The sentence behind the house rules

A holiday home near the beach in Ras Al Khaimah is listed online with a page of rules that runs longer than its description.

No visitors after ten. No food in the bedrooms. The deposit kept in full for any mark on any wall. Check-out at eleven means eleven, not five past. Guests who break any rule will be asked to leave without a refund.

Read cold, it sounds like a house that does not want anyone in it. Which is strange, because the owner pays to list it and presumably hopes to fill it.

Behind a list like this there is nearly always a sentence the owner did not write. Something along the lines of: a group last winter broke the furniture and fought me over the deposit, and I am still angry. Or: I bought this place to earn a little on the side, and I never expected strangers to be this much work.

Both feelings are understandable. The trouble is that the rules were written for those guests, and they are read by the next ones. A couple looking for a quiet weekend take every line personally, because it is addressed to them. They know nothing about last winter. All they can see is a host who expects the worst, and they book somewhere else.

The same thing happens on the returns page of a small online shop, on a laminated notice at a clinic reception, in the small print of a booking form. Stern words written after one bad experience go on punishing everyone who arrives afterwards.

The answer is not to have no rules. Some of them protect the place and the people in it. The useful exercise is to write the unspoken sentence out in full, privately, before anything goes public, and then read the rules with it attached. If that really is what you want every new guest to hear, keep them.

Usually, once it is in front of you, it is not.