Starting a hotel business in France

I’m currently an Auto-Entrepreneur, doing some freelance consultancy work.

However, I’ve just been offered the chance to run a small business close to my home.  This is a small hotel with 11 rooms.  The current owner started and was developing the business, and in fact, was one of my AE clients.  However, for personal reasons he can’t continue, and business has been sliding for a while.

So my first question is - can I continue to be an Auto-Entrepreneur and set up a second business?  If not, could I close my AE business and do this instead?

I’ve been looking at various forms of business registration for this hotel, and having spent many hours, usually in the middle of the night, trawling the internet, I believe the best format juridique would be an EIRL.

My reasons for thinking this are:

1. I don’t need any capital to start the business
2. Formation seems to be quick and reasonably easy - I assume I just visit the Chambre of Commerce.  Since the current owner is desperate to hand the business over to someone else, and there are current bookings, so that is an important factor.
3. I can opt to pay on the regime “réel”.  Since I would be renting the entire hotel and all it’s furniture and fittings from the current owner, which would be significant expense each month, I don’t want to have to pay cotisations on all my turnover, only my profit.

Have I understood all that correctly?

I have run businesses in the past in the UK, using Quickbooks, and I’d like to do the same this time.  Would I need to employ an accountant to finalise accounts for me each year, or is it just a question of me keeping the records myself and making them available if anyone wants to see them?

The current owner tells me that he’s VAT registered, and advised me to do the same.  However, I don’t think the expenses of the business are high, the only bills would be electricity, food for breakfasts, etc., cleaning materials, and rent, which is not VAT rated.  (He’s also currently paying for a dame de chambre and a laundry service, because he’s no longer on site, but we wouldn’t be doing so). If we do that, we’d lose 10% of the income to VAT, so I can’t personally see any benefit.  Is it possible for me to start without VAT registration, and then choose to register at a later date if I change my mind?  And if I manage to grow the business (at the moment it only has 27% occupancy, so there’s lots of scope to grow it), within a couple of years I’d expect to be above the VAT threshold, so I assume I’d be able to register at that time.  Is this correct?

My husband is retired, and above UK state pension age.  If I wanted him to help me in this business - say I needed some repairs made, or someone to go to the airport to pick up a guest - would that be permitted? He wouldn’t be earning anything, but I might buy him a nice dinner from time to time :0)

My daughter already has experience of running a small hotel and may wish to become involved at a later date.  If she and her husband wanted to do that, could we change the business from an EIRL to a SARL de famille?  Would that give us many problems?

And finally ...

I believe we’re in a ZRR.  So if I started this as an EIRL, would I be able to claim relief from cotisations for 5 years, and then lower cotisations for a further 5?  And if after a couple of years, I wanted to change the format of the business to the SARL de famille, would claiming those subsidies stop me from being able to do that?

That’s all I can think of for now, sorry to ask so many questions at once.