A violent storm ripped through our part of Ontario earlier this week and took out power for several days to thousands of homes and cottages in our rural areas. For those of us who live here it's not an unusual experience and we're geared up to managing the inconvenience of occasional outages. However, for guests in vacation rental cottages it can come as quite a shock to find the things they normally take for granted, even during a power cut, are not available to them.

Take a moment to think about your property. If you were there when the power went off, you would know what to do, but would your guests? Do you have a clearly written guide that tells them what to expect? If not, it's worth taking the time to outline what will happen, where to find emergency lighting and what they should do next.

For example, when the power goes out in my cottage, the telephone will cease to function since it's a cordless with a charger, so we have a spare phone that can be plugged into the telephone jack. However, if guests don't know beforehand where the phone is kept and where the jack is, they would not have a clue how to report an outage, since there is no cell signal either. In addition, the water pump will stop working so there's no running water for washing, cooking or flushing toilets.

Keep the guide brief and specific and include:

Don't just put a page in the back of your Welcome Book since most guests will not read it. The emergency guide should be prominent so keep the instructions short and on one sheet, laminate it and put one on the inside of the most used cupboard door; another could go on the fridge door or somewhere that gets a lot of traffic and is more likely to be seen and read. Of course you can never guarantee it will be, but you will have done your best.

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