Examination of Witnesses (Questions 580
- 599)
WEDNESDAY 12 MARCH 2008
MS LYNNE
HOOKINGS, MR
JOHN MILNE
HOME AND
MR MORAY
BOWATER
Q580 Mr Hall: Could I return to the
issue of quality. Moray, you said quality has to be good to provide
value, yet the industry only has a voluntary code of practice
in terms of looking at the quality of accommodation, which is
the National Quality Accreditation Scheme. From what I can gather
it is not universally popular. John, you mentioned the cost of
this, £60 to £70 to register and it is £140 a year
for the inspection. It does not guarantee any extra bookings and
the system is quite inflexible.
Mr Milne Home: Absolutely.
Q581 Mr Hall: I suppose you are absolutely
delighted that it is a voluntary scheme and not a compulsory scheme.
Mr Milne Home: If you turned it
into a tax and said all accommodation providers had to be registered,
as I see it that would be the only way. Of our 140 members, about
80 are accommodation providers, 34 have NQAS and I reckon of that
40-plus if we said, "You have to be NQAS", as people
like SECTA does out of Looe, we would lose half of them, if not
more, who would just say, "I am not interested because it
does not affect our bookings at all". In fact, when we first
went into this business eight years ago, they asked, "Have
you got a rolling pin here?", although I think they have
got past that stage, so we found it was a detriment and never
publicised that we had been inspected. It is much better now and
people do go for 4 star, 5 star or whatever.
Q582 Mr Hall: But you would not countenance
for this scheme to be compulsory?
Mr Milne Home: No. There are so
many ways of getting at this it could be so much more flexible.
At the moment they say, "You will join us and you will pay
this £140", but you can either go and be inspected through
people like Moray's organisation or—
Q583 Mr Hall: You are anticipating
my next question. If this scheme is not the scheme, what should
we be doing?
Mr Milne Home: They need to look
at different standards. You could have something which says, "You
have been inspected" and, therefore, the powers that be know
that you are of a given standard, but at the moment it is gold
plated and that is what is turning people off. My members are
small, very small. I have three large hotels but the rest are
small units like mine, a few houses they let, bed and breakfast,
et cetera, restaurants, they are just not interested, they
are getting the business so why spend that 200 quid plus.
Q584 Mr Hall: You do not see the
need for this particular type of scheme?
Mr Milne Home: Quality is vital,
absolutely vital. Somebody said that the need is going up and
I am not against it, but what I am against is the VisitBritain
syndrome which is the gold plated, cost an arm and a leg and we
do not get the benefit.
Q585 Mr Hall: There is no financial
return for you at all?
Mr Milne Home: Southwest Tourism
provides various things like a good scheme for using credit cards,
as an example, so that is a benefit, but for a weekly let, self-catering,
you ask for a cheque; bed and breakfasts are more likely to use
a credit card. There are benefits and if it was a reasonable price
I would push it, but I cannot push into the TAVATA organisation
because people would laugh me out of court.
Q586 Mr Hall: Does that find an echo
with you?
Ms Hookings: No, it is the opposite
in Torbay because to go in the English Riviera Guide you
have to be graded.
Mr Milne Home: That is what I
mean, you have to be graded. To advertise in the Tourist Information
Centres you have to be graded. We are paying for it but we cannot
go in there because we are not graded.
Ms Hookings: But you have to give
your customers an assurance of what they are booking. If I was
marketing myself I would be bound to say, "I am wonderful".
If I am marketing my property, "Oh, it's wonderful".
You have to have a form of inspection which is neutral that is
going to tell you whether you are wonderful and you are 2 star
or 5 star. Customers are looking for assurance. It is one thing
booking whatever the property, serviced or non-serviced, on the
basis of a star rating, and you might never book less than 3,
you might always book 5, I do not know, but—
Q587 Mr Hall: This gives you the
choice.
