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An estimated 4 million people a year rent cottages or holiday apartments and more than half of those are let independently rather than through agents.
Starting and Running a Holiday Cottage Business offers practical and down-to-earth guidance for prospective holiday cottage owners who want to turn their holiday home-owning dreams into reality, and make it a long-lasting success.
The first part of Starting and Running a Holiday Cottage Business helps you to identify your market and your ideal guests, where you want to establish the business and the kind of self catering you are interested in. Chapters include guidance on how to carry out building works, decoration, and how to furnish and equip the cottages to meet the requirements of your guests and of the quality assurance schemes in Britain.
The second section of the book focuses on the day-to-day running of the business – how to market and advertise your properties, take bookings, and organise your accounts. Also included is essential information for establishing a safe, legal and profitable holiday rental operation, including how to keep your guests coming back year after year!
This is an excellent guide for people looking for a change of lifestyle and hoping to establish their own holiday cottage business.
Gillean Sangster runs her own successful holiday cottage business in Scotland. She is co-author of The Downshifter’s Guide to Relocation also published by How To Books. According to the author, she had no plans to start a self-catering business, but in the course of downshifting to the country for a more relaxed lifestyle, she recognised the potential in a small unused cottage on the land she bought and decided to turn it into a holiday letting property. It took a great deal of hard work, marked by a high learning curve and inevitable mistakes along the way, but eventually her first letting was born. Later she moved to Scotland to downshift even further and applied her new found expertise to a larger property in the West Highlands.
Says Gillean, “I hope that this book will guide anyone as to exactly what is involved in the business. We have certainly never regretted our decision. It is still a pleasure to see guests – tired after the journey and often stressed out with working long hours – gradually relax over the next few days.”
Starting and Running a Holiday Cottage Business is published 15 by How To Books Ltd. and is available at £12.99 in major bookshops and online retailers across the country.
