What goes wrong in a villa, and it is almost never the villa

The gate is the whole problem

Guests land after a long flight, get in a car, and arrive somewhere dark with a wall and no sign. The pin in the booking confirmation drops them at the end of the lane, or at the neighbour's, because that is where the map thinks the address is. They message the group chat. Nobody answers, because the person who runs it finished at five.

Everything a guest needs to get through the gate should reach them before they leave for the airport, in one message, in the order they will need it: where it is and what the turning looks like, what time they can arrive, how they get in and who meets them, and one number that is answered. Not six messages over three weeks, and not a PDF.

The pin is wrong at about half the villas I review. Send a photograph of the turning. It solves more arrivals than any amount of writing.

If check-in is after dark, say what the lighting is actually like and have someone physically there. A code on a keypad is fine at two in the afternoon. At eleven at night, with a sleeping child and no local SIM, it is the difference between a good review and a bad one.

One number, and somebody actually holding it

Most villas have a WhatsApp group with the owner, the manager, the caretaker and sometimes the cleaner in it. It looks like good service. It is the single most common reason a request disappears: when a message belongs to four people, it belongs to nobody, and everyone assumes someone else has picked it up.

• One person owns guest messages at any hour, and a named second person covers their day off. Write down who, and tell the guest the name.
• Everything that comes in gets an answer, even when the answer is "I'll find out and come back to you before six". Silence is what guests complain about, not delays.
• When a request is handed to someone else — a driver, a plumber, the pool guy — the person who took it still owns it until the guest says it is done.

The whole of that costs nothing. It is a decision about who is responsible, written down once, and it removes most of what guests describe as "hard to reach".

The house manual nobody reads

Nearly every villa has one. It is usually twenty pages in a folder, written when the villa opened, and half of it is now wrong: the wifi password changed, the restaurant it recommends closed last year, and the air conditioning instructions describe a unit that was replaced.

Guests do not read twenty pages on holiday. They look for one thing, at the moment they need it, usually with wet hands. What works is short, in the room where it matters, and current: how the hot water and the aircon actually behave in this house, what the pool rules are, what to do if the power goes, and the number from the paragraph above.

I would rather see one laminated card by the door and one in the kitchen than a beautiful folder nobody opens. And whoever cleans the villa should be the person who tells you when something in it has gone out of date, because they are in the house every day and you are not.

Nobody is reading the pattern

Villa feedback arrives one message at a time, in different places: a review, a WhatsApp, something a guest mentioned to the driver on the way to the airport. Each one gets dealt with on its own, and then forgotten. So the same thing goes wrong eleven times before anybody notices it is the same thing.

Write them down in four or five buckets — arrival, cleanliness, maintenance, communication, the area — and read the list once a month. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between fixing an incident and fixing a cause. If three guests in a row have asked about the same noise, that is not three complaints. That is one unmade decision.

What I check first, in order

• I book the villa as a guest and arrive after dark, because that is when the gaps show.
• I read the last three months of guest messages, not the reviews. Reviews are polite; messages are honest.
• I ask the caretaker what guests ask them most. They always know, and they are rarely asked.
• I check what happens to a request at nine in the evening, and at nine on a Sunday morning.

That is usually a day and a half of work, and it gives an owner a list in priority order rather than an opinion. Most of what comes out of it is free to fix. The rest is worth money precisely because it keeps costing you money.