The Golden Rule: Treat B&B Guests as You Would Expect to Be Treated at $150+ a Night!

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As time went by, we became resigned to the fact that to the people who paid our paltry wages--$1,000 a month for each of us!--we were the enemy.

We consoled ourselves with the simple fact that guests loved us. They would leave us gifts of wine and flowers--sometimes even money!--and tell us over and over how wonderful Jenny's cooking was and how the two of us had made their visit an unforgettable experience. We had some problems, ruffled feathers on the part of disappointed visitors, but we never had anyone leave unhappy--it was a point of pride for us that if a guest was not comfortable, we weren't either.

Reuben once said to me that he envied how easy I found it to look strangers in the eye and talk to them as if they were my friends, and I just laughed off the (I assumed) compliment and said it was a symptom of a simple mind. I told him that I felt that getting along with people from the get-go was easier than the alternative, and suggested that the majority of guests felt exactly the same way--being happy was a whole lot less stressful than complaining, right...?

Both Reuben and Laura had a carefully cultivated image of themselves as caring Christians out to make the world a better place, and at every possible opportunity they would tell us about their good works and their church connections. But they were both prone to the most extraordinary temper tantrums, and it was clear that Reuben was scared to death of his wife, who in turn hid a mean-spirited, critical nature behind a soft-spoken, grandmotherly demeanor that may not have been Oscar-worthy but could easily have snagged a Golden Globe Award.

Reuben once said "God is our booking agent," and I laughed at that, commenting to him that given the lousy job he was doing, it was just as well that the Almighty did not expect a commission. Religious jokes were not appreciated, I learned...but I did not apologize for that one. God is much more Jen's thing than mine, but I have always identified with the notion that if he exists, Big G is most likely to help those who help themselves and to ignore people who idly wait for a miracle (hopefully excluding those of us who buy Lottery tickets four times a week!).

From a business standpoint, the Lord Mayor's Inn was an unmitigated disaster, although in our first couple of months we were able to deliver a marked improvement in occupancy, up from about 10% to 25%. We had to fight the Brassers to do it, though. Once, the two cottages around the corner from the Inn (a brilliant addition to the room inventory that we will copy if we ever get the chance) were both full with kids in town to take the California Bar Exam at Long Beach Convention Center, and inexplicably both sets of guests arrived at the breakfast table shivering and complaining that they had all had to suffer cold showers on this one of the most important days of their lives.

Jenny and I were mortified, of course, and offered to let them take showers in as many of the empty bathrooms in the main house as might be needed, but of course by then there wasn't time. We were at least able to give them good breakfasts and warm them up with hot tea and coffee, and then it fell to me to figure out what on earth could have gone wrong in not one but two separate hot water systems.

It turned out that Reuben Brasser had crept around the back of the two annexes and turned off the hot water heaters in both of them, claiming when I challenged him that I had told him that neither of them was occupied. It was MY job, he said, to make sure that water was not being heated in the cottages when there were no guests to make use of it, a nonsense observation that confirmed to Jen and I that we were right to think Reuben had finally lost what little was left of his mind.

By then, I had been in touch with another interesting-looking B&B, the Artists Inn and Cottage in South Pasadena, not at first as an escape route but simply to discover what the Innkeepers there were doing to make their business a success. I knew it was doing far better than the LMI because the Artists Inn website gave guests open access to a calendar that showed the availability of all ten rooms for two weeks at a time. They were averaging about 50% occupancy, more than twice the norm for the Lord Mayor's Inn in spite of the fact that Long Beach is far more of a tourist magnet than South Pasadena.

Our "big kids"--Jen's two sons and a daughter from her first marriage--all live in the Pasadena area, and we made a habit of going to stay with them in turns when we needed one night away from the Brassers in any given week. On one of those escapes, we paid a visit to the Artists Inn, and were very impressed by what we saw.
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