Advice for ni-Vanuatu bungalow owners

I visited the island of Tanna recently, in Vanuatu, and became friends with a ni-Vanuatu family who have recently finished construction of three bungalows. The problem for Tannese accommodation providers is that the furthest most of them have travelled is to the capital, Port Vila, many hours' uncomfortable journey by boat away. They do not have access to the internet, and so do not have much of an idea of how other accommodation providers set up their businesses. The result is innumerable bungalows all more or less the same, none of which are easy to find out about or book from overseas. The cost of getting anything to Tanna is great, and what is available there is extremely limited. I made them a web-site (http://rockyridgebungalows.wordpress.com), but am still pondering how best to assist my friends. There are some websites which promote ni-Van bungalows (see the links on the website I set up), but they are not very prominent. So the purpose of this post is to invite you to provide your ideas in relation to how to assist most efficiently, and also to share your idea of the dream budget holiday, a kind of 'what white people like' guide to the mindset of the kind of Australian / NZ / French holidaymaker who might like to stay in a bungalow on Vanuatu. If you have stayed in ni-Van bungalows, what would have made the experience better?

Nice website, although this does seem to be a blatant promotion of it, but is probably ok if you are helping out a fledgling place. As I read it, I so wanted to go back. I've stayed at White Grass before. This place looks delightful.

My question is: What is the bedding like in the bungalows? I've stayed in some bungalows on Vanuatu and had horrible sleepless nights on nightmare mattresses.

I don't think the owners of White Grass will appreciate your saying "for less than a third of the price....." You should really support each other's business.

I suspect rural ni-Vans are similar to rural Solomon Islanders - they think if they build accommodation the visitors will come. Sometimes they do not consider infrastructure, etc.
Their best bet for advertising is to register either with the regional or national tourist association, and get on their website.
I had the opportunity a couple of years ago of taking the manager of an accommodation place in Honiara to stay in a 4-star apartment in Brisbane, to give him an idea of what Westerners are likely to be used to. He was blown away. Interestingly, the guest house he had managed was renovated soon after he returned home.

I also think that getting it into the Postiveearth and the official Vanuatu Tourism websites is the best you could do.
After that, write to LP to recommend them, and keep hoping it gets at least a mention in their next editions.

Provoded you don't have a financial interest, and actually stayed there, you could also do a review on Trip Advisor.

Commendable effort in creating this free site for Tom and Margaret.

My wife and I lived in Tanna for three years, we launched White Grass Ocean resort in 2001, so know the bungalow situation well. We now own & operate www.vanuatu-hotels.vu (see "About Us page" for what we do) and surprised that you dont have any reference to us anywhere in the site you built or in the above comments, considering we are the country's No One booking site for Vanuatu bungalows after the Vanuatu Tourism Office (which is a referal site not booking site) and we are members of www.whl.travel the world's No One organisation assisting small indigenous operators like Nivanuatu bungalows find their market.

Your comment "...There are some websites which promote ni-Van bungalows (see the links on the website I set up), but they are not very prominent" is incorrect, you will find our website usually in the top three listed sites (not sponsored) on the majority of search words in Google for Vanuatu. We promote numerous properties including bungalows that no one else will bother with because we are local and try to give the small guys a chance to get into mainstream tourism.

We also offer free websites with On Line booking credit card facilities to commited NiVanuatu operators such as http://www.sunsetguesthousetanna.com/; http://www.tevergreenresort-tours.vu/ ; http://www.lonnocbeachbungalows.com/ and lots of others for which many we are their only travel wholesaler and their main source of income.

One problem the bungalows have is that their rates are usualy too cheap hence cannot provide any viable commission to an agent (our min operating cost to generate a single booking is $10 before profit not including free content write up, photography, free website and we carry all c/c etc fees). However in the case of Rocky Road the rate of 8,000 for a double is expensive in comparison to lets say the excelent Tanna Evergreen Resort considering the lack of services & facilities, but the problem they have (on top of negligible infrastructure etc) is with only two rooms, there is negligible potential to recover the investment for a distributor to set up & update a web page, and if the operator has to phone numerous times on the odd chance they may catch the owners at home (happens all the time, sometimes up to 10 calls over three day period), it just becomes too hard & expensive.

Other big problem with bungalow owners is that they will give the agent one contracted rate and undercut it at the every opportunity with travellers. Obviously the agent has better things to do than respond to complaints that he is trying to "rip people off" (when he is actually doing the bungalow a big favour representing him) because the bungalow owner has not honoured his contract. Note also that bungalows carry no liability insurance hence this makes them unsealable via mainstream distributors.

