Things are looking up

 Wow, it is refreshing to be away from the uncertainty of  bookings via Sykes.  After a winter break we've increased returns by 25% and yet seen some good quality holiday rental bookings. Apart from a couple of days we're already booked out into the summer, and we've turned people away. We've been able to assess the guests prior to accepting their bookings. With the Sykes regime booking would come from a wide range of third party sites with virtually no checking of the guests other than that they possess a credit card. No more anonymous guests who think they can play the system.

Now we are sure that the guests have proper prior documentation and a clear route for contact in respect of the booking and any issues arising. Taking payment via credit/debit card is straight forward and not all that expensive. Its card payment provider automatically links into our accounting system (Xero) giving us a clear up to date record of income/expenditure.

Sykes should have better control

 We've now left the Sykes Holiday Cottage family where they had been appointed by us to act as our agents for self-catering rental of our holiday cottage. I won't go into details of our reasons why we decided to drop them. We have informed Sykes as to the underlying issues and have completed the agreed notice period. Meanwhile we're launching our own website to advertise for rental as before. 

One of the exercises were having to undertake is to clean up the mess left on the internet by the Sykes advertising of our cottage for rental.  They promptly removed details of the cottage at our request when the contract was terminated by us. The problem is however, that it appears that Sykes has allowed a network of third party companies to copy from the Sykes web servers, their pictures and description of our cottage. This even extends to the third parties being able to take bookings, presumably for financial benefits, using the Sykes bookings and vacancy process. We not sure of the exact mechanisms/ permissions in place, but the impact is that there are many sites appearing to advertise our cottage for rental, or saying the cottage is no longer available for rental. This is in effect misrepresentation by the third parties. This is damaging for our business, and we're having to pursue the third party website owners to remove the false entries. 

If Sykes are permitting third-party organisations to advertise an owner's cottage for rental (via Sykes) they should have a mechanism in place to control access to the cottage and its booking details. Sykes should be able to restrict access to third-parties who no longer have permission to access those details.  There are easy technology solutions to provide this level of access control. For those without permission, Sykes has legal remedies to prevent unauthorised display.

Normally there's no incentive for a rental agency to stop the ghosting of retired property details. In fact it can be used to generate business for the agency, along the lines of: "You enquired about cottage xxx, but it is no longer available. You may wish to consider these alternatives." This is of course sharp practice, and if we detect Sykes doing this will complain.  Another tool in our armoury is that we have registered the cottage name as a trademark. People advertising the cottage without our permission can be accused of infringing the trademark and also passing off. Both of these can have legal consequences, including damages.

We'll be writing to Sykes to express our concerns about the internet traces left by their activities. Hopefully they'll take notice and change their procedures to avoid inadvertent ghosting of cottage owners. We tried to warn other cottage owners of this issue on the Facebook Sykes Cottage Owners forum, but the moderator blocked the story on the grounds that it might upset other group members.

Edit 6th Mar 2022

I came across a useful wording for others facing this situation:

You are reminded that by continuing to advertise a property you have no ability or authority to let, you are in breach of the ASA CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3. By advertising my property as 'unavailable to book' you are impeding my ability to receive bookings. Furthermore anyone googling my property name can be misdirected to your affiliates, whereupon potential guests may look no further and are mislead into thinking it could be booked for the next two years.

Vindictive guests

 We've already stated elsewhere on this blog that we subsidise guest stays in the cottage. We're looking to cover costs whilst keeping the property occupied without the longer term risks of tenancy agreements.  Bringing holiday guests into the locality also injects cash in the local businesses. As a consequence our rental fees one of the lowest in the area when compared to the facilities provided. However we still get some guests paying the low rent and then expecting Ritz facilities. They will then approach Sykes to get a discount on the subsidised prices.

We had one pair of guests stay over a year ago who demanded a partial refund from Sykes which they didn't receive even after they sent "photographs" to Sykes. Their main complaint was that the accommodation smelt musty. I guess that is difficult to (dis)prove with photographs.  We didn't get involved in this until their bad review was received by Sykes.  Either side of their bad review on the Sykes website are complimentary good reviews from other guests.

Contractually the guests are supposed to contact the owners first during the holiday stay to seek some form of remediation. The "guests" didn't attempt to contact us.  There were the other vague issues added to their complaint list, such as cleaning etc,.  All this could have been resolved if they'd contacted us during their stay.  

