I got a real laugh out of a recent article regarding a survey conducted among hotel owners in Europe. The travel company, Expedia, surveyed these people to find out which nationalities were the worst and best behaved hotel guests. And no surprises in that the British came out tops in the worst behaved category.

I have to be honest and say that in our experience, (with the exception of one particularly vile middle-aged couple), any bad behaviour on the part of our own British guests has been limited to their kids – for some reason alot of British parents have a problem with discipline. Having said that though I will say that Brit’s can be the greatest whingers about the most trivial things.

I am surprised though at the inclusion of the Russians; all the guests we have had from the soviet bloc countries have all without exception been wonderful and friendly people to play host to. The French…they basically tend to complain if your French skills are not up to theirs. And the Indians…? we had two journalists from the Bombay Times stay with us three years ago and one of them brought with him some Indian spices; he insisted on cooking us a traditional rice dish for breakfast and, being from Bombay, thought our humble abode was a palace. Wonderful guys !

We have found that the Spanish/Catalan folk generally make very fussy guests, albeit friendly, with rather high expectations for what they are actually paying for – when they ‘review’ your property their comments often venture into the realms of fantasy; we had one Spanish couple write a review on a travel site about us complaining about our “  sucia piscina ” (dirty swimming pool) and we don’t even have a swimming pool !

Yep, there are television shows and newspaper articles devoted to tourists relating their bad holiday experiences - someday hopefully we hotel owners will get our own show and then watch out