Guests Sweet - The Coconut Chronicles: Two Guys, One Caribbean Dream House - page 205

It was official.
At long last, our fully-furnished house—upstairs and downstairs—was ready to hit the
rental market.
We changed our web pages to reflect our exalted new status as a three-bedroom property
instead of a “one,” and sat back to wait for the bookings to pour in.
But they didn't.
Whereas the previous October we had received twenty or thirty inquiries, this October
we got just six. We were mystified. Was it the economy? Or was it some subtle change in
the wording of our web pages that was turning off prospective guests? We called Jane and
asked her, somewhat breathlessly, exactly what we'd done wrong.
“Nothing that I know of,” she said. “By the way, have you cut back on your meds?”
She had a subtle way of letting you know when she thought you were going off the rails.
We contacted the handful of other people we knew who owned rental houses on the is-
land to ask if their bookings were down.
“Actually we're doing better than last year,” replied Veronica, a divorcée from Boston
who had bought a house on Vieques with her son and daughter-in-law. “Of course we're just
a two-bedroom. I've heard the bigger houses are having trouble this year.”
This was disheartening. Michael logged on to a Vieques travel website and checked out
three-bedroom rentals. The previous year there had been thirty-two (the year before, only
nineteen). This year there were fifty-eight.
Had we inadvertently positioned our house in the most competitive rental market on the
island? We discussed offering the place either as a one- or three-bedroom, but after all our
hard work we weren't ready to offer the one-bedroom option yet. Maybe more inquiries
about the three-bedroom would come in soon.
Three weeks before Christmas the New York Times ran an article about Vieques in its
Sunday travel section.
“This will do it,” we said, high-fiving each other. “We're in.”
But while the article generated lots more emails from potential renters in New York, Bo-
ston and Washington, bookings remained sluggish.
For the first time, we found ourselves trying to convince people to rent our house.
Neither of us felt comfortable doing this. Previously all we'd had to do was respond to email
queries about the house; now we started calling potential renters who listed a phone number.
Sometimes these calls didn't go so well. Howard from New York answered his phone
with a growl when I called in response to his email about renting the house over New Year's.
“I don't remember sending you an email,” he barked. “Where's your house?”
“Vieques.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It's a small island off the coast of Puerto Rico.”