooms.

We stayed there for a month.

No I’ve mainly compared prices for premier inn etc. But we wouldn’t want one huge family room, that’s what I’m saying, we’d need 4 bedrooms, all connected, with living space and kitchen. And a garden. A house basically!

Not suggesting one room. Suggest the 'it's so difficult and we hate using air b and b' spiel and see if they just outright offer you a better price!

Might work better with little indies than chains, I guess.

I'm always surprised at so many people insisting that going abroad is cheaper (and usually not comparing like with like)
We like to self-cater and either go to a cottage or caravan. We've camped in the past in our own tent in the UK or France.
Last year admittedly we hired a 2 bed apartment in Cyprus for less than £500 for 10 days. Flights in school holidays for 4 were approx £1300 and the train fare to the airport was about £40 each way. Then we hired a car for €27/day.

We probably couldn't have done a 10 day self catering let in the UK, at all, during school holidays - most places prefer whole weeks (and from a business perspective I get that) and we couldn't have done it for that price ....but it was a different type of accomodation (very basic apartment - almost no cooking utensils and hardly any soft furnishing- on a complex with unheated pool and very small gym) than is generally available in the uk.
We would normally expect to spend £1-1.5k on a more comfortable 2-3 bed house....but would spend more time in it if the weather wasn't great.

We need more aparthotel setups for sure! Not necessarily cooking facilities, but some sort of setup where you have varying numbers of small bedrooms connected to a central living room where adults can hang out when the kids have gone to bed.

The cleaning situation is the killer for holiday cottage type setups. There is only a narrow window during which cleaning can be done (10-3, ish). If a cleaner has to trail around by car (or whatever) to each individual house and do an individualized cleaning job, the whole process is very time consuming and inefficient and it is unlikely they will be able to do more than one or two properties within that crucial four-hour window, resulting in inability to procure cleaners and high prices when they are available, as you will have to pay a cleaner enough to make it work her while to trail about to each property. So you end up with big cleaning bills AND having to ask guests to do a lot of the cleaning themselves.

Hotel cleaning is a triumph of efficiency; small groups of cleaners wheel equipment trolleys down hotel corridors, march into rooms and suites which are only a couple of strides away from each other, and clean them at breakneck speed because everything (the room layouts, equipment and products) is standardized and designed for fast, efficient cleaning. A team of four cleaners can clean a gobsmacking number of hotel rooms/suites/apart hotels in a single morning.

Of course, in some areas, it isn’t exactly easy to build hotels either….

I live in a tourist area. The fishermen's cottages near us have been mainly holiday homes for years. To some extent, that makes sense. Poor parking and small rooms and ceilings but quaint - OK really for a week on holiday. They affected the ability for locals to buy locally though. That's been the case for decades.

What happened during covid was threefold

1.People were buying anything as a second home, and that included in the typically residential areas of town.

2.Rental holiday prices went stupid

3.People got angry at the wrong target and weren't hospitable and welcoming.

3 hasn't been forgotten now people have travel options again, 1 has overstaturated the market and so 2 is no longer the case and the bottom has fallen out of the holiday market.

Let's hope with the tax changes too, our residential homes return to residential long let's or first home ownership. I certainly think prices have dropped noticeably. Which is a start!

And maybe people will start to realise tourists are valuable and deserve to be welcomed. Just like we expect when we go on holiday.

I think you nailed the three reasons, feeling strange.

But I’m not hopeful that they’ll return to short term tenancies. I think they’ll be sold. The ones in typically residential areas might attract local buyers, the ones in tourist spots will attract second homers, who are able to afford the triple council tax and now also get a property a bit cheaper.

I work in this industry and we are fully aware that guests hate the later arrival and early departure. However it is very difficult to get reliable and thorough housekeeping staff.

We used to employ loads from Eastern Europe who used to come over for the summer, mainly students, who would work, save, then go home to study again. They'd often come back for a few years and would happily live in a mobile home for the summer. Of course Brexit has put a stop to this.

Local workers are hard to find, and our experience since Covid has not been good. Lots have been flaky and unreliable, something you don't need in the height of August. Getting people to work for the just summer is difficult too as the mobile home option doesn't exist now and private rentals are too expensive.

As someone else said, there is only a 4/6 hour window to turn a house around for the next guests. People expect it to be spotless, as it should be, and this takes time so we do need people out by 10. If housekeepers have to travel between properties, this also eats into the time available.

