We have a high-end, remote and fully off-grid home and are seeing a consistent pattern of guest behaviour on which I would love some hints from the community.
Background: The house is a luxury home without any grid connection of any kind. Electricity is from the sun, with battery storage and automatic generator as a safety net. We really hate to run the generator, as it's burning diesel and polluting the air. Water is rainwater stored in a 120,000 litre tank. We have LPG tanks for the cooktop and hydronic under-floor heating. It all works beautifully and is unobtrusive, as reflected by the fact that reviews have been 100% 5 star despite a fairly expensive rate.
I ask people to use common sense when consuming power and water. I realise that is perhaps not a helpful enough guideline. We have a guidebook that provides a lot of tips. That is shared in advance via email and there's also a hardcopy in the house. Notably, it is only in English, which may be a contributing factor.
The issue, with only one exception over 30 bookings, is that guests from China use far more power and, on average, 4X the water. As all systems in the house are remotely monitored, I know when people have, for example, turned up the heat to max and left the doors wide open (guests from Asia, exclusively). Also, without exception, all bookings that brought more people than booked were our Chinese guests. This impacts resource usage also.
I don't assume what I'm seeing is intentional, though I am at a loss for the persistent excessive guests. The record was 12 people when our maximum is six. That was when I was using a property manager to advertise and manage the booking. It hasn't been quite that bad since I took back control.
Do you think translating the guidebook into Chinese would help? Our guests have seemed to communicate with us in fluent English.
What else could I do without coming across as over-zealous or unfriendly?
This is a real issue for us and I would like to solve it in a way that is effective while still being welcoming. I think it is really cool that so many people travel from China to stay on our rugged, remote coast on Australia's Southern Ocean. I hope my post doesn't come off as insensitive or negative.
