4* pet-friendly self-catering holiday cottage in the Loire Valley France, Spacious and comfortable accommodation for up to 6 people, with its own secluded garden. In 2015 Jackie and I decided to take early retirement and move to France with the intention of setting up a pet-friendly holiday letting (gîte). After a lot of property searching, we eventually found the perfect one, and moved lock stock
and barrel (+dogs, horses and everything else) to Les Vieux Auberts in February 2016. After a lot of hard work, we finally opened for business in May 2017, and were really pleased to get 13 weeks’ of bookings, including 2 over Christmas and New Year. The end result was that we were awarded 4 stars in the category “meublé de tourisme” (furnished holiday accommodation) by the Anjou Tourist Board in November 2017. This is quite a stringent set of mandatory and optional requirements that have to be met in order to achieve a minimum score for the category:
“4*: top-of-the-range comfort accommodation with very good quality amenities and a wide range of services and facilities (information media available in several foreign languages including English, bilingual reception, broadband internet access, mirrors, freezers, etc.)”
We scored 202 out of a possible 207, with the missing points being lack of a tumble drier and lack of a dedicated landline telephone. We are still listening and still improving!! We advertise on our own website, lesvieuxauberts.com, as well as VRBO.co.uk, Cheznous.com, France-Voyage.com, Holiday France Direct and Anjou-Tourisme.com, and have received bookings from guests in several different countries. Our advice is that if you want to book with us, do it early, as we have received almost all of our bookings by the end of January, and we have been full up to the end of September!
