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Coronavirus advice for owners

This page is to keep all our owners up to date. Please check back regularly as the situation develops…


UPDATE: 08:00, 24 March 2020

Below is DRAFT wording of new policy. We aim to get this online by 9am today Tues. If you have a chance to read and comment please do so. The vast majority of you have said ‘cancel’ and those who have opted for ‘advisory’ have done so with good reason. So in a nutshell we are cancelling April, with May advisory for now although of course we can cancel May in a couple of weeks if/when we want to and some of you will already have made that decision. By doing it this way we encourage guests to move or cancel (under generous terms) which protects some income and/or supports business later in the year.

Also see below, below, our charity plan (Martin & Sue’s idea, Pearl and Gem).

Here’s the text — we are still proofreading and tweaking….

To protect the limited capacity of the NHS in Cornwall, which has a high number of old and vulnerable people in its communities, and in the light of Government advice, we have to close our doors for a while. It’s with great sadness of course which we know you are sharing too, but we all need to do the right thing. It’s not all doom and gloom though and we are looking forward to happier times! With that in mind our small team has worked closely with owners, who are all keen to be as generous as possible to you, the visitor. We know you love Cornwall and will come back as soon as you can! So here are our plan, and your options.

Holidays in April

With deep regret holidays in April are cancelled with a few exceptions (which will be notified individually). You will receive a full refund except for our standard £50 cancellation admin fee. We have decided to charge you this as per T&Cs but will pass it on in full to our self-employed housekeepers, who are the hardest hit by this situation. It’s a small amount and we hope you are sympathetic to this decision to support local communities wherever we can.

Holidays in May

These remain in place (of course we will monitor guidance closely and review our policy as necessary). We have worked closely with owners to give you three options;

1) Wait and see. Your reservation is secure and we have suspended our usual cancellation policy for May stays meaning that you can cancel up to 48 hours prior to the check-in day with only our standard £50 cancellation fee if you cancel later. This means you are under no pressure and can wait and see.

2) Cancel. If you’d rather make a clean beak, we understand your feelings and you can cancel now — we can give you 50% of the holiday cost you have paid, plus any security deposit you have paid, with no admin fee. Cancellations must be notified by the end of March or will deemed to be ‘wait and see’. If you cancel we’ll process payments within 72 hours and the credit will return to you card within around 10 days.

3) Move it. We’d love to see you later in the year so we can move you to any 2020 dates and have also agreed with owners to extend this offer to the end of 2021 (subject to availability) because we know some of you can only holiday at certain times of year due to the jobs you do. If you move your stay we can waive admin fees of course. If you can tell us new dates that’s great — if not we can give you a full credit note for later.

Holidays in June and beyond : existing and new bookings from Fri 5 June onwards

Obviously there is uncertainty about June and beyond but we want to make your decisions as easy as possible, so we have suspended our usual cancellation policy until further notice. Instead you can keep your booking in place, confident that you can cancel it later if you need to and only pay our small admin fee of £50 — or move it with no admin fee. We hope this will give you the confidence to ‘wait and see’ knowing that you have a great holiday booked with excellent flexibility.

Charity proposal

We will also ask anyone cancelling under favourable terms to make a voluntary £50 donation to St Petrock’s the Cornish homeless charity – and will double it with equal top-up from owners and/or FC. Details to be worked out later… Homeless are one of the most vulnerable groups of course, as ever.


 

UPDATE 18:00pm 23 March 2020

Sorry more reading this evening! We have now audited a list of competitors (National Trust, Classic, Aspects, Gems, Sykes, Horizons, Original Cottages, Beach Retreats and others). They are pushing/encouraging guests to cancel but not actually cancelling the stays themselves. This makes an important contractual difference because if we cancel holidays we have to give all money back. If guests cancel we are not obliged to give any back.

