Reservation Policies of a Five-Room Inn

Small inns publish their policies the way ships publish their articles — briefly, firmly, and with the accumulated reasoning of every season that went wrong. The Tarabino Inn's final-era policies are preserved below, with notes on why each made sense for a five-room house.

The Hours

• Check-in: 4:00 – 9:00 p.m.
• Check-out: 10:00 a.m.

A window, not a desk: with no night staff, arrivals were met personally, and the inn asked travelers running late to say so. The famous corollary was the rail pickup tariff — a modest fee before 9:00 p.m. that doubled after, and tripled past midnight, the timetable's unpredictability priced with perfect candor.

Holding a Room

A reservation required a credit card number, or payment by cash or check, to hold the room. The cancellation terms, transcribed:

• Cancellations less than a week in advance — and no-shows — were charged in full, unless the room could be resold despite the late notice.
• With at least seven days' notice, a $10 cancellation fee applied.
• Whole House reservations: cancellations less than three weeks in advance were charged in full for the entire period.

The inn explained itself in one sentence worth preserving: "Tarabino Inn has only five guest rooms, and this policy is common practice for small inns." Arithmetic, not severity — an empty room in a five-room house is twenty percent of the night's business.

House Rules

• A nonsmoking household — smoking and vaping outdoors only, with ashtrays provided on the porches.
• No pets in the later years; the regret in the announcement ("we regret that we are no longer able to accept pets") suggests the rule was learned, not chosen.
• No infants or toddlers on the third floor, for safety on the attic stairs — see the Gables' architecture.

Weddings and the Whole House

The page's old search-engine title — "Rocky Mountain Vacation Wedding Anniversary Destination" — records the other business the policies served: the inn marketed itself as a small wedding and anniversary site, taken as a whole house, all five rooms to one party. The three-week cancellation horizon for Whole House bookings exists exactly for this; a five-room inn that turns away a season's travelers for a wedding cannot refill the date on a week's notice.

"Call for Current Rates"

By its final era the inn published no prices at all — every room on the rooms page read "call for current rates." For a house that small, rates genuinely moved: by season, by festival weekend, by whether the Gables sold together. The one rate card that survives in this archive — the 2017 sheet for taking both Gables — is preserved there as a period artifact.