A year of holiday rentals

And just like that, we’ve completed our first year of renting out the Farmhouse.

We welcomed our 44^th group on our anniversary – to date we’ve had 253 adults, 32 children, 7 infants and 68 dogs enjoying their holiday with us. It’s been wonderful to meet so many lovely people (and of course the dogs – we’ve had such a fabulous range of breeds here, and most recently excitingly 2 boxers – if only Evie had been well enough to run around with them!!).

Our visitors are very different to those we initially expected – most have been multi-generational families getting together to spend time together or celebrate milestone birthdays. We expected people to live 1-3 hours drive away – but we’ve seen a real mix with some people coming as far as Norwich and Huddersfield, and some as close as 18 miles away.

Interestingly we thought we’d see more people arrive with electric vehicles (EV) – in fact we’ve only had 2 out of over 100 vehicles, which means our EV charger has had very little use. Maybe less surprising as the cottage rental company we use are yet to include an EV filter in their search options – it must be frustrating when trying to find a cottage you can easily charge your car at without this.

Most of our bookings have come through Cottages.com or one of their brands – with AirBnB helping to fill a few off-peak weekends, and Booking.com only bringing in 3 bookings and all of them last year. For some reason we only show as accepting one dog on both third party websites, so perhaps that’s putting people off. About half of our bookings have involved two or more dogs…

And to date we’ve managed to sell 171 jars of our homegrown homemade produce – mostly jam and a high proportion through our local milk vending shed Daisy’s Dairy. As we barely make any profit from our produce we had intended on using these mainly as a value-add for our guests to make us stand out from other holidays; and partly as a marketing tool, raising awareness of our holiday cottage and hopefully getting a few bookings from them. However we still need to find time to get to a Farmers Market to sell them! We had hoped to find a target area based on where our guests have come from so far, but locations (of the person booking at least) have been too sporadic.

We held our half-yearly business review on Saturday to review what had gone well and what we need to change, both based on experience and feedback, and based on our visitor demographic.

We’ve already added various things to the Farmhouse including a full-length mirror, fans in the bedrooms, baby gates, children’s books, additional kitchen implements, and bird food in case guests want to watch the birds from the conservatory. Guests have loved using our predesigned walks although we do want to design some new ones using footpaths where dogs can go off lead if their owners are cautious of them being off lead on the lanes. And of course we added the Games Room to our listing in January and the table football game in the last couple of weeks.

We already have a lot of family board games but have decided to supplement our offerings with more younger children’s games to keep them entertained. And after our only bad experience where we needed to wash a duvet between guest stays, we’ve decided to buy spare pillows in case we find these could do with being refreshed between guests.

And from a commercial perspective we decided to explore different cottage companies to see if we’re getting the best deal both in terms of occupancy rates (how much of the year the farmhouse is booked for) and commission we pay the company. Naturally we want to maximise the return we make from the Farmhouse and the time we invest into it each week; however we also want to see it full as much as we can. It’s been quite sad looking at it standing empty for the few weekends we’ve not had guests!

We’ve absolutely loved almost all of the last year – although we do need to find a bit of a balance so we’re not always working. Having same-day Friday changeovers over the summer have been long days but it’s been quite nice to have the work contained to only 6 hours. Otherwise we’ve found the Farmhouse changeovers bleed into evenings and weekends and take a lot longer. It is rewarding though to hear how much our guests have loved their stays.

We’ve been so grateful to have received 37 reviews to date (with a huge amount of effort put in both by our guests and by John chasing up Cottages.com. All bar one of our reviews have been 5 out of 5 (or 10 out of 10) which has been really motivating (even the 4 out of 5 reviewer gave us positive feedback both in the review and in our guest book!). A few have marked us down for local amenities, not realising that we live in a rural area. However a friend of ours pointed out that we have nearby community shops and pubs that serve takeaway that we could also direct people to, instead of pinpointing the local towns that are 20-25 minutes drive away.

While all our guests have been very complimentary about their stays, some of their reviews have stood out more than others.

So – here goes for another year at Ley Farm Cottages – more improvements where we find them, and hopefully more happy guests!