Owner advice
Advice and opinion for holiday rental owners
Your source for villas, apartments & holiday rentals in Spain and the Canary Islands
Do pancake day like a Spaniard
Spanish pancakes
Pancake day (aka Shrove Tuesday) may be a uniquely Anglo-Saxon tradition but Spain loves pancakes too! Here’s some utterly useless but fun ways to give your pancake day a Spanish flavour:
1. Learn the lingo
Pancake in Spanish is normally a Crepe, or sometimes a Panqueque.
2. Don’t take your clothes off
Pancake day in Catholic countries, including Spain, is better known as Mardi Gras – or Fat Tuesday. It’s an ancient festival involving alcohol, dancing and not much clothing.
Spain doesn’t really do Mardi Gras but many regions do celebrate Jueves Lardero, normally the Thursday before Ash Wednesday.
It’s more of an omelette celebration than pancakes or booze but it shares the idea of clearing out the larder with our Shrove Tuesday.
3. Give your pancakes a Spanish twist
Fed up with lemon and sugar? Try this alternative pancake recipe which includes oranges and brandy:
- Make some pancakes the way your mother taught you.
- Melt 50g of butter and 50g of sugar in a pan.
- Add orange rind and allow it to caramelise – do not burn it!
- Add 5tbsp of cognac and the juice of one orange, allow mixture to reduce a little
- Dip pancakes in your sauce, fold into quarters
- Pop on a plate and drizzle a little more sauce on top for presentation
4. Watch viral sensation Julio
We spent minutes researching this article on Google and we couldn’t help tripping over videos of Julio, a nice man from Alcudia who has his own unique style of making pancakes. A lot of tourists seem to like filming him. Here’s Julio in action…
Soaring pool heating costs don’t have to cause misery
We had a useful discussion this week with Lawrence Pemberton, owner of a highly successful property in Lanzarote.
He explained the dilemma he has with the soaring costs of pool heating, a problem a lot of owners are having to deal with as energy prices climb.
To keep a pool permanently warm during a guest’s stay can be enormously expensive. The cost can also vary wildly depending on time of year, the weather or even guest taste. (We’ve all met the person who shivers in anything colder than a hot bath.)
The temptation with this issue is to make pool heating an “optional” extra and we agree the logic makes total sense when looking at your property budget.
But we think optional extras are the wrong approach.
Unavoidable extras annoy people
The point is widely proven in the rest of the travel industry. Lets think about some examples.
Think first about all inclusive holidays whose popularity is growing; they are popular because people like the simplicity and ability to budget for their break. Love ‘em or loathe ‘em – customers like the model.
Conversely the companies who attract holidaymakers’ ire year on year are low cost airlines.
Their unavoidable “extras” and opaque, tiered pricing annoys people to distraction. They only overcome the bad publicity with headline grabbing low rates and vast marketing machines, neither of which is a luxury the average holiday rental owner can afford.
Option 1: Go All Inclusive (recommended)
Customers like simple, transparent pricing. Period.
It makes you easy to book with and the lack of quibble over whether the pool will be warm or not avoids friction. A good relationship with guests is built right from their initial enquiry so it is paramount you get off to a good start.
The solution when calculating your rental prices is to assume your pool will be heated during every guest stay, then amortise the costs over the entire season. Build this into your prices to create a simple, all-in, price.
Option 2: Work backwards by discounting
This is messier but may offer a halfway house.
Calculate prices with heating costs built-in (as in option 1) then offer a discount when guests ask NOT to have the pool heated.
Why would anyone want this? People love discounts – that’s the reason they hate extras! So reverse the psychology by incentivising guests to reduce heating bills.
With this technique, some guests staying in the hottest periods can easily convince themselves heating isn’t really necessary when it’s 30 degress outside. Some will take the discount and ditch the heating. It’s the same result – better presented.
Happy renting!
(Thanks again to Lawrence, ever a hard working and inspiring owner, who’s made Villa Madera in Lanzarote a huge success.)