Giving Your Guests a Good Read

I’ve been on vacation for a few weeks now on our annual road trip to the US and have already got through seven books. I save all my fiction reading for this trip since the rest of the year I’m usually immersed in How-To books on scintillating topics like SEO, WordPress plugins and Facebook Marketing. My friends all swear by their Kindles but I still like the feel of a real book and being able to see how many pages there are left, and the joy of curling up in an evening with a hefty tome in hand. It’s for this reason we take pride in the large paperback library in each of our vacation rental cottages.

A Mix of Genres

I used to vacation in Cornish cottages years ago, and it seemed that cottages those days had the monopoly on Readers’ Digest Condensed Books as that was all they had. I worked for the Digest for many years and even with the vast library of CBs we got as freebies, I don’t think I ever read them; I prefer the full length versions without some editor (however good) deciding which bits to cut out. It just made me wonder what they would have done with the Fifty Shades trilogy!

Anyhow…….having a good library of books at your property will please your guests. This means a range of genres – some thrillers, some easy reading, teen books and children’s titles. My libraries have a mix – there’s Tolkien, Grisham and Ken Follett; K Rowling, Michael Chrichton and Maeve Binchey – in fact, something for everyone.

Book Exchange

We encourage our guests to swap books – if they are in the middle of a book when they come to the end of the vacation, they can take it with them as long as they leave one in its place. This has made for a great turnover of titles and our regular guests like it because there are always new books for them to read on each visit.

It can be a big disappointment to arrive at a vacation rental and not find any reading material. Even in the days of libraries in your pocket, there are still a lot of us who get excited about page turning. Yard sales, libraries and second hand book stores or stalls on markets are a great source for books. Our local bank has even taken to selling used books for charity, and I picked up half a dozen at $1 each recently. This is not a big money deal and it can generate some really good feedback from your guests.