An effective way to cut hospitality costs while traveling for business or for pleasure is by opting to stay at a friend’s home rather than renting a hotel room.
If you are the host, this choice directly affects you, and the impact is likely to grow exponentially as the length of the stay increases. So what can you do to be completely hospitable to your guests, without totally disrupting your own home life? Follow some simple guidelines listed below and you will find a perfect solution to balancing hospitality and your daily routine.
Early Communication
Talk with your guests as early as possible to determine the logistics of their visit. Use this interaction to advise them of optimal arrival situations. For instance, rush hour traffic in your area may be significant enough to warrant an arrival before or after the traffic onslaught begins.
At this point, discuss any special needs such as schedulings issues, dietary constraints and preferences or allergies. Ask the guest if there are any activities or sightseeing trips that they’d enjoy. While your guest may not be familiar with the particular attributes of your location, this is a good time to become the expert resource for them.
You may even wish to maintain a file of local attractions and activities to share with your guests. This could be achieved simply by picking up promotional flyers, through internet websites or by a listing that you’ve created yourself.
Create a Guest Suite
An important component of balancing hospitality with maintaining a normal routine for you is to create an area where your guest can hang out, work, relax and decompress. While having a separate guest apartment would work beautifully, it is not necessarily feasible for most people. However, you can steal some ideas from that scenario. Minimally your guest area should include a bedroom, (either a designated spare bedroom, a kid’s bedroom, a den or a similarly private room would work well), a bathroom and a few amenities of home.
So how do you achieve this setup? If you have more than one bathroom in your home, designate the one that is closest to the guest’s bedroom as his or her bathroom. Clear out all of your personal items and stock it with fresh linens, new bath products, extra tissue and toilet paper, and a few disposable drinking cups. And then make this bathroom off limits for everyone but your guest – no matter what.
