A strange title you may think, as business travel is usually anything but beautiful. As it doesn’t involve the pleasures of travelling for leisure, but usually entails a lot of soulless nights fixating on the TV from a hard bed or cramped up over a laptop in a hot room where you can’t even open the windows, it is hardly ever beautiful. Far from the ‘jet set’ glamour that people who don’t do business travel think it is, it is usually quite a lonely, empty experience. Hotel rooms are not the friendliest or most welcoming way to stay for most people anyway and when you are alone and away from your loved ones because it is work, and not really allowed to enjoy yourself, they can be soul-destroying.

Dan says: “New York, Madrid, Copenhagen, Paris… Business lunches and dinners – all expenses paid; It would be easy to think you’ve made it and it’s certainly hard to win sympathy but it’s not all as jet set as it sounds. Travelling alone with the purpose of your trip definitely not to have fun (that doesn’t go down well in the office back home) can actually be quite dull and spent in a hotel room where you could be anywhere in the world preparing for your meeting or catching up on e-mails. My business travels, 9 times out of 10, lead to me going back to these cities for fun with someone I could actually share it with.”

But holiday lets have changed all that. How lovely to be welcomed into someone’s home to stay, where you can spread out, relax, cook, eat, watch a film and not all in the same room. A home from home is so much more inviting where you can literally feel at home, especially as you are there to work and much more likely to spend a lot of time in and not out sightseeing or raving it up.

Air BnB have specifically marked our homes as ‘ready for business travel’ in a bid to open up our homes and hearts to business travellers needing a bit of love and care. Our business travellers love that they can feel at home when they are away from home – a far cry from the days of hotel rooms and homesickness.

With more and more buy-to-let investors looking at holiday lets as an alternative to traditional long-term lets what is actually involved? Having built a holiday let business where we manage a number of properties for people; we know very well the massive advantages of holiday letting a property. Get it right and the returns are vastly superior to a long-term rental and that financial superiority has only grown since the new tax rules applied to landlords by HMRC have come into effect.

But it is a lot more involved and labour intensive than a long-term let which is where our service comes into play. We bring years of experience and knowledge that pre-dates the likes of AirBnB of providing a service to landlords and guests. Cleaning, preparation and laundry are some of the new material things to manage with a holiday let vs. a long-term let, and that is assuming you have got the marketing bit right. AirBnB have become the new ‘Hoover’ of ‘Holiday Lets’ but it would be very limiting to think that the best results can be delivered by just using AirBnB; there are a number of platforms and it’s managing use of these in tandem that produces the returns.

For information on how we can deliver the best returns for you with zero stress, simply hand us the keys, then please contact us:

Tel: 01225 571234
Email: hello@holiday-lets.com

Great article by Money Wise with contributions from our friends at Property Tribes.

http://www.moneywise.co.uk/home-mortgage/letting/why-holiday-homes-are-the-new-buy-to-let

Extract:

If you’d prefer to use an agency, there are lots of companies that will take over management of your property for a commission of about 20% to 30%. While that may sound steep compared to the DIY options, many holiday let owners feel they couldn’t achieve the same level of bookings without agencies.

“If you find the right agent, they are worth their weight in gold,” says Adam Walsh. “Unless you are living within five minutes of your property I would think you would have to have it fully managed. Ours are a long way from us, so it would be unrealistic for us to manage those properties.”

While our fees are not even near the 30% mark we have to agree with Adam!

We deal with a number of investors who take advantage of the tax and financial advantages of Holiday Lets over traditional property investments. Even if you don’t have enough to invest alone we have a number of investors and mechanisms to help people take advantage of holiday lets in and around Bath.

For more information on how we can help your money work harder for you, get in touch:

Please contact us on 01225 571234 or e-mail

Living in Bath, it’s easy to miss some of the top pleasures of the world. When you grew up next to the Royal Crescent, it’s not such a wonder as it is to someone who sees it for the first time. We have become almost immune in Bath, actually a little bit spoilt.

I know whenever I return from holiday I think ‘Ah, Bath, it’s so nice to be home’ and in fact it’s quite hard to go away anywhere because it’s hard to beat Bath. It really is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. That sounds a bit arrogant but it’s not my city, I’m just incredibly lucky to live here. Probably in the top ten of lucky in the world.

