Holiday let changeovers in Tarifa
The guest in Tarifa is not the guest twenty minutes up the coast. They come to be on the water, they spend the day in it, and they come back to the property with a soaking wetsuit, a board and sand in everything including the rucksack. That difference shows up in every changeover, and a property here priced like an ordinary beach flat loses money from the first month.
Wet kit inside the property
An apartment in Tarifa receives several wetsuits, harnesses, boots and sometimes a board that fits nowhere. All of it arrives soaked in salt water and gets hung wherever possible: on the terrace if there is one, and if not, in the bathroom or the living room.
The consequences are concrete and have to be dealt with at every changeover. Salt and moisture leave rings on the flooring and mark the wall where the suit hung. Soft furnishings absorb the atmosphere and start to smell. And the bathroom sealant, already under pressure from showers, suffers twice as much when the room doubles as a drying rack.
So the changeover includes forced ventilation while we work, treatment of the sealant, and inspection of wherever the kit ends up hanging. When a property has no suitable place for it, we tell the owner: a couple of hooks and a rail on the terrace, with a tray or grid underneath, saves a serious amount of maintenance across a season.
Sand, filters and drains
The sand here does not only arrive on feet. It comes inside board bags, in rucksacks, in pockets and stuck to the wetsuit itself, and it ends up in the shower tray, the dishwasher filter and the washing machine filter.
At every changeover we remove and clean the traps on the shower, dishwasher and washing machine. It is a three-minute task almost nobody does and it prevents the most expensive and most inconvenient fault of the season, which always arrives at the worst moment: a blocked drain with the property occupied and no way in until the guest leaves.
Short stays across the week
Unlike ordinary family lets on this coast, stays here are three, four or five nights and arrivals fall on any day. That has an advantage: changeovers do not all pile into Saturday afternoon. And it carries a requirement: we need a reliable, current calendar, because an arrival nobody told us about means a property that has not been prepared.
We work from whatever calendar the owner or agency provides, and confirm every completed changeover with a report and photographs the same day.
How it works
A visit to see beds, bathrooms, the terrace and where the kit ends up, then a fixed price per changeover rather than by the hour. Season dates are booked in February, because in Tarifa March already counts as season.
Questions we get in Tarifa
Why does cleaning cost more here than in a normal beach apartment?
Moisture first, sand second. A wetsuit hung indoors leaves salt water on the floor and humidity in the air for days, and the sand that arrives with watersports kit is not what comes in on bare feet: it comes in quantity and it gets into drains and filters. That is genuine extra time per property, and we would rather charge for it than do half a changeover.
The shower drains block constantly.
It is the single most common fault in Tarifa properties and it has a cheap fix. At every changeover we remove and clean the shower trap, which is where the sand collects, and we warn the owner as soon as the water starts draining slowly. Fitting a fine mesh drain cover costs very little and prevents most of the August plumber call-outs, when nobody is available anyway.
When does the season actually run?
Much earlier and much later than the rest of the province. With wind there is real occupancy from March and it holds well into October, with short stays spread across the week rather than concentrated on Saturdays. That changes the whole plan, which is why the calendar here closes in February.
My arrivals are mid-week, not just Saturdays.
That is normal in Tarifa and it works better than you would think: with changeovers spread out rather than all landing on one afternoon, each one gets more room. What we need is an up-to-date calendar, and if your platform syncs it, better still: we plan the whole week at once.
Get in touch
The quickest way is to call. If you would rather write, the enquiry form is on the Spanish version of this page and we answer in English.