It’s binary, which is unhelpful — and we are trying to give better options. We want to do better than the competitors — but ideally protect some owner income (which in turn can help housekeepers) and some business cashflow. At the same time we know some of you are in a position where you cannot offer certain weeks because of Corona-induced operational issues. In view of this we now see two options for you:

  1. Cancellation option. If you cannot offer some or any of your April or May bookings, or if you feel it’s important not to, we would offer to defer the holiday with a 100% voucher/credit note against any future bookings, redeemable until the end of 2021 OR if the guest did not want to defer, make a 100% refund. Our customers will welcome this and it will emphasise our position as a helpful and trustworthy agency.
  2. Advisory option. If you can accommodate bookings and are happy to do so we would still strongly advise guests not to travel as per Govt advice (but saying we can’t enforce it, as per competitors); and offer that if they chose to cancel we’d offer a 50% refund OR a 100% voucher/credit as above. Again this is far more generous than the competitors and will also be very welcome by the majority of customers, many of whom currently believe as per T&Cs that they will get less favourable terms than that. At the same time we are being a responsible agency re Corona threat to Cornwall. Most will opt to defer or cancel we think (indeed this is the main objective) but of course some will choose still to come — and changeovers will need to be carried out for these with the utmost care — and with strong behavioural advisce given to guests. We will be exposed to some risk of reputational damage from these but limited I think. Also arguably some risk to Cornwall, but really very very small.

Most of you have already said you’ll go with the majority, or with what we advise but with the above choice we’d need to know if you want to opt for ‘cancellation’ or ‘advisory’ — I know most of you have already expressed some preference but we’d need to check. You could also say ‘cancel April, Advisory May’ — Also we’d want you to commit to one strategy or the other as far as possible — obviously the Govt advice may change but I think even in a draconian travel lock-down we’d still be saying the same thing in respect of option 2. ie we can’t enforce non-travelling, only advise.

Sorry we know this is shifting sands… email straight back plesae!

Regards, Phil


UPDATE: 16.15, 23 March 2020

We have a separate page for guests, which we have promised will be updated by 9am Tuesday 24th with definitive answers to their questions about cancelling, refunds etc.

Find it here. https://www.forevercornwall.co.uk/coronavirus

What’s the latest?

As you are no doubt aware, Cornwall Council and Visit Cornwall are telling visitors not to come — and the Government has tightened up its definition of non-essential travel to include travel to holiday homes, unambiguously.

We have had various requests from you to make your properties unavailable for particular periods (April, May, June etc) but really need to get all on the same plan where at all possible. Please read on for our latest thinking and proposal. Then please email Phil to confirm agreement or to make any counter suggestions or to raise questions.

Cancelled bookings

March and April bookings. We propose to cancel all remaining March and April bookings with immediate effect.

May bookings and beyond. We propose to keep these in place for the time being so that if restrictions lift these holidays can be taken, but will keep the situation under review. The message is ‘there is no need to cancel your summer bookings — your deposit money is not at risk’.

New bookings

We will not take any new bookings for stays before Friday 5 June. Any new bookings for stays June onwards will be subject to a 48 hour cancellation policy (ie they can cancel up to 48 hours before stay without penalty). This is to give guests the confidence to book future dates without risking deposit money.

Moving holidays

We have been offering to move holidays to later in the year without an admin fee for some time and will continue to do this.

Refunds

Regarding funds that we are currently holding for stays we are cancelling. We have consulted our lawyers who say that they would interpret the “Events outside our Control” clause as that monies should be refunded. Strictly speaking the contract is formed between you the owner and the guest — however we think we need to give a simple, clear message that does the right thing. We also do not have the capacity to make individual agreements with you, and feel it wouldn’t be fair to pass the buck (as some other agencies seem to be doing).

So what do we propose?…. Right now we are debating whether to simply give full refunds, or whether it’s worth considering a partial refund (eg 75%). The reason for this would be to protect some owner income in April/May, as well as protecting some cash flow for our business. We are also considering ways in which we could get some money for self-employed housekeepers who are the most vulnerable. This might all be unworkable … if you have any views please feed them back to Phil (as succinctly as you can).

Read policy here — clause 16.

https://www.forevercornwall.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/

End of month payments

With the uncertainty about cancellation payments and the huge pressure on us last week and this please bear with us regarding the month end payments. It is possible we’ll be running a few days or even a week late — we’ll try not to.

Recovery later

We are planning for resilience and welcome any ideas. One thing that has been suggested is that in the recovery period ie when non-essential travel restrictions are lifted we might offer occupancy on a week-on week-off basis with fallow weeks — so that housekeepers and incoming guests are protected from any potential residual virus. What we are all hoping of course is that incisive action now will help ensure that by peak season we are back to some sort of normality.

Communication

As you’ll appreciate the phone and email is a bit clogged up. Do email Phil direct with any super-urgent matters — and with any thoughts and questions on matters raised by this page.

Phil, Maria and the team