Lastly, the lack of consistent maintenance in bungalows is a real problem, you may see a gorgeous one and a year later it would of fallen into terrible disrepair. As a duty of care to my travellers I inspect the bungalows we represent regularly (Tanna, Santo, Epi, Mystery Island, Malekula) in order to see for myself whether the bungalow is still as good as I last saw it, and remove from my site any bungalow untill they are back to a reasonable standard or add new ones.

Hope this brief overview answers some of your questions, in response to your request re "If you have stayed in ni-Van bungalows, what would have made the experience better?" suggest you read the traveller feedback in our site.

Please note that the Rocket Guide to Vanuatu is now defunct, it was last produced in 2008 and it has not been updated since then.

Tropical regards from Vanuatu,
John Nicholls

Thanks for the responses. Bedding ok, but obviously not $800 mattresses. It seems to me that beds are one of those things where sleep quality correlates precisely with price until you get into the several hundred dollars range, and is a real challenge for a budget accommodation operator. Tripadvisor review done. Love the story about the post-Brisbane renovations. I have sent Tom and Margaret some book like 'South Pacific Chic', or 'Hip South Pacific Hotels' to give them some ideas.

I'm keen to hear your thoughts about the perfect budget tropical accommodation though, if you have the time. For example, I suspect that lots of holiday makers hate the pawpaw that ends up on breakfast plates, but many fewer hate mango. In fact, heaps of people hate fruit full stop, a concept probably very foreign to a ni-Vanuatu. So a question at the start of the stay about the kinds of fruit, if any, the guest wants for breakfast seems like a useful innovation to me.

Brainstorming, I like:

• dragonflies
• geckos
• frangipani
• fresh flowers (but in vases makes more sense to me than on beds where they quickly wilt)
• good incandescent light for reading
• powerpoints to plug my laptop into and watch dvds on the bed
• things made of natural materials
• handmade stuff
• free stuff
• good quality stuff (Lindt, glassware, cutlery, lightfittings)
• hanging up my clothes in a cupboard
• having somewhere to dump my travel junk out of the way so the room looks clean
• hammocks
• kids playing with kites
• babysitting you can trust
• libraries with books about the fora, fauna, history, and culture of the place
• going for walks with a local
• picnic lunches
• never quite being able to have a sophisticated conversation because of language barriers
• feeling more like a guest than a customer

I hate:

• formalities associated with checking in
• having to check out by a certain time
• being forced to think about what I will do the next day
• instant coffee
• tea bags
• overcooked seafood
• getting charged extra for every little thing
• uncomfortable reading chairs
• feeling guilty about long showers
• holes in mosquito nets

Indeed, 8000 Vt is not cheap at all compared to most local-run bungalows on Tanna or elsewhere in Vanuatu.

Dear John, I well understand why you are miffed that I missed your wonderful site. Rest assured there is now a link to it on Rocky Ridge's website. I am so impressed by what you have done, and am in fact reassured that there is such a site. I will contact you directly by email.

Trap-i-a-s, your standards are much higher than mine. You are looking for what I would expect in Singapore, not a rural area of Vanuatu. My usual village stay is here, but is basically a village stay - no phones, little power and 1 waterpipe. I spent 3 weeks there at Christmas - and on the way, someone stole my supply of powdered milk, so the only coffee I had was black instant (which luckily we had packed a jar of in a different bag) or a disgusting thing called coffeemix that was invented in Asia somewhere, and includes fake milk and sugar with 3rd grade instant coffee. (and I hate sugar in my coffee).
For me, a supply of fruit is essential.
Absolutely no quality stuff such as Lindt (I bring lollies for the village kids), but the seafood is freshly caught, and the environment and the people are wonderful.

Yeah OG, I found that list funny, too. But for $80, maybe one can expect more than the usual basic bungalow.
Also had a giggle at sending "some book like 'South Pacific Chic', or 'Hip South Pacific Hotels" to Melanesian bungalow owners to give them ideas! ;-) Well, maybe they are unusually wealthy islanders with acess to "hip" building material and builders.

