List Your Home

For UK properties, Oliver’s Travels requires a minimum availability of at least 10 weekends and 4 key school holiday weeks a year. For properties located in France and Italy, we require a minimum of 6 weeks of availability in July and August.

Certainly, many of our partners use their properties themselves or live in them part-time. We have no restrictions on this as long as the minimum availability requirements mentioned above are met.

We don’t charge any upfront fees. As an agency, we earn a commission for each booking we secure on your behalf.

Initially, we expect partners to commit to a one-year partnership. If everything is going well, we won’t contact you for renewal, and the contract will roll over. If you do not plan to commit for at least a year, please make this clear during the sign-up process. You have the option to give notice at any time after 9 months, and while the contract specifies a three-month notice period, we are open to discussing this with you. If you have specific concerns about contract terms, please contact us for a copy of the owner contract, which aligns with our guest terms and conditions found on our website’s homepage. By signing our contract, you agree to the terms and conditions applied to guest bookings.

You have a responsibility to ensure that your house complies with all safety legislation for furnished holiday lets. It’s essential to conduct your own research specific to your property’s needs. You must have your Fire Risk Assessment and Public Liability Insurance (we recommend coverage of up to five million pounds but no less than two million pounds). We reserve the right to request copies of these documents at any time.

Guests booking your property can vary widely, but common bookings include groups celebrating special occasions like 40th and 50th birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and friend reunions. Extended family bookings for such events are prevalent, so it’s beneficial to ensure your property has child-friendly facilities.

As Oliver’s Travels acts as a booking agency, the responsibility for preparing the property for guest stays lies with the owner. This includes ensuring the home is ready for arrival and being the primary point of contact for any questions or issues during the stay.

Once a booking is confirmed, clients receive the arrival information we have on file. Owners receive the lead booker’s contact details four weeks before arrival, allowing them to arrange the security deposit and discuss any final details such as key collection or bed configurations.

Ideally, you should have a housekeeper or a local contact who can provide check-in services and give guests a tour of the property. This person does not need to live on-site but should be available to address any guest concerns. Leave detailed instructions about the property’s operation, such as heating, trip switches, and the location of items like logs, board games, and TV/Sky and Wi-Fi controls. This information ensures a smooth guest experience.

We can provide you with an inventory to help furnish your property adequately based on the number of guests it accommodates. We recommend providing essential cleaning supplies, basic food provisions like tea, coffee, sugar, oil, salt, pepper, and kitchen basics such as tea towels, cloths, cling film, foil, etc. We can assist with creating a list. Your property should also have an unlimited broadband package.

While it’s not mandatory, we encourage providing a simple welcome pack with locally sourced items. At the very least, include a loaf of fresh bread, butter, jam, 6 eggs, and 1L of milk to help guests get started.

Yes, we recommend decorating your property for Christmas and New Year. These holiday seasons are high-demand periods, and guests typically expect to see decorated Christmas trees and festive decorations in the main reception rooms. For bookings arriving approximately two weeks before Christmas until New Year’s, it’s important to have these decorations in place.

At Oliver’s Travels, we sometimes assign “marketing names” to properties listed on our website. This allows us to actively promote your property on various channels, such as Google and social media, without directly competing with your own marketing efforts. It also provides privacy and security for your property within the local community and when the property is unoccupied. We will collaborate with you to agree on a marketing name before listing your property. After booking, guests will be provided with the actual property name for locating the property and organising deliveries.

We can use your photos if they meet our quality and standard criteria and belong to you. If we believe your photos don’t meet the required standards but still want to list your property, we will arrange our own photo shoot at no cost to you (separate terms apply). The photos we take during the shoot will be used exclusively on our website. You will have the opportunity to review the photos when we preview the page to you. If we believe a photo shoot is necessary, we will inform you at the start of the listing process. You may be asked to provide props to dress the property for the shoot, with a cost not exceeding £100.

The houses we find most popular possess the following qualities:

• A good bathroom to guest ratio, en-suite bathrooms are especially popular, allowing guests to retain an element of privacy from the wider group
• Some form of water access, either a pool or a hot tub or both!
• Some flexibility on the bed layout – zip and link beds are ideal for this as they allow rooms to be set up as doubles or twin singles, ideal for multigenerational groups
• Activities for children. In order to state that you are family friendly we recommend at least possessing good Wi-Fi & TVs for streaming, games consoles, board games etc
• Excellent local information regarding pub/restaurant recommendations, attractions. We will add as much to the listing as possible
• Great photos – we will sort this if you don’t have them
• Dog friendly. A very high percentage of groups wish to bring their dog along. We recommend accepting 2 well behaved dogs. We can add notes to the T&Cs to state if there are any additional dog fees or restrictions to which areas of the home they can access etc.

We will help you with this. If you are doing it for the first time we can produce a rate chart for you based upon our experience, what we know of your location, facilities and the market in general. It is a good idea to be open to some keen pricing in the early days while the house gets going. This can be reviewed a couple of months after launch depending on the level of demand for the house, and once you have got some positive reviews to add to the website.

It can take a matter of weeks. The photographs are key because we can’t make a page without the images. We will send you a property survey, coupled with the images, and we can then start the process of onboarding your property. If a holiday let licence is required in your region, please ensure you obtain this before listing and provide us with your licence number during onboarding. From that starting point, it takes us around 2 weeks to have the first preview to you to make your comments.

Yes, we always send a booking request email to owners to confirm availability before proceeding. This email includes the requested dates, the net rate to you (after our commission), and a breakdown of the guest group. As you have the option to manually update your calendar or sync it with an existing one using an iCal URL, we expect that the vast majority of bookings (approximately 99%) will be confirmed without issue. We’re also keen to enable instant booking where possible, providing your calendar is always kept up to date.

As agreed in the contract, owners can hold a security deposit, with the amount depending on the size and style of the house.

We do expect that consumables (glasses, crockery, cutlery, coat hangers, toiletries etc.) up to the value of £50 to be absorbed by you as a running cost. Costs above this should be discussed with our Customer Service team, and evidence and receipts should be provided as soon as possible.

In case of damages or additional cleaning requirements, we request you to share photos within 48 hours of the guest’s departure. Please understand that prompt submission of invoices is crucial for transparency with guests. Consumables like glasses, crockery, cutlery, toiletries, and coat hangers up to £100 are considered running costs absorbed by you. Any costs exceeding this amount should be discussed with our Customer Service team, with supporting evidence and receipts provided promptly.

We undertake mediation with the guest to recover costs from the security deposit. It is important to note that we are committed to acting fairly and reasonably. Our decisions are grounded in evidence and cost considerations that would withstand legal scrutiny.

We issue a non-refundable deposit to secure your booking each time. The final balance is then due two weeks prior to the client’s arrival.

Sadly no – it will depend on your location, house style, who you allow in, features at the house, amount of availability you give us and the pricing you display, amongst other things. If we have all the answers to these questions, we can make an approximate projection based on the success of similar properties.