In fact we'd just finished redecorating the entire interior of the cottage about a month before their stay. We'd cleaned the whole cottage after the decoration process.  All of the carpets in the house had been professionally cleaned, prior to their arrival. We also undertaken a Covid-19 sterilisation clean in every room, at short notice, prior to their arrival. This included wiping down surfaces, UV-c light exposure and steam sterilisation

One of the guests has publicly stated in bold type on the Internet, for all to see, that their objective of their holiday was: "...a cheap few nights..." I guess that sums up the whole event. I'm sure a discount would have made it cheaper. As it was they were able bring their two dogs to the cottage for no fee, which saved them £240 in kennel boarding fees.

However not content with a bad review via Sykes, they posted a similar review about the cottage on TripAdvisor some 14 months after their stay. That is plain vindictive. We're now considering legal action against this couple for damages. I've made sure to take full archival copies of their reports.  

They also failed to comply with Covid-19 regulations during their stay and also did not follow the departure procedures with the consequence that we were unable to check the security/state of the cottage when they left.

Should we make better use of the property?

 Having had a poor summer in terms of the guests, we're looking at future alternative uses for the cottage. In previous years the guests have complimented the cottage, but this year most of the Covid staycation guests have been excessively demanding, manufactured unwarranted complaints and looked to get discounts on our already subsidised prices. Would they put in hours of unpaid work for strangers who are only going to complain?  Guests, who we've allowed to board their pets in our property at no additional cost.

We're contacting the local authority to discuss offering our furnished property for rental to those in need of housing, such as Afghan refugees. People in genuine need.

Goodbye Sykes - we're giving notice!

We've finally tired of Sykes' games. They provide poor quality guests, and don't help when things go wrong. The term "Teflon Shoulders" comes to mind.  They've made a lot of money on the back of our capital investment and free labour. We're tired of subsidising guests stays in our property for Sykes profits. 

They now appear to be tinkering with contractual terms and conditions. A contract should document the business agreement and relationship between the parties. It is a document of last resort to be used when things go wrong, but when one side attempts to unilaterally change those terms and conditions to their sole benefit it is a sign that the original business agreement has broken down. Our guess this is largely due to the change of ownership of Sykes and the need to recover the massive sums borrowed for the purchase.

Six more months before we are finally free.

The costs of cleaning self catering holiday home for Covid-19

We're discussing with our rental agency (Sykes) what the impact of additional cleaning costs will be when we turnaround our small one bedroom holiday cottage between guest stays. Providing a safe place will inevitably increase the rental charged to guests, when Covid is no longer a concern we can consider removing the extra charges. On the basis of current estimates it is an additional £65 per turnaround.

We've carefully considered the Sykes recommendations for cleaning, ignoring those which are contradicted by the World Health Organisation, to ensure effective but safe procedures for our cleaners. We have decided against the use of fogging devices which leave a residual fine layer of biocide chemicals throughout the premises after application by mist/spray/fog.

To prevent infection passing between sets of guests, and our cleaning staff, we need to undertake extensive and thorough cleaning both inside and outside our cottage. We need to disinfect surfaces that may have become infected. We also need to provide additional disposable protective equipment (PPE) for our cleaning staff.

We already have extensive cleaning procedures in place for our cottage as part of normal rental. These existing procedures have to be completed within a four hour gap between the departure of one set of guests and the arrival of new guests. To complete the additional work for Covid-19 precautions we'll need to extend the turnaround gap by two hours to a six hour period to allow for the additional work. To keep capital costs under control, during the indeterminate period of Covid-19 risk, we have chosen to rent the necessary equipment, for steam cleaning and ultraviolet light sterilisation, on a daily rental rate. The costs of the additional treatment and labour, extra to existing cleaning, is estimated at £43.17 per turnaround.

The cost of additional disposable items, arising from Covid cleaning and safe disposal is estimated at £14.96 for each turnround.

We also need to purchase additional stocks of bedding, linen, towels,  pillows, cushions etc to enable potentially infected materials to be left for a week in sealed bags, allowing any virus to degrade. Our cost estimate for this additional stock is £407.  Spread across the expected lifetime of these goods, that is around £6.98 per week or turnaround.

I've a detailed spreadsheet of all of the cost items. I won't publish here, but it is available for those who might want more information.

Sykes Owners Facebook Page

We've belatedly signed up to Sykes Owners' Facebook page. To be honest it is a bit of an eye opener. Many of the owners are not happy with Sykes' performance on Covid-19 and refunds policy in the case of booking cancellations due to Covid-19. One poll shows 30% of owners have given notice to Sykes Cottages. Undoubtedly this poll is a bit self selecting, but it is an indication that all is not right.

