Official certification from A tout France
For those of you who have followed our progress over the past 5 years, you will know that we haven’t always had luck on our side with this renovation. We could not have planned for the global pandemic, or the supply issues resulting from the terrible situation in Ukraine, not indeed for the lighting strike that set us back quite a way when we were so nearly there….not to mention our lack of experience doing a building project this big on a tight budget. But we did it. And we have a beautiful home and a very nice rental apartment, even if we do say so ourselves! It was therefore a real milestone moment for us to get our official ‘classement’ assessment by the I&D team from Annecy, to rate our apartment and its facilities against the standard used for rental properties across France by A Tout France at the beginning of July.
The rating process
The rating process is not mandatory for holiday rental properties. However, in order to benefit fully from the wonderful support from the local tourist office, and to provide a nationally recognised standard to allow guests to know what to expect, we decided to take this route. There is a long list of facilities and equipment that must be provided in each of the classes of rental property, right down to the type of glasses and number of pieces of cutlery required for each guest – as you might expect in a country as culinarily focused as France! Then there is the official visit and assessment. A date is arranged and the assessor arrives from Annecy (in our case) at the specified time to make a tour of the accommodation. Everything is checked against the long list of criteria, from the bed linen, the kitchen appliances and the number of spoons, and you are given your score on the spot.
We were thrilled to achieve our goal of the four star rating. We have put a lot of work into getting here, and having the official recognition of the quality of the accommodation felt like a big milestone for us. For sure there are things we still want to do, especially with our outside space and I still dream of my Finnish sauna here in one of the mazots one day…but for now, we are going to enjoy what we have achieved and really hope our guests enjoy it too.