Speaking of which, the Roman Baths, that extraordinary underground, small taste of Roman life beneath a city of Georgian grandeur is actually number one on the list of things to do before you die; according to The Telegraph. That’s no mean feat. There are so many amazing places to see in the UK. But The Telegraph got me thinking because only the day before, a lovely family staying with us from America had asked me if the Roman Baths were worth visiting and I said that I thought it may be rather boring for the children! What a terrible thing to say! Unforgiveable! I just didn’t think and I acted on my instinct. I did go on to say that it was definitely worth going for the experience but I’m still shocked at my initial reaction! I have to add, they did visit and they loved it!

So, I started thinking about how spoilt we are here. How we get on with our daily life with our heads down, complaining about parking and getting stressed sitting in traffic. We are immersed, almost literally due to the bowl shape of Bath, in a world of wonder, in a city that was built by the Georgians for pleasure. If we take time to look up and around and actually think, there is so much we take for granted. If we go one step further and try to feel and imagine, we can take ourselves back in time to the splendour of times gone by, without the cars and the traffic. We can try to imagine being carried around in a sedan chair or wearing magnificent Jane Austenesque long dresses whilst courting men in heels! And possibly even wigs!

The Georgians built Bath so that the wealthy people of London could come here and ‘take the waters’. They partied at night and bathed in the healing waters by day. How lovely to have no phones or cars but just perhaps a horse and a lot of energy! And, technology aside, not much has changed, except that now that travel is so much easier, we have visitors from all over the world coming to experience the Roman Baths and the city. And it’s exciting for them to see a world so far apart from their own, wherever they come from.

I love that our guests love visiting here so much and I’ve always known that we are lucky to live here and have such a beautiful hometown to share; but I hadn’t thought much beyond that and I now know that I won’t be taking Bath or its many beautiful and magnificent pleasures for granted again.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/united-kingdom/galleries/The-ultimate-UK-travel-bucket-list-20-things-to-do-before-you-die/roman-baths/

What does ‘value’ actually mean today? The dictionary says “The worth of something compared to the price paid or asked for it”. Simple then. If I wanted a coffee and two shops next door to each other were selling coffee but one was cheaper that the other I would have to say the cheaper shop was better value. But of course its not that simple, for a number of reasons, ‘value’ is all too often linked with money and putting a number on it. Lets be honest us Brits love getting a deal, getting more for less is so satisfying so long as the product delivers to our expectations. Then there are the review sites “Rate the value out of 5” well that is really quite subjective, to give one example to make an extreme point:

I need to get to London so pay £29.50 to get the train, its ok value in my opinion could be cheaper and could be more expensive if I went peak. I have a lovely evening out but needing to be back for something early the next day leave for my return train, I miss it, there are no more trains or buses. At this point I am in a bit of a pickle but find a taxi that will take me home for £160.00. WOW that’s expensive and over 5 times the amount I paid to get to London but it represents great value to me. The value comes in getting home more than the money spent.

That’s rather over the top but shows that value isn’t always about money its about what something is worth to someone personally and what one person values maybe very different to what someone else values. Also past experiences can set the tone for this. So how do you rate value? All our holiday let properties whether they are in Bath or the surrounding area get reviewed and ‘value’ is always a criteria, we maintain what companies would traditionally say is “good value” for money but perhaps next time you fill in a review think of ‘value’ to you not just in monetary terms.

That all said we are proud that when guests fill in reviews for one of our AirBnB Holiday Let properties in Bath 93% of the time it’s a 5/5.

In truth nobody can say for certain because we are in uncharted territory and it’s that fact which will cause instability. The initial ‘knee jerk’ reaction of the financial markets are really just a shot across the bows as the move to exit the EU isn’t seen in favourable light by the world because the UK hasn’t actually left the EU yet, that will not even start to happen until Article 50 of the Lisbon Treat is triggered. Markets and economies like stability and growth; anything that unsettles the apple cart creates a nervousness and uncertainty. In lots of ways it could now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Over the coming months and even years we will likely see a seesaw effect where key milestones are reached along the ‘divorce proceedings’ and at each juncture there will be a perceived winner and loser in the negotiations. This will tip the markets one way or the other but with all of this we need to keep in mind that while no longer brothers in arms, the UK is joined at the hip to Europe. In April 2016 the UK exported £25 billion while importing £41 billion worth, so there is a symbiotic relationship where neither can afford to do too much damage to the other. Like we saw on Friday 24th June, the pound had a very bad day but the euro lost around 3% of its value.