Ozziegiraffe and Laszlo, I well understand your mirth at one level, but at another, I don't. In fact my list is not my 'standards', but the truth of what I like. If Chinese chocolate is all that's on offer, I will probably eat it, but all things being equal, I would prefer good quality chocolate, and that is useful information for people who may not know that good quality chocolate is something which exists, or that there are gradations in perceived quality. The point is not that South Pacific Style is unaffordable because it's too expensive, but that Tannese bungalow owners don't know what Taschen or Australian Gourmet Traveller (and hence many holiday makers of the kind likely to travel to Tanna) consider to be 'South Pacific Style', which is no doubt going to be informed in large measure by the 'international tropical' style which has been grafted onto Bali and come to be known in such books as 'Balinese style'. So though they are desperately trying to build accommodation which appeals to holiday makers, they have little idea of what that might be, or to the extent they do, it is in large part based on misconceptions. Whatever approximation of my concept of 'style' they can afford, it should at least, for commercial reasons, be an approximation of the concept of 'style' likely to be held by likely holiday makers. For example, you will not find strip fluorescent lighting in any of the pages of 'South Pacific Style', whereas you will find lamps considered elegant in developed nations and incandescent lighting more generally. And since Tom and Margaret have a fridge, ordering Lindt chocolate in bulk, and providing a square with a coffee at the end of a tour is not an inconceivable project. Nor is buying six good quality plates for the tiny restaurant, and 10 drinks glasses of a kind which cannot be found in the cramped Chinese emporia of Port Vila an impossible project. Put these things in a photo on the website, and it will do two things: first, it will demonstrate a style which will be a point of difference from every other bungalow, and secondly, it will suggest that the accommodation is one of those joint developed world and local people projects which travellers' experience tends to suggest work. The other thing is that 'South Pacific Style' is in fact counter-intuitively regressive. We like to leave our glass and steel palaces and get back to a rural idyll full of quaint thatched cottages. As Tom and Margaret's bungalows are built of concrete blocks, I am not sure they 'get' this (though it's possible they do and just don't want to rebuild every three or four years). The bathrooms are indoors, whereas outdoor bathrooms are all the rage, and for all I know are probably cheaper to create than indoors bathrooms. And so on and so on.

You have some point - I might add our dislike of pink plastic chairs and the like! ;-)

But I still think that showing pix of ultra-expensive hip resorts to locals with limited resources may just intimidate them by making them think "If this is what Westerners need, I will never be able to do it".

Good on you for doing the website etc for your friends. We've just returned from Tanna and appreciate the difficulties the bungalow owners face in letting people know about them. We stayed in ni-Van run bungalows in different parts of the island (Banyan Castle over at the volcano -www.banyancastle.info and Ikamir Guesthouse south of Lenakul -www.positiveearth.org/bungalows - were two definite highlights) and we walked past the Rocky Ridge bungalows when we went snorkelling at the blue hole.

I would say the best thing that can be done to improve the experience for western tourists would be the comfort level of mattresses & pillows. Everywhere we stayed had good mosquito nets so no complaints about that. Actually there were few mosquitos around but it does make you feel safe from any passing night time insects.

Having available information about local attractions and activities - not just those requiring a tour and entrance fee - would be good too. For example, we stayed at Evergreen, next door to White Grass, but there was no info there about the blue hole just down the road, or even an accurate high tide time. I guess their main focus is on guests flying over from Port Vila for a day or two to see the volcano and a kastom village rather than the slower-paced exploration that we were in to.

OP, when living in Solomon Islands not that long ago, we went for a whole 6 months of not being able to obtain any chocolate at all, for love or money. And certainly most of the chocolate that is available is Australian or New Zealand Cadbury, and therefore good quality.
Laszlo, I was very grateful for a hastily obtained (and ridiculously expensive) blue plastic chair on my last Solomons sea crossing to Malaita.
However, I do see the point, and always applaud supporting locals over expats where possible.
My Malaitan friends are seing my point about the advantage of leaf construction over timber and iron when it is hot. The house on Lismore Island is much cooler in the hot months than the family house on the main island, which is timber and iron. (However, when the cool winds blow in July, they prefer the permanent house.)

Hi everyone,

New Site for Southern Vanuatu: http://tafeatourismcouncil.com/

The TTC (Tafea Tourism Council) has commissioned J&S tourism Consulting to build them a website to provide better public access for their members: accommodation and tours operators in the five islands (Tanna, Aneityum, Futuna, Erromango, and Aniwa).

We are in the final leg of doing this so hope this site (presently still being furnished with content & images) will assist travelers to these islands.

Cheers,
John Nicholls

PS: if anyone wants to add content & or images please contact me via the site. This is a nonprofit job for the collective good, so please feel free to help.

Edited by: vivavanuatu