Cleaning the cottage in a Covid Era

We just received guidance from the Rental Agency (Sykes) on the health measures needed when the holiday cottage industry opens again. Their current conclusions:

• Provide PPE for cleaners or changeover staff; disposable gloves, aprons, masks, hand sanitiser.
• Clean most surfaces with bleach/disinfectant
• ULV Fogging machine used in all rooms between bookings; 
• Change all cleaning cloths, mops, oven gloves, bathmats, tea towels and towels between bookings;
• Change all linen, bagged before laundry;
• Change pillow and mattress protectors between bookings;
• Change gloves between each stage of cleaning;
• Clean high use areas, also ovens, fridges, freezers,toasters, kettles, irons, hair dryers, and vacuum cleaners, bathroom fittings
• Clean controls, books, toys, games
• Clean bins inside and out; empty bins between bookings (note the council only collect fortnightly).
• Clean umbrellas, mops, dustpan & brush and brooms
• Clean garden furniture, Bbq, Sheds, Garages, shared entrances, key safes.
• In  addition to soap, supply guests with disinfectant, hand sanitiser, tissues, disposable gloves, new cloths (?), disposable wipes, paper towels; i.e. throw away the  unused toilet rolls and paper kitchen rolls after a guest stay.

Note that fogging machines cost around £500 or more, if you ignore the cheaper (unwarranted and uncertified) Chinese Ebay type of device. Their recommendations would also entail expenditure on additional bed and bathroom linen from the current four sets to six sets of linen and towels. The additional cleaning will increase the man hours needed for change over. 


We recently had to do an extensive deep clean when some guests decided to smoke  inside the property, against the booking conditions, during their stay. It greatly increased the cleaning time from about ninety minutes to five hours work. I'd imagine doing extensive anti-virus cleaning will see similar extensions.

So far Sykes haven't explained how this additional expenditure will be recouped, they certainly they  haven't suggested they'll contribute to the costs. As we currently only make on average £3 profit per day this additional funding will have to come from increased rental charges. The ownership of Sykes changed hands from private equity company Livingbridge for $480 Million USD in the autumn of 2019 and have a reported annual profit in the region of $25 Million USD.

Discussions are ongoing but their initial idea was for us as owners to offer a 20% discount on rental to prospective clients to encourage bookings. It seems like a recipe to increase losses in the face of increased cleaning costs and extended between stay gaps.

We've also done some research:

• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-52577705
• https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/disinfecting-building-facility.html
• https://www.aftermath.com/blog/the-truth-behind-fogging-cdc-recommended-cleaning-and-disinfection-procedures-for-covid-19/
• http://www.iuva.org/IUVA-Fact-Sheet-on-UV-Disinfection-for-COVID-19
• https://www.pascuk.co.uk/standards
• https://www.independentcottages.co.uk/holiday-blog/coronavirus-considerations-for-reopening-your-holiday-home-to-guests

Edit 02/06/2020: Added details of Sykes

Unexpected guests at the cottage

A couple of weeks ago, we had a bit of a panic when a guest SMS messaged me saying they'd be arriving in an hour's time and how do they get the keys to the cottage. Unfortunately our holiday rental company Sykes had made a rare mistake and not told us about this guest's booking in advance. So, we were not expecting them to arrive. Having a week's gap in bookings, we'd removed the covers from the furniture and the cottage was not "made up" ready for the guests.  Indeed, I had been planning to start stripping paint at the cottage in preparation for some redecorations.

A couple of urgent calls to Sykes established the booking had been made, but not paid for by the guest. Sykes couldn't get the guest to answer their phone. However I, by SMS message, I was able to contact the guest and establish he had in fact paid in advance and had a booking number. I forwarded this information to Sykes who were able to sort out their problem and release the booking to me. At this point the guests were on public transport just 30 minutes from the cottage. I really didn't want to ruin their holiday.
Cleaning the cottage and making it up, normally takes a couple of hours work for my wife and me.  Unfortunately my wife was away from our home, at a charity committee meeting. I had to start the process of getting the cottage ready for the guests, and we live 20 minutes drive from the cottage. My wife understandably was not answering her mobile phone at the time, so I had to hurriedly gather clean bedding, linen, towels and chair covers, then head off to the cottage.  I could at least let the guests into the cottage when they got off their bus, but there'd be a delay while I prepared the cottage for them.

The couple duly arrived when planned, about five minutes after I'd arrived. After greeting them, I carried on preparing the cottage while they went and did some food shopping.  Not long after my wife materialised, having seen my messages and leaving her committee meeting. We set the cottage up in record time, including recovering the lounge furniture.