It is now a case of finding the balance between stabilising the economy and stimulating growth to avoid a recession. The Bank of England will play a key role in this and thankfully so far Mark Carney seems to be one of the few men with a plan. Overall borrowing will become tougher and the base rate of interest could be used to regulate the economy. This could drop in the short term to keep worried Brits spending and keep monthly household costs down but the stability of the interest rates we’ve enjoyed for so many years could be over. Other than a fiscal stimulus, the Bank of England’s base rate of interest is the best mechanism to exert control over the economy.

Swap rates – which are often the precursor to changing mortgage rates – have been falling since the vote to leave the EU. If mortgage interest rates follow, then housebuyers and those remortgaging may see the cost of their monthly repayments become a bit cheaper. BBC News

Britain though is one of the most debt-laden countries in the world and the deficit (the difference between what the government spends and what it receives in taxes), projected to be around £69 billion a year before the referendum is the big concern. This was arguably a large concern while our economy was growing, with the ensuing uncertainty and with the fact that the UK’s outlook has been downgraded to ‘negative’ by Moody’s and other, the UK’s borrowing is only going to get tougher and more expensive.

So what does this mean for the UK tourism and the holiday let industry? Let me first caveat this by saying again nobody really knows for certain, if they did I think they would become very rich indeed! In the short term there will be no changes with regards to the way people can move around Europe and even if there are changes long term, holidaying will be easy enough, just as it is now for people to go to the USA etc. we may just need a visa.

With the pound weaker it becomes more attractive to travel to the UK for foreigners as their money will go further. And ‘staycations’ could become more popular by the same token; that going abroad will cost Brits more than it did before. This could all change but this would equal more money coming into and staying in the UK, which is good news for holiday let owners. That is the mathematical way of looking at it but there is a fear that there could be a backlash from Europeans and an effective boycott of the UK. The leave campaign, and even David Cameron in his re-negotiations earlier this year, did not have many nice things to say about the EU, it is possible that Europeans will feel aggrieved by the referendum vote. So far we have actually seen bookings increase, comparing the last week with previous averages, so the outlook is positive at present.

In terms of investment in holiday let properties I think it is accepted that growth in the property market will slow and with the right facilities in place to overcome tougher lending for mortgages some good deals can be struck. We could be faced with increased demand for all the reasons above and properties being accessible in a slower market, providing an opportunity for a good return on investment. With the recent tightening of tax rules on ‘buy to lets’ holiday lets are seen as a lucrative alternative.

A recent blog by Simon Misiewicz explains some of the tax advantages to holiday lets: http://www.propertytribes.com/are-holiday-lets-the-next-big-thing-t-127624358.html

Related articles: After Brexit will more of us take our holidays in the UK? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36651466

Dan Whiting – The Bath Holiday Company www.holiday-lets.com

Picture by Adam Calkin

AirBnB is just one of the ways in which we advertise the properties we manage.  To be honest AirBnB still feel like the new kids on the block given how long we have been in business but they have done for holiday lets what Uber have done for taxis and really shaken up the market.  We were sceptical at first and wanted to do all the necessary research before putting any of our client’s lovely homes on it but hats off to AirBnB they really do bring a whole new audience and way of transacting to the holiday let market.  The two way reviews (both guests and hosts can review each other) are a breath of fresh air, and really create an open relationship from the start of any booking.  We are proud to be classed as ‘super hosts’ by AirBnB as it shows that our service to our guests is of the highest calibre.

Success breeds success and we are pretty much full in our current properties delivering great income for our clients- everyone wins.  However, we need more properties, the worst part of our job is telling an excited would-be guest that we are fully booked.  With the best value for money management fees, some of the highest occupancy rates (number of nights booked each month) and with a proven and rewarded commitment to the best service, The Bath Holiday Company is worth having a chat to.  Whether you currently holiday let property, are thinking about it or know someone who is, please get in contact.

Tel: 01225 571234
Email: hello@holiday-lets.com