Unsupervised B&B/guesthouse

denachoman

I live in a small estate (roughly 20 houses) in a village one hour from Dublin. There is a hotel 100 yards up the road from the estate. The hotel owner has recently bought 2 houses in our estate that were up for sale and is operating them as B&B/guesthouses.

Hotel staff maintain the rooms in the houses and guests go to the hotel for the breakfast part of the B&B. The houses are completely unsupervised (i.e. not like a normal B&B where the owner of the house is resident there) and there have been numerous incidents of guests being drunk and disorderly at various times between 2am and 6am and one incident of drink-driving at 2am.

Needless to say all the residents are very unhappy with the situation as many have young families and it was previously a very quiet estate. We are anxious to see if we have any grounds for complaining to the hotel owner, does anyone know if there is a legal requirement for this type of accommodation to be supervised, any fire regulations etc that must be complied with?

I would greatly appreciate any responses.

Irish-Lass

if they are running it as a business there are all sort of Licences they would need. You should contact your Local County Council/Authority and inform them of the situation, I am sure they are not making all the B&B guests use the same bathroom, if not they would have had to applied for Planning Permission to alter the interal walls. They would need a Fire Safety Certificate but ring your Local Authority armed with the full facts and see what they have to say

copacetic

I lived in an apt block and there were a lot of apts leased by a local hotel and rented out for weekends, mostly it seemed to stag and hen dos!
there is very little you can do, basically they are just renting the houses out for short periods and will say they aren't responsible for the activities of people who stay there.
If you can keep records though you may be able to get their drinks license suspended if the drinkers are leaving the residents bar and going to a seperate location to stay the night.
It is basically a similar situation to having a landlord rent out their house to Students, not a lot you can do..

Your best bet is to try to come up with a plan with the hotel, they are bound to want to keep the peace.

Victor

It would appear to be short-term / holiday lettings in properties that are residential. This constitutes a change of use and requires planning permission.

denachoman

Thanks for the advice guys – we have set up a resident’s association and are awaiting a reply from the hotel owner to a letter we just sent expressing our concerns.