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We’ve had guests skip breakfast when they had to share the dining room. They didn’t want to just not have to share a table (we had 6 separate tables), they refused to sit with anyone in the same room!

I wanted to stop in one last time to say goodbye and thank you to everyone who has cheered us on and commiserated with us over the years. (The PITA baton is available!) It’s been over a year since we retired and I don’t feel I have anything up to date to contribute. So, time to hang up the...

I’m planning a vacation in the fall. I have to wait until Gomez gets his act together because the cottages I’m looking at are all non-refundable and I don’t want to go without him just so I don’t lose the money. 🤣

Oh the pain! They had the phone number all along. Drives me nuts.

Yes to all of this! I do not miss the breakfast crap. At all. However, it’s been a year and I have serious memory issues around the 18 years we spent running the inn. 😉

You know…on vacation we were offered a full Scottish every day. The innkeepers were ok with adjustments as long as it was adding to or subtracting from the full Scottish. Maybe they had gluten free bread, but they’d probably consider a request for gf as meaning you don’t want toast. 😉 There was...

We had big weekends that were booked a year in advance: graduation, parents weekend, fiber festival. I always sent a reminder on January 1. Then again 3 months before. The 3 month one is where the cancellations came in. You could do as suggested and take the balance at a month out, or whatever...

You’ll need to verify the fire code. The rules are different by category (hotel vs B&B, for example) and they vary by state, too. Now on to the the other point. You want blackout curtains, whatever shape they take. You want an easy to operate curtain system. You don’t want those horrible, noisy...

If I thought ‘expensive’ from the photos, I wouldn’t get to the prices to be surprised. Unless I had to be in that location. Funny thing, I just went to look at the website of the castle we stayed at. The room photos screamed ‘cheap.’ The room I stayed in looked nothing like the photo. I guess...

Yes. I like to know if I can afford something before I spend a lot of time looking.

Recommendation: if you only list prices on the booking page make sure your guests don’t have to ‘go back to change dates’ if you’re full on the original dates they entered. Nothing winds me up faster than not being able to find rates unless I enter a date and then having to start all over again...

Yowza!

First time in forever! We just beat the crush, which generally starts around the second week in July over there.

We had duvets in the winter, not all year. (But they were in addition to everything else, so they did not save any time!) My best suggestion is to get covers that fit closely, without a lot of extra space around the duvet. I’m not sure why it was so difficult for me to find covers that fit...

It was a shock coming back and finding the towels at La Quinta so tiny and thin.

We always made the beds ‘the way mom used to,’ with top sheet, blanket, coverlet. I am here to say that after two weeks in Scotland I am sold on the duvet system. Yes, a bit of work getting the cover on the duvet, but that’s it. Bottom sheet + duvet = done. You’re washing one sheet...

It’s your website. If it’s not up to date, that is your problem. If you were running a sale today, then explain that, but still expect grumpy guests. There are people, Gomez included, who check prices for weeks after buying something to annoy himself that he could have gotten it cheaper.

If it needs perspective, it’s not much different than room service. Someone has to deliver the meal to the room (patio) and there’s a fee. We only did outdoor service for two years. It involved me running trays up and down a flight of 15 steps. Good exercise, but that was about it. If guests...

So, the interesting thing about this, having watched it happen for years, is she didn’t see the pitcher with the half and half. Seriously. Even if she looked right at it, it did not register. In her head, mini moos were what she had to find. Pre-caffeination most coffee drinkers cannot function...

I used to think that. We tried it anyway. Some weekends it worked, others we just lowered the price again. I went and checked how my old gang was pricing for this summer and found that the one place that used to have much lower prices ($40-50) is now up where we were. (With no commensurate...