How to Start & Run Your Own Bed & Breakfast Inn by Carl Glassman & Carl Glassman

Author:Carl Glassman & Carl Glassman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811740951
Publisher: Stackpole Books

It was photocopied on letterhead, including the signatures. In other words, nothing fancy. But it was effective.

PAID ADVERTISING

Innkeepers are not good candidates for most paid advertising, except for the Internet and visitors bureau area guides. These are going to be your best bet—affordable, effective. Print advertising in magazines and newspapers is generally going to be very diluted. A message needs to be in front of a potential guest when he or she wants to see it, and more times than just once.

Regional travel magazines used to be good outlets, but even their effectiveness has diminished as their rates have gone up. If you have a million-dollar budget and a staff to administer it, then you can do extremely well. Needless to say, innkeepers do not fit that category, although we might hook on to a local attraction that does.

The advantage of the Internet is that your message is there, where it should be, when people are looking. So it makes the most sense to put your dollars there. Be cautious, however; many specialist sites might fit you (www.dogfriendly.com, for example), but they may not. Granted, you may not lose more than a hundred bucks on a nonperforming site, but those can add up quickly. The most effective broad sites at this writing are www.bedandbreakfast.com and www.bbonline.com. Your local visitors bureau guides also will be extremely effective for you, as will the websites of your local and state associations.

In effect, the Internet has replaced guidebooks. Yet the Internet has not replaced the great value of guidebooks in offering relatively unbiased opinions of inns. There is not, to our knowledge, any website that does this, though most sites offer guests a chance to sound off about places they do or do not like.

The guide to Internet guides about bed-and-breakfast inns is www.innstar.com. It rates the guides themselves, and the top-ranked ones are BedandBreakfast.com and bbonline.com. These are excellent, but they are not rankings by an independent authority; they are listings written by the innkeepers. The value of Innstar is that it tells you as an innkeeper which guides are probably going to be the best for you to buy into.

Nationwide independent rankings are done by Mobil, AAA, CAA, and a few others. These will also charge you to be listed in their guidebooks and online guides. The drawback is that they are still working to come up with ways to distinguish inns from motels. For AAA, most of the inns’ rankings are three diamonds, which makes it difficult for the traveler to know how distinctive various inns are. It almost makes it seem that if you don’t have at least three diamonds, you’re not really acceptable. AAA insists that even one diamond is good, but the traveling public doesn’t believe that.

State associations are taking the lead in providing guarantees to the public that their members have been inspected and meet the requirements for a safe and comfortable stay. Local associations theoretically have winnowed down their membership to include the best of the

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