Sooner or later, Airbnb is going to change its name to Airb, partly because it takes less time to type, and partly because it is becoming a misnomer. Increasingly rarely is there a breakfast to go with your bed. I am walking from John ‘o Groats to Land’s End at the moment, so I have been staying in a different town every night, save for when I have been on the hills in a tent, and not once so far has anyone offered me a fry-up. Only once have I been offered any breakfast at all.
Neither, by the way, have I even seen anyone in most of the places I have been staying. All but one have been entirely remote-control operations with key codes and key safes. I am, therefore, getting quite nostalgic for the traditional B&B. Surely between Caithness and Cornwall there is still at least one landlady in pink fluffy slippers, walls with Artex so sharp that you could cut yourself on it, and a pervasive reek of fried bacon fat throughout the building. That is how it used to be from the 1970s to just a few years ago. You never had to book (and you couldn’t easily before the internet). You just rolled up at about six in the evening, and if you saw a sign saying ‘vacancies’, you were in luck.
But the signs are becoming rarer. Booking your holiday accommodation has become like dating: everyone does it online now, even if you are already in the town where you want to stay. And instead of staying in someone’s bungalow or Edwardian villa, you will more likely be in a pod in their garden, or in a buy-to-let investment where no one lives. The guest house has given way to the ghost house. If you are lucky there will be a communal kitchen so you can cook your own breakfast; otherwise, it will be a pot of Quaker Oats you can fill from the kettle.
There are several factors feeding this trend. Online platforms such as Airbnb and booking.com have utterly transformed the market. They make for a remarkably efficient marketplace. You don’t have to ask, a little embarrassed, how much a B&B is going to charge after stopping at a ‘vacancies ‘ sign; you can see instantly the price of every option for miles around, along with a rating from previous guests. They also take a hefty cut, forcing accommodation owners to cut costs to remain profitable, and often the thing that goes is breakfast.
Many years ago the big hotel chains decided to charge extra for breakfast, so there is no longer an expectation that it will be included in the price. Or at least not everyone expects breakfast to be included. In one place in the Highlands where I stayed recently the landlord was holding court about how he had lectured one poor guest who had complained about being expected to pay an extra £17 for his breakfast. The guest got a full rundown of the owner’s spreadsheet. Then came Covid, after which many B&Bs never reopened. At times during that period social distancing rules forced tourist accommodation to adopt a remote control model, and some stuck with it.
In Scotland, where I will be for another ten days or so, the SNP has done its best to make life impossible for B&B owners by forcing expensive and time-consuming licensing schemes on them. Meanwhile, all over the country, the war on landlords has forced buy to let investors to convert rented homes into short lets because there is less bureaucracy, fewer punitive fines for doing do. That has created extra competition, further undermining the traditional B&B.
The guest house has given way to the ghost house
But it is also a matter of changing lifestyles. Staying in a stranger’s house seems a lot more intrusive than it did in the 1960s and 1970s, when B&Bs exploded in number; we like our privacy more now. Moreover, remote control accommodation accessed via key code is more flexible. You can turn up when you like: you don’t have to worry about keeping someone up until midnight when you have been held up on the motorway. Once, on a cricket tour to South Wales, I ended up arriving at ten in the evening, waking up the poor landlady who came down in her dressing gown to let me in. You can also leave when you like; I don’t always want to hang around until 8.30 for breakfast.
Nor, as it happens, do I want a fry-up. Much though the reek of bacon fat used to make me happy as a child because I used to associate it with holidays, all I ever want now is a bowl of porridge. No longer do I have to subsidise other guests who want the full works. All the same, it would be sad if the traditional B&B was lost for good. There is a wonderful archive film you can see on YouTube of holiday season in Broadstairs in the 1950s, when landladies still used to chuck out their guests after breakfast and not allow them back in again until evening. That wasn’t what offended one holidaymaker, though. He took exception to his congealed breakfast – and went and dumped it on the counter of the town’s tourist office by way of protest. I wonder how he would have taken to having no breakfast at all.
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