British holiday home owners in France tell of quarantine worries

British tourists cancelling trips to France because they may have to quarantine for 14 days on their return might be upset, but the owners – often British too – of the places they had booked to stay are losing more than just a holiday.

“For every potential visitor, there’s an owner who depends on that rental for their livelihood,” said Gavin Quinney, who runs a large farmhouse gîte in Créon near Bordeaux and is now staring at a blank late August and a very shaky September.

“You can understand people hesitating, for all sorts of reasons. But we’re going to have to work out what the rules are, what’s fair, because there are people who are really suffering from the permanent stop-start uncertainty of this summer.”

France is reportedly “on the cliff-edge” of being removed from the British government’s list of quarantine-exempt destinations amid a continuing rise in infections, with a decision expected by the end of the week.

The country, visited by 12 million Britons a year, has a rolling weekly average of nearly 1,700 new infections a day and an infection rate of 30.4 per 100,000 inhabitants. Boris Johnson has said the UK will “not hesitate” to impose fresh quarantine restrictions if the government deems them necessary.

In its latest update on Tuesday, the French national health agency said the circulation of the virus was “progressing and intensifying in mainland France”, with infections “affecting all age groups, particularly young adults”. The prime minister, Jean Castex, said the country had to “get a grip of itself again”.

Quinney, who with his wife, Angela, runs a successful vineyard producing red and white wines also mainly for the UK market, had “as good as written off” the 2020 season but has been fully booked since early July when the UK lifted its previous quarantine requirement for travellers returning from France.

“There was massive demand,” Quinney said. “But the possibility of a new quarantine is a real issue. It clearly doesn’t bother some – they work from home, or don’t believe it will be enforced. But for many others it’s a major concern. And everyone’s rolling their eyes at what people definitely see as government ineptitude.”

Several late summer and early autumn bookings have been cancelled, he said, or people are holding off making the final payment. “We’re having to call up, ask them to commit, and return their money if they can’t,” he said. “If there’s a possibility of replacing a booking we can’t afford a last-minute no-show.”

Many owners have no alternative source of income. Phil Davies runs a small, specialist complex of six apartments near Perpignan aimed at families with young children. Despite the fact a proportion of his bookings are from continental European customers, he reckons earnings are at least 50% down.

“Our customers tend to be quite careful people,” he said. “So this year has been specially hard. Among British customers at least, there’s a real ‘once bitten, twice shy’ mentality. A feeling that the government did it before with quarantine, with very little notice, so it can do it again.”

Davies said the British government’s communication had been neither clear, reassuring nor timely. “People are confused, some are frightened, and many are ashamed,” he said, adding that rather than a blanket quarantine the government should consider the regional approach to infection risk adopted, for example, by Germany.

“That would make a really massive difference,” he said. “The Germans say: ‘Avoid Brittany’, and they test people on the day they come back then again six days later. That way your family life isn’t ruined; your work life isn’t ruined. Where we are here – the Pyrénées-Orientales – has been very little affected.”

Davies said customers had pulled out, or tried to put off paying the balance of their bill until the last possible moment. “For a small business, that can cause real cashflow problems,” he said. “Even if they postpone and move their deposit on to next year, that’s income lost for this year. It’s made customer relations very hard.”

For some families, he said, the possibility of having to quarantine was not as alarming as a potential Foreign Office warning against all but essential travel to France, which would invalidate their travel insurance. “But in general, the list of worries is really quite extensive,” he said.

“People are concerned about their travel insurance; about whether their kids will be able to go back to school on time; about having to take annual holiday or unpaid leave to cover any quarantine … You can understand. But for us, it’s really not easy.”