Bookings are down this year, but are probably back to 2019 levels. Some owners have got greedy and have pushed up the prices to ridiculous levels. These are the properties that are staying empty. I think prices will naturally drop over the next couple of years; indeed our company is reducing summer prices already which is something we don't need to do usually.

Statutory registration will hopefully level the playing field, and weed out the more casual operators. The new fire regulations are pretty expensive to implement and many won't want the hassle.

Do Airbnb have to do the new fire regs too? I thought they got round any kind of regulations!

In terms of the fire regs, open plan regulations are not published yet but it’s likely that properties where you have to walk through the kitchen to get out will require an expensive sprinkler system.

this applies to a lot of little cottages in places like Cornwall. The owners will face either selling up or spending a lot of money. They may also have to plasterboard over some original features like the floorboard/beam structures, which is an awful shame in cottages that are hundreds of years old.

if they give up and sell, who will buy them? They aren’t cheap, and they aren’t practical to live in when there’s no parking anywhere nearby. Second home owners will buy them, leave them empty much of the year.

Air bnb is a booking platform. They have zero responsibility for safety regs.

safety regs are the responsibility of the owner. If you stay in any property booked through any platform or any company, they are just creaming off commission, they don’t implement fire regs

Sorry yes I meant the home owners who let out their houses solely through airbnb - would they still be expected to do this?

We can't afford a holiday abroad and have only done holiday cottages. I'm not sure about the article but all the places that I wanted to book were mostly fully booked for at least 6m..

This is madness. Why would you need to be out by 10am when no one even goes there for several days?

Yes.

All lets are expected to do this.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/64257cff2fa8480013ec0fec/Aguideetomakinggyoursmalllpaying-guest-accommodationsafeefrom_fire.pdf

It doesn't seem to be really enforced.

I know, right? Compare with the lovely house we rented in Greece in the summer. Beautifully renovated (with modern plumbing), cleaner twice a week, official checkout time of noon but, when I asked if there was anywhere we could store our luggage on the last day because our flight home was in the evening, they told us to take that extra day in the house (free). It was probably about the same price as the UK cottage but a far, far nicer experience.

I'm not a morning person but even I don't think 10am is outrageously early, the way some people are talking it's as if you're being asked to leave at 8am!

A lot of UK holiday cottages are poor value. We rent in a Canadian resort when visiting family. Beautiful clean well equipped apartments, with washer dryer so we can travel light, early check in and out by 11am. No cleaning, just put the dishwasher on when leaving. Our latest was just £400 a night for 6 people.

We tried to book one that had a “quiet rule” from 9pm… it was a house for 12 people and there had to be silence after that time. We’re not horrible people but that felt unrealistic. We went to a hotel instead and didn’t have to do housework. Another time when dc were little we had a weekend in Cornwall through dh’s work and it was so lovely - gorgeous cottage, perfect for 3 toddlers etc. so we looked up a week there in the summer - it was cheaper to fly abroad and go All inclusive. Bonkers price but I guess people pay.

I grew up in a seaside semi rural area. Second Homes and holiday lets got out of control during and just after covid. Its always had quite few. Lots of Londoners bought second homes in the area and homes to let out. My sister said how people were approaching her friend in her front garden as she has a house overlooking the sea asking her to seek, she got really annoyed about that. My friend divorced in 2019 and was trying to buy in 2021, many small houses were being snapped up by cash buyers from London. It’s caused a lot of resentment from locals.

@Feelingstrange2 you have a similar story to my home town.

Yes they do. It’s legislation

This sounds like my holiday let, but not in Canada!!

It is when you are supposed to leave the beds stripped, the place immaculate, all the rubbish gone and hoover/sweep the floors etc...... all while paying a hefty cleaning fee on top. Hence why we don't use these places anymore.

We are a family looking for a self catering cottage for the October half term, and one of the biggest hurdles is most cottages are now Friday start days. This means for adults using an extra day of holidays, but for our children it means loosing a day of school, which their school is not happy about. The alternative is loosing a days holiday and travelling on the Saturday. We did try travelling after school, but the traffic was horrendous. Friday starts are relatively new and hugely inconvenient for guests unless you are retired. We are now thinking of using a premier inn, which is more flexible with dates, and cheaper.

I’ve never been able to find a nice AI holiday with 4 (I’d take 3) bedrooms for the same price as a Cornwall cottage, where are these holidays? For 5 adults and 1 child? For £4-5k for 2 weeks in August.