Ms Hookings: You would tell yourself
that is the sort of rating you would trust or you would go on
word of mouth. You might go somewhere that is not rated if you
have got a jolly good recommendation to go there, but word of
mouth is nothing like as widespread as going on a rating scheme.
I do not run a hotel anymore, but as a professional hotelier I
have always been a believer in AA—RAC has gone—in
getting a grading and assuring my customers of what they are likely
to expect when they come to us and, indeed, if they do not get
it they have every right to say to me, "What on earth are
you going to do about it?" and put it right.
Q588 Mr Hall: You would not like
to see this scheme made compulsory?
Mr Milne Home: We would believe
it was a tax and I do not see why you should not have some measure
of inspection coming through the organisations like Farm &
Cottage and the one Moray runs which gives you a grading. Farm
& Cottage will not accept a cottage which is not 3 star. They
come once a year, have a quick look round, "Are we damp?",
no, everything is smart, clean and correct.
Q589 Mr Hall: Moray, how does this
impact on your business?
Mr Bowater: We started star rating
self-catering cottages 25 years ago when we started the business.
VisitBritain started their star rating scheme about five years
ago.
Q590 Mr Hall: You have got a bit
more experience.
Mr Bowater: We have got a bit
more experience, we think. The most important thing to remember
about grading schemes is that they are primarily marketing tools.
It is a marketing tool for the business that participates in the
grading scheme. The only purpose of going into a grading scheme
is to attract more business to your business so that you can boast
about whatever grading you have got. Inspections and gradings
on their own do not drive up quality, it is the market that drives
up quality, customers saying, "I want to go to that 4 star
place or that 5 star place" and it is customers understanding
what 3, 4 or 5 star means to them that drives up quality or drives
the market to deliver accommodation or a product of the appropriate
quality. We could all be 5 star if we were all prepared to invest
the money but there would not be the market to support an entire
market full of 5 star accommodation. The grading scheme is designed
to try and give customers an idea of where that accommodation
stands and it has got to be seen to be reasonably independent
and reliable. Our customers obviously see our grading scheme as
independent and reliable and we push that very hard to them. We
think it is very rigorous and we work very hard on training our
staff to make sure they know what they are doing and make sure
the properties in our portfolio meet the expectations of our customers
and we dump those that do not. John also mentioned the discrepancy
between our inspection scheme and whether or not that is accepted
as an official inspection scheme and the NQAS, which obviously
is. This seems mad to me, to be honest. We have been doing it
for a long time and about 100,000 people a year come on holiday
to our cottages and very few of them complain about what they
find. That is a vote of confidence which is beyond anything that
anyone else can say about it really.
Q591 Chairman: I live in Essex and
if I wanted to come on holiday to Torbay I would go on the Internet
and I would want to compare different possible accommodation providers
and I would find it very useful. How do I know that your accreditation
scheme, your star rating, is the same as another company's? What
you might call 3 star somebody else might call 1 star.
Mr Bowater: Do you have a feel
for what you might call 5 star?
Q592 Chairman: I have an idea of
what I think 5 star means.
Mr Bowater: And 3 star, 4 star,
et cetera. Amazingly, if you go round and look at the various
schemes they almost all coincide with what people intuitively
understand to be about 3 star or 4 star or 5 star. Of course,
all of these grading schemes are all star ratings but by a process
of evolution they have sort of rubbed into one another. We reckon
that our grading scheme is about a star, half a star, because
we do half stars, better than VisitBritain, so something they
would give 4 stars to we would give 3½ stars to and something
they would give 5 we would give 4½ and so on. Does that really
matter? I do not think it matters from a customer's point of view.
Lots of people want to book our holidays and that seems to prove
that it does not matter.
Q593 Rosemary McKenna: I think it
does matter and I think it matters because families who book,
particularly families on a tight budget looking to get a holiday
for their family either in a budget accommodation hotel, a bed
and breakfast or a cottage, if they turn up and find they are
in a damp, smelly, horrible place that really they do not want
to stay in they are torn between allowing their children to stay
or having to go home and not have a holiday. Do you not think
a national scheme is the way to make sure that people know the
standard of accommodation they are booking?
Mr Bowater: No, because I do not
think a national scheme guarantees that it will not be damp, smelly
and nasty, because the inspector could have come round in October
and they are going on holiday the following September and there
have been 12 months since the inspection took place and in that
time the property may have changed hands and you might have a
new owner who is not nearly as conscientious as the old owner.
There is nothing that guarantees a level of quality.
Q594 Rosemary McKenna: They would
surely have someone to complain to. That is the thing, they have
got a comeback.
Mr Bowater: Of course, that is
exactly what happens. If someone arrives at one of our cottages
and they think we have mis-graded it they are on the blower to
me straight away.
Q595 Rosemary McKenna: Yes, but you
are not independent.
Mr Bowater: Of course I am independent.
I do not own the cottage, I am the agent who lets it. We have
a commercial interest in making sure that those people do not
phone us up. If they do there are commercial consequences of them
phoning us up and complaining. I would have to do something about
it and, most importantly, I would have to answer my mobile phone
on a Saturday afternoon when I would prefer not to. There are
strong incentives for the agency to ensure that the accommodation
is of good quality and it does match the star rating we have given
it.
Q596 Chairman: What about all the
B&Bs and little independents, do they say, "I think I
am a 4 star"? You are an agent but lots of people do not
use agents, they are independent, stand-alone accommodation providers.
Mr Bowater: Yes, and in theory
any independent could put on their website, "I reckon I am
5 star", they could do.
Q597 Chairman: Or they could say,
"4 star hotel", they do not need to say who has decided
they are 4 star.
Mr Bowater: Absolutely, they could.
Q598 Chairman: But if you have a
national scheme it has a symbol and it says, "This is accredited
by an independent inspectorate".
Mr Bowater: VisitBritain have
spent some money on trying to explain to the population nationally
that they have a scheme and this is what it means. Similarly,
we have spent a certain amount of money over the years explaining
to the population, or people who have been interested in our cottages,
what we do, what it means and why we are reliable doing that.
People trust ours and people trust theirs. There is room for lots
of schemes but they have to be sufficiently well trusted by the
public and as long as they are then they are useful both to the
people who are booking holidays and also people who are delivering
accommodation. I would not trust someone who just put on their
website, "I reckon I am 4 star".
Ms Hookings: I think there is
a big difference between inspecting the properties that you market
and having an independent inspector come in. I believe in self-catering
they actually make appointments but in the hotel sector they arrive
totally unannounced and I think that is of far greater value.
I would not, however, say that VisitBritain has got NQAS correct
and there is still a lot of confusion. Even I do not know what
is a guest accommodation, a guest accom, or a guesthouse, I could
not tell you, and I am in the trade. Of course, the problem they
have got is their awareness campaign to the public of what you
get if you stay in a 4 star guest accom or guesthouse or boutique
hotel, whatever level they are inspecting. It is very difficult
if they have not made enough money available to market the campaign
and the value of independently inspected businesses. This is the
downfall of the NQAS, the average person on the street does not
quite know what all the different qualifiers mean. We have got
rid of the diamonds, so we are 1 to 5 stars, be it self-catering
or serviced accommodation, but I do not think the average man
on the street quite understands exactly what all the different
qualifying terms are underneath and that is the weakness of it.
Q599 Rosemary McKenna: If we could
move on to EnglandNet and, Moray, I believe you are challenging
that through the European Commission. VisitBritain defended it
very strongly when they came to us and said, "We are not
a booking agency but we do pass on something like half a million
pounds' worth of business a month". Do you still stand by
your criticism?
Mr Bowater: Absolutely. I was
quite horrified to hear what Tom had to say about EnglandNet.
| 
