The Accidental Hoteliers

THESE PAGES RECORD THE TIME we spent running a small hotel. During that time, that began in 1993, we learned a lot about hotels and restaurants, and something about human nature.

This is the story of what we learned and what we made of what we learned. It’s a kind of philosophical treatise on the future of humankind, based upon the theatre of the front door opening and someone unlikely walking in with straw in their hair, or not.

THERE ARE TWO SORTS OF PEOPLE in the world, those with too much to do and those with too little to do. We are people of the too-much group, we always have been. We aren’t complaining about this, far from it, we think it a privilege to be that way. Auntie Mary, on the other hand, is and always has been someone with of the other type; someone with too little to do. Auntie Mary comes to stay with us. “You're working too hard", she tells us, "Is there anything I can do to help?”.

“Well, this morning we have to devise a marketing strategy for our Autumn promotion”.

“I’m not sure I know how to help you there”.

“Then there are the accounts receipts to be entered into the computer, enquiry calls to be sent a brochure and tariff, the chef’s pay to be calculated, the accountant to be phoned about the latest tax demand, menus to be devised for the coming week, an advertisement for cleaning help to be drafted, the latest communication from the Tourist Board to be read and we are desperate for some time to sit down and analyse the profit margin on our expensive entries in the classified sections of publications last year. And someone has to prepare the carrots for the chef”.

“I can chop the carrots”.

Ten minutes later the carrots are all ready, and Auntie Mary has time on her hands again. But then Auntie Mary is one of the people with too little to do.

In order to buy our hotel, we had to have some money, and the way in which we found ourselves with just about sufficient money was as a result of having relatively well paid and time-consuming jobs. We are people with too much to do.

One of the characteristics of a too-much-to-do person, is that they can use up a lot of the available time allotted to their life on research, so when we decided that a small hotel was something we might be expending our energies on, it was a natural reaction that we should investigate what was to be involved. But we could find no really practical written help on the subject at all. There were books telling you to buy a big dustbin, or get an accountant, devise a business plan, draw up a form for monitoring refrigerator temperatures daily. Practically nothing about the things you might do to give the business a chance of making a profit, about the day-to-day problems, what you are letting yourself in for, how to avoid expensive mistakes, how to survive or at least go down laughing. We have had to write the instruction manual ourselves.

We have found that there are basic underlying rules for running a small hotel or guest house. Essentially, we have honed these down to seven principles, which are these:

1. The business is basically unsound, so the accounts are important.

2. Everyone else knows how the business should be run and tells you so, so product focus is important.

3. The world wants to sell you advertising and insurance, so keeping an eye on marketing is important.

4. It’s not that you cannot please all of the people all of the time, you cannot please all of the people at all – so dealing with customers is important.

5. For most people, there is only one thing more personal than sex and that is food, so the restaurant is important.

6. The moment you take your trousers off, someone rings the doorbell, so pacing is important.

7. Life is a lottery, so a sense of mission is important.

Those are the outlines, there now follows the details. In the descriptions, the names of many of the people have been changed to protect the innocent – ie me!