We rented both Gites as we had our wedding at the nearby Chateau de Lartigolle and needed a place…read morefor our close friends to stay.
Unfortunately this is a rural location and there aren't many choices, especially in the height of summer, therefore we parted with 4000 POUNDS to rent this place for a week. 4000 pounds! We calculated we could have put all our 20 guests up at a nearby 3 star hotel for 7 nights, with daily cleaning and breakfast included for far less money.
This is evidently what we should have done, however we thought the experience would justify the price. We were very wrong
What do you get with Beaulieu? You get a fairly average Gite - this is not luxury by any stretch of the imagination - with a fairly average pool. You get towels in each bathroom to last you seven days and the owner scraped together a few mismatched pool towels for our guests. The rooms are basic and no frills, with a smattering of cheap materials and cheap furniture. There is no cleaning included. You are asked to pay a 200 euro cleaning fee at the end of your stay which evidently covers no cleaning at all - as I will come on to later. There are also no bins on site - you are expected to drive all your own trash to the nearby village and deposit it yourself.
If you question any of this, you are told that 'this is how gites work..'. I'm sorry, but for 4000 POUNDS, it's not unreasonable to expect a little service.
In addition to this, you get very little privacy. The owner is snooping around the property most of the time and other members of the family are (oddly) pretty much always pounding on a boxing bag next to the pool where my guests were trying to relax. Also, the pool was green for the first four days of the stay and was unusable for our guests.
All this would have been fine. We still had a good time despite all this, however the actions of the owner at the end of our stay is what really tainted our whole wedding...
We had had 20 guests staying there and i'll be honest and say there were a few glass breakages and one of them had inexplicably been sick on the floor (disgusting i know, but it was a wooden floor and easily cleaned) but the place was tidy and all the furniture was intact. Unfortunately though, the dishwasher had broken down on our last day therefore we left a days worth of dirty dishes. My new wife understandably didn't want to spend the last day of our wedding holiday washing dishes.
We expected the 200 euro cleaning fee would be sufficient and were expecting to be charged for a few glasses. What we got was an extra 200 euro cleaning fee (400 euros in total!) for '23 hours of cleaning' - the owner claimed. Then, to truly take the p*ss, we were charged 300 euros to fix the dishwasher..! Seriously, I have never, ever encountered such a thing - having to pay for the Gite owner's dishwasher to be repaired. If you own a holiday home and rent it out, you anticipate appliances breaking down occasionally and you get breakdown cover. Or you have rental insurance. It's that simple. You do not bill your customers whatever you want. It's unethical and frankly, illegal. However, this is rural France and seemingly you can do what you want as no-one will enforce any kind of statutory laws
Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about this as the owner has your 1000 euro damage deposit to ransom.
In any case, we were stupid enough to rent this place, even though there were no reviews on review websites, in the hope that we would have a nice authentic experience with some lovely hosts that may justify the exorbitant cost. We will never be so naive again.
We are writing this review to warn everyone to stay away from this place. You will regret it.
