Since Jen and I started out in the B&B business, a regular feature in our lives has been phone calls from online listing services pitching the notion that theirs is the only one worth a percentage of our precious marketing budget.
The calls didn't excite us much because we never actually had a marketing budget. We read somewhere long ago that at least 10% of cash flow should be set aside for advertising (including website maintenance, brochures, business cards and so on) but for reasons outside our control, it never happened that way.
