Policies
1. General
As a Cape Cod inn and family vacation rental, the Bursley Manor follows all minimum procedures required of vacation rentals and offers many additional amenities, with a couple of restrictions, as follows:
Host Availability:
I’m your host Margaret Rankin, the Bursley Manor’s innkeeper and owner. I am available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on 774 205 3639. If I am not immediately reachable, I will call you back at my earliest convenience.
- There is a 7-day minimum booking requirement on bookings from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Bookings of fewer than 7 days can be made by arrangement with the innkeeper at other times.
- Guests of all ages are welcome.
- The Bursley Manor accommodates families of up to 14. Additional guests are charged at the rate of $60 per person per night.
- Each booking incurs a cleaning fee of $750, which will be refunded in the event of cancellation. Guests are required to comply with the simple check-out procedure posted at the property. If the procedure is not followed, the payment method on file will be charged an additional $300.
- Pets are welcome at a rate of $200 per week per pet and must be cleared with the innkeeper before arrival.
- Smoke-Free inside and outside – The Bursley Manor’s insurance policy does not permit smoking indoors or on the patios. Guests may smoke on the northeast lawn at the outdoor furniture comprising four chairs and a glass outdoor coffee table. Smoking materials must be properly extinguished and safely disposed of in the outdoor property waste bins following use. Extinguished smoking materials may not be disposed of on the lawn or grounds. Should any guest in a group violate this policy, a $250 cleaning fee will be charged to the booking party’s bill.
2. Check-In & Check-Out
Check-in begins at 4:00PM.
Check-out Time is 11:00AM.
For options regarding Earlier check-ins and/or Later check-outs, please refer to the Early Arrivals & Late Departures Special.
Guests are required to complete the Bursley Manor Check-Out process detailed below by 11AM on their departure date. Guests who do not complete the check-out process will incur an additional cleaning fee of $300.
Early Arrivals & Late Departures Special:
The 4PM check-in and 11AM check-out times are set in order that housekeeping may properly sanitize, stock and otherwise prepare the Bursley Manor for your stay. As the property is nearly 4,000 square feet and the minimum stay is 7 days, proper preparation of the manor does require five hours, even with a team of five housekeepers. I do often get requests for more time at the manor and am happy to accommodate guests in this regard provided that the time extensions conflict with neither the preparation of the manor for your stay nor its preparation for the guests following your booking. When possible, I offer add-on extensions at the manor, available in 3-hour blocks at the rate of $125 per block. You may choose as many of these blocks as are needed and available by prior arrangement with me.
Bursley Manor Check-Out Process:
To be Completed by 11 a.m. on the Date of Departure
Dear Guests,
Thanks very much for choosing to stay at the Bursley Manor! Please note that check-out is at 11 a.m., as the housekeepers and I must get started then in order to be ready for the next guests. The end-of-stay cleaning is included in your rate, so there is no laundry, vacuuming, etc., to be done, but I will be immensely grateful for your help with the following:
Kitchen:
Please feel free to leave non-perishable staples if you don’t want them, but remove any meals you prepared and partially consumed fresh foods.
- Load and run the dishwasher.
- Wash any other used dishes, leaving the kitchen free of dirty dishes.
- Empty kitchen trash into the trash bin by the shed and recyclables into the recycling bin there.
- If the bins are full, please use the black contractor bags under the sink by the kitchen door, separating them into trash and recycling bags. Place bags by their corresponding bins.
Bedrooms/Baths:
- Please strip beds of sheets and pillowcases
- Please do remove the duvet from its cover.
- Place used linens, towels, beach towels, robes, washcloths, placemats, table cloths, cloth napkins, and kitchen towels in the two laundry rooms.
- Empty mini-fridges.
- Place all trash from rooms in the room waste baskets or outside garbage bins.
- Have a fellow guest double-check your room before you go. Most guests leave something!
Common Spaces:
- Please return books, games, and other objects to the places you found them.
- Check for and remove personal items like chargers, shoes under sofas, jewelry, etc.
Patio/Outdoor Spaces:
- Please simply leave these areas as you found them.
- Please empty extinguished used charcoal into the underbrush back by the marsh.
Finally:
- Please let me know if any of the household furnishings/equipment did not work or stopped working during your stay.
- I will be grateful for any feedback you may have about any improvements I can make for my future guests.
Thanks again for staying with me, and for your help with the above!
3. Pets
Your house-trained pets are welcome by prior arrangement with me at the rate of $200 per pet per stay.
4. Forms of Payment
Acceptable Forms of Payment:
- Cash
- Venmo
- Zelle
All Major Credit Cards. (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover). Because of merchant processor fees, please consider the following:
Verify that the card you provide is the one you are going to want all payments to be made from.
