It occurs to me that maybe if you are significantly more expensive than someone who is slashing prices, you will look safer and better? Some people might look at a low price as indicative of desperation that manifests as less safe?
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As a professional guide, I always believe in hiring other pros. Now if you need a professional evaluation of your tour, I won’t charge you if you won’t charge me!
I’ll trade you a 4 craft brewery Alaskan tour for a Jerez cellar tour…
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Yer on mucker the only problem there is will you remember enough at the end to provide a comprehensive evaluation?
Don’t torment me! Good ale here is either like unicorn shit or extremely expensive. Whenever anything decent appears in the supermarkets (which it does sporadically), the WhatsApp messages between my friend and I begin. We have been known to clear a shelf of certain UK IPA’s within hours of it being available.
This place literally just opened up last week, and it’s just round the corner from us:
They’ve got an interesting selection, and their prices for some of the Belgian beers are decent. Need to wait till we get a few bookings under our belt before any extensive research is cerried out!
JF
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Now don’t you get confused and start doing beer tours of Jerez!
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One of my guests who booked for 3 days in July, asked if if I’d make an exception to my 3 day minimum, as they wanted to modify their stay to 2 days.
In preCovid (and since July & August are not prime season) I would have agreed. But these days, it’s not worth it for me. This is how the messaging went:
GUEST: .… Would you be willing to make an exception to the three night minimum stay? We will be in ____ the week before and have friends joining us so we’d like to stay there until Friday afternoon instead of missing them and coming back Thursday let me know if we can modify to just stay Friday and Saturday and Check our Sunday. It would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
ME: Hi ___ Because of all the cleaning requirements for Covid19 precautions + the gap days between stays, I no longer do 2-day stays. If you would like to cancel, and if you do so today, I’ll support a full refund, however you’ll need to initiate it and then AirBNB will contact me to verify. LMK
I followed up this morning:
ME: Just checking back to see if you’ve decided to cancel this reservation, to find something that fits your revised schedule. If that is your plan I’d ask that you do so today, and I’ll support a full refund * By doing such, that will give me enough time to either rebook those dates or make other plans.
If you aren’t going to cancel today, I will have to have to stick with the cancellation policy that is in place. (I included a screen print of the policies)
‘*’ Note: I have no control of how AirBNB handles their service fees but I’d suggest that if you are booking another AirBNB, that you can probably negotiate the refund of service fees on the cancellation.
GUEST: Hi, sorry meant to get back to you yesterday but we would like to keep the reservation as is. We were able to change our other plans and are all set. Looking forward to it!
Lesson learned: Being supportive but sticking to your guns seemed to work.
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@IamJasonWeber Welcome to the forum and thanks for all the constructive input.
On a different topic we got into a discussion about stays greater than 1 month
Curious as to your approach and if/how you mitigate risk regarding tenant squatters, whether you use AirBNB, or go through a traditional lease with background checks, security deposit, 1st/Last, etc.
- Yes; a major difference between renting rooms vs a whole apartment or property. With other renters present, it is also easier to keep tabs to ensure the potential squatters are not being destructive.
- I can see how your market (Silicon Valley) with high cost of living and multiple tech jobs seem to warrant a such a business model.
- You highlight the “one size does not fit all” aspect of this community.
I assume that your Covid19 challenges are those
- now not willing to share apartments
- returning home (or elsewhere) to work remotely
On a similar theme I came across this article a few months ago.