Bed & breakfast

When we came to France we found ourselves in a house with spare bedrooms and we decided to offer B&B. To begin with it was mainly for our UK friends and acquaintances, but in 2007 France passed a law requiring all publicly advertised accommodation to be formally registered. The Lunel Tourist Office noticed our website, and we decided to register rather than remove the details.

It turned out to be a fairly simple process. We were offered the chance to register with accommodation agencies, but decided to remain 'hors label'. So some Tourist Office staff came with a local Councillor whom, as it happened, we knew. M Moysan is a neighbour and the Member responsible for cultural affairs and we'd already met him to discuss music in the town. Apparently they usually bring an elected Member with them, and in this case I think it satisfied a natural curiosity to see how his English neighbours lived, which we well understand. Anyway, we apparently passed with flying colours and duly completed the paperwork. Now we appear in tourist guides and pay the very modest taxe de séjour which helps fund tourist publicity.

Lunel is not crowded with B&Bs - it's not really a tourist town, but a lot of people pass through or find it convenient between Nîmes and Montpellier, hills and sea, vineyards and Camargue. So it's not really surprising that almost immediately people (mostly French) started to phone with requests for rooms. Several were pilgrims, starting from Arles via Saint Gilles and Vauvert towards Montpellier on one of the many routes across France to the shrine at Compostela in north-west Spain. One of these was a young Korean man spending the last of his savings on a life-changing journey having lost job and girlfriend all at once. Others have been people visiting friends and relatives nearby, or coming to a wedding in Lunel, or taking work-related exams which start bright and early in the morning. Just now we have a young man, Gabriel, who is with us 5 nights a week for 3 months while he takes an arduous heavy lorry-driving course; and Theresa, a young Englishwoman, as just left having been over for a fortnight to train French franchise owners how to run a Bagel outlet in a new shopping centre in Montpellier.

We still welcome friends and family from the UK and elsewhere, though visits have tailed off in the past year because of the fall in the value of the pound though we still welcome all who can make it. For the rest we try to cover costs, not really to make a profit. We have other English friends who have run their B&B as a fully-fledged business and have scarcely had a moment to call their own between March and October. We try to balance our life and other commitments here with our efforts to offer a comfortable and enjoyable stay for our paying guests, but in any case our French guests have offered us a glimpse of the country and culture we've joined and an opportunity for us to practise and develop our language skills!