A quirky Yorkshire AirBnB - on water! We bob along to the Rainbow’s End canal boat situated between the Bingley Five Rise Locks and Saltaire.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 My name is Tom Greenwood and I am an Airbnb host. Welcome to Rainbow's End.
00:05 We're here at Dowley Gap which is, for those of you who don't know, it's a little
00:09 tiny hamlet I would imagine between Saltaire and Bingley Five Rise Locks.
00:14 I bought this boat about, I want to say about five or six years ago, something like
00:19 that, can't remember exactly. We lived on it, myself and my wife Prue, enjoyed
00:24 living on it but then decided, you know, it's time to get a house, bought a house
00:29 and then what do you do with an enormous boat that sat there doing nothing? So we
00:35 decided to go down the Airbnb route. We spent about a year getting everything
00:40 just so, took it up to dry dock, got it blacked, got it all ready and then did
00:46 all the garden as best we could. Spent a fortune and I thought right I'll read
00:51 this book on how to do Airbnb, Airbnb for dummies. We listed it and within
00:56 seven hours the phone or my iPad just went crackers. I say to people when they
01:01 get here, I say it's really relaxing and when I say that it'll be like you've
01:06 been given a tranquilizer and people say we got it and then they'll speak, you'll
01:11 come back and speak to people and they'll go we got in there and an hour later
01:14 I was comatosed on the sofa. What is it? I said I've no idea. I said it just slows you
01:21 down. That's the nature of boats, it's, you know, don't buy a canal boat if you
01:25 want to go anywhere fast or do anything fast because everything's slow.
01:30 As part of the Airbnb experience we want to offer our guests, we thought about
01:37 adding spa or pamper sessions. So I'm currently training as a complementary
01:43 therapist and so we're going to be offering as add-ons relaxation
01:47 treatments such as a full body massage, head massage, just kind of relaxation
01:53 pamper stuff. So that's going to be added on to this lovely Airbnb. They can be
01:58 inside if it's raining, they can be outside if it's even if it's drizzling,
02:02 have a barbecue, do whatever, you know, eventually hopefully we're going to do
02:06 some canoes down the canal. All the alternative energy that we've put on to
02:11 it, all the electrical systems and everything we've done to it is a
02:14 lifetime's work for me. I did it with my last house and I wanted to make an
02:19 off-grid lifestyle. This has just done it. I am as nervous, or was as nervous as a
02:24 kitten saying there you go, there are the keys to my pride and joy. Enjoy it, don't
02:30 trash it. But what I found is most, we cater only for couples, no kids, no pets.
02:38 99.9% of the people that come here are extremely respectful, they look after it.
02:45 Some people you can't even tell they've been here. They literally, they must
02:50 photograph it before they start and then put everything back exactly as
02:54 it is. We've had people in tears because they've had to leave. It's like well, I
02:59 can't do it about that but you can always buy your own boat.