Well we’re now starting our second season and so I thought it was time to give an overview of our first season. We made the gite available for booking from the middle of July, as we obviously needed to buy it first (very important) and then go over and make sure everything was ready for our guests before they arrived.

Getting everything ready for our guests was really hard work but we managed it in the end and the gite did look really nice and hopefully we had everything our guests needed. As for our bookings, they had gone very well, especially as we had only advertised on Owners Direct. We also had our own website but that wasn’t being found on it’s own through the search engines, see this post on getting your website found for the story of that.

As we were coming to market quite late in the season we had decided to have relatively low prices for our first High Season, to ensure that we got the bookings and we were full. In the end we were booked through to the 3rd week in September and also a week in October which was great and ensured that although it wasn’t really going to make us rich, it definitely covered any costs.

Of the list of things we wanted to change about the gite our number one priority was some new sofas. The sofas that came with the house were comfortable but did not look great, especially in the photos as the throws looked like dust covers, so in our trip in October at the end of the season we decided that this was something we needed to resolve so we bought some new ones. These were delivered in December and we have just been out in March to get everything ready and open up for the new season and so were able to unpack the new sofas and get some photos of them for the website.

So our first season was a great success, all of our guests had a great time and left some great comments about the gite, nothing went really wrong, with only one call-out to our gite managers about a key stuck in a the back door lock. On the breakages front We had a broken video recorder and one broken mug. The video recorder was tricky to resolve as most people seem to have stopped selling them but we did replace it so all is well.

We are really looking forward to our second season, our first full one, coming up and things have been going very well on the bookings front so we really hope that continues and everyone has a good a time as our guests did last year.

Brittany Gite – 2 Bedroom Cottage / Gite near Dinan, Brittany, France

Buying, Owning and Running a Gite in Brittany Blog

©Derek Arkwright 2008