- Decide who will be ultimately paying and use their card. I do not make charges on one card, then refund and charge another. The transaction expense is too great.
- Make all reservations with gift cards by phone call to apply the gift certificate first before any credit cards are run.
Bursley Manor In-House Gift Certificates:
You must call us with the gift certificates so I can apply them toward your room payment. Call if you have lost your house-issued gift certificate. I may be able to reproduce it.
5. Schedule of Payments
Non-Refundable Deposit:
All reservations require the immediate payment of a non-refundable deposit of $500 for each night booked.
Payment Schedule After the Initial Deposit:
30-Days-Out: Thirty days prior to your date of arrival, which coincides with the Bursley Manor’s 30-day cancellation policy, your credit card will be charged a non-refundable payment of the remaining balance of the entire length of your booked stay.
- 3-Day-Out: All spa and transport will now be charged at 50%. This payment is not refundable.
- 1-Day-Out: All other outstanding items on your account will now be charged. This is a non-refundable payment. Besides expediting the check-in, it starts the whole vacation experience on a very positive note instead of starting the check-in procedure with a payment discussion.
Statement of Charges:
A statement of all charges will be emailed to you on the day of your planned departure.
Cancellation Policy:
You may cancel any stay at the Bursley Manor within 48 hours of booking without penalty. Thereafter a strict cancellation policy is followed. Please read it carefully before you book. A two-interval-cancellation policy with a replacement booking safety net, the details of which follow below, will always apply regardless of the reasons for the cancellation, which may include, but are not limited to: weather, illness or risk of illness, family emergencies, or even death of family members. (Even in these extreme cases which might be called “Acts of God”, the financial responsibility for your reservation does not transfer to the manor but remains solidly with you.)
- First Interval | Outside of 30-Days-Out of Arrival: Cancellations before 5:00 PM, 30 days (or more) before your arrival, will result in the forfeiture of the non-refundable deposit only.
- Second Interval | Inside of 30-Days-Out of Arrival: All remaining charges for the rooms, including sales tax, are scheduled to be charged at this time. Cancellations or reductions of multi-night stays after 6:00 PM, 30 days out, will not relieve you of full financial responsibility for the entire length of your booked stay plus sales tax (regardless of the reason for the cancellation.) In other words: Cancellations in this interval will occasion no refund of accommodation charges. The word “may” applies because some packages do have their own specific cancellation intervals, like spa services and limo reservations, which you will find annotated in the terms of the specific package.)
- One-Time Replacement Booking for “direct bookings”: To soften the blow of forfeiting the full cost of a canceled stay, I will compensate you by providing a free gift certificate towards a booking of a similar length stay on non-holiday weekdays (Monday-Thursday) between November 1 and March 31 of the upcoming year. This replacement provision gift certificate will have the following caveats:
- Expiration Date: It expires one year from the date of your canceled booking.
- Non-Refundable Deposit Payment: Just as the persons with a cancellation more than 30 days of arrival will lose their non-refundable deposit payment as explained above, so do persons who cancel with less than 30 days lose a non-refundable deposit. In the original reservation, the previous non-refundable deposit payment became part of their now fully paid room payment so with the gift certificate for a rebooking, they have really lost nothing (other than the convenience of booking anytime they want.) So, in the case of a replacement booking, their non-refundable deposit will be made at the time of their booking. If they were to cancel this replacement booking, they would lose the nonrefundable deposit payment
Exceptions to Gift Certificate: No gift certificate for a replacement booking will be offered if:
- The reservation is a “No Show”.
- The cancellation request is made on the same day as the arrival date.
- The canceled booking was made through a commissioned third-party provider, like Expedia or Booking.com, for example.
- The canceled reservation is the second time the original paid-for-booking has been canceled. After the second cancellation, the original gift certificate will become null and void.
7. Changing the Date of a Reservation
Outside 30-Days-Out:
The first time you change the date of an existing reservation outside the 30-Days-Out date will be handled simply by changing the arrival date of the current reservation. Period! No fees. No new non-refundable payment. However, if you should need to change the date a second or multiple times, I will require the repayment of the non-refundable deposit of $100 for each change of date after the first.
Inside 30-Days-Out:
For all practical purposes, changing the date of a reservation inside the 30-Days-Out period, is a cancellation. As such, your situation will follow the cancellation procedures described above.
8. Excessive Cleaning/Damage
In the rare case that a room at the Bursley Manor or any of its contents are damaged or require professional cleaning due to guest negligence, you will be billed a fee equal to the cost of replacement or professional cleaning required to resolve the damage.
If you have any questions about any part of this policy, please contact us prior to booking. It is our hope that you will find these policies reasonable and I assure you they will be administered fairly. Please call us if you have any questions
