Is there a time you just close the inn?

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JBloggs

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Do you close the inn over the slower months?
Do you accept reservations for only a certain room or rooms?
Do you close for January or February for renovations or maintenance?
 
Vacation days.... 8 more sleeps.
Time to take off to warm climate and then home in enough time to do fix ups painting, planting & General and major yard work. Clean up out side of house a good old wash down. Then put up my feet and drink "ice Tea " I know in my dreams LOL..
 
We close for 5-6 weeks in the winter. We do projects and try to get out to see family and friends on a road trip. Then we'll close M-Th during some months so we can just relax.
 
I close when I have a Conference or DH wants to go somewhere (a la the motorcycle retrieval) or I take a month off like i did last June to go to Europe. But we do not close down during any specific time each year.
If it is snowing DH does not even go out on the porch - so I may as well be open (heat only goes on upstairs when a room is rented - bathrooms are kept just warm enough to keep pipes from freezing). BUT we are never as busy as some of you are. I have yet to do a month when I had regular-type B & B bookings every night like some of you. I am off-the-path.
 
We close for vacation and for repairs when needed.
We are open in Jan & Feb - gotta be open for the snow birds!!!
 
We stay open all year round. Jan and feb are very slow, but that gives us time to do any work required.
Also close for vacations, like now.
 
We close for vacation, grandchildren or if we have grounds or building maintenance going on.
 
We close from November until April. I run this whole thing by myself, I am the one that is available 24/7, I clean everything myself due to not being able to get reliable help, I really do EVERYTHING. Guess what, I need a break. A long break. When I open up again, I am ready to smile and laugh about the stupid things people do
 
We close from November until April. I run this whole thing by myself, I am the one that is available 24/7, I clean everything myself due to not being able to get reliable help, I really do EVERYTHING. Guess what, I need a break. A long break. When I open up again, I am ready to smile and laugh about the stupid things people do.
IrisoftheWayfarer said:
We close from November until April. I run this whole thing by myself, I am the one that is available 24/7, I clean everything myself due to not being able to get reliable help, I really do EVERYTHING. Guess what, I need a break. A long break. When I open up again, I am ready to smile and laugh about the stupid things people do
Oh Iris! I can tell you see the light at the end of the tunnel one more week to go!
 
We don't have set times that we close, but November, January, March and April leave opportunity for us to take a break. This year so far I've blocked a couple weeks in Nov ... Sun-Thurs closed.
I can't wait!
 
We close from November until April. I run this whole thing by myself, I am the one that is available 24/7, I clean everything myself due to not being able to get reliable help, I really do EVERYTHING. Guess what, I need a break. A long break. When I open up again, I am ready to smile and laugh about the stupid things people do.
IrisoftheWayfarer said:
We close from November until April. I run this whole thing by myself, I am the one that is available 24/7, I clean everything myself due to not being able to get reliable help, I really do EVERYTHING. Guess what, I need a break. A long break. When I open up again, I am ready to smile and laugh about the stupid things people do
Oh Iris! I can tell you see the light at the end of the tunnel one more week to go!
.
Indeed I see the end and two wonderful trips for yours truly.
wink_smile.gif

 
First year, no...unless I had to block off a day because I was so sick that I couldn't take care of guests.
Second year, I looked at the very dead times from the previous year and blocked some time periods off entirely to do maintenance and upgrade/replace things...and take some days off in a row. There were other just sloooooooow times when I blocked off the rooms in our second house to save the $$$ on the utilities and just had the rooms in our house available. I tried doing it the other way around to give us some more privacy, but we still had to keep everything top notch in the main house since that's where I checked them in and served breakfast. Seemed like blocking rooms off backfired at times when the university needed to put folks up. I usually relented and booked the rooms. sigh.
I think I would have stuck to the plan if I had kept going forward...the university was very forgiving.
Some of my slowest times were in the hottest Summer months...a bit different from most folks, I think.
 
We're seasonal. Our water distribution system is all above ground and not winter-proof, nor are the cottages insulated or heated. Besides that, there just aren't any winter tourists, although the harbor can be quite beautiful in winter.
So we are shutting down and winterizing the cottages now. Will open things up again in late April / early May, once the threat of a hard freeze has passed.
 
We will actually 'close' only when I can't get an inn-sitter, or when I don't want to bother with one. So, this means two days over Thanksgiving when we go to Philly to spend time with family; four days in August to head down the shore and a few days at Christmas.
DH works full-time outside of the inn and DD is still in school, so it doesn't make any sense to close during the slower months (Jan/Feb) like some of our local colleagues do. P.O.'s used to take their kids out of school right after Christmas and head to Australia for the month of January. Didn't set well with the school.
Closing the inn (for just a little while) truly allows me to relax, whereas if I had a sitter here, I'd still be worrying about things.
I do projects like painting, major cleaning and stuff while we're still technically 'open', but I can usually get 2-3 days without guests during the winter so I can get things done. If I'm working in a specific room, I'll just take that one out of service for whatever time I need.
 
Which reminds me. I have a living room full of boxes from that Swedish store with Chinese Furniture that actually incorporated in the Netherlands. It's intended to be the new furniture in one of the rooms, but we haven't had two days in a row empty to allow me the time to build, move and update the furniture in the room. Likely middle of November or early December.
I think I'm going to hire two university students and let them build the furniture and move furniture from room to room. Officially the only open days on the calendar are two when we come back from vacation and then the last two days of November and we are already into December. We are almost full for Christmas already.
 
Our Inn has always been open year-round, even through the holidays - 365 days a year. According to the books from POs, January & Feb are so dead, it's like we're closed. One year they only did 4 rooms the entire January (out of 240 possible). So with it being that dead, we can take day trips and sleep in, do maintenance, etc. We're hoping the new owners will let us shut down for a week or two so we can go visit family or one of y'all
wink_smile.gif
 
I run my 3 cottage/room B&B by myself also. Open all year round except for Innkeepers meetings, small trips to see friends/relatives. Dec, Jan, Feb, are slow here and May,Oct. are very busy. When I want off I just mark the calendar not available and take off. I retired last Dec . so no job except the B&B.........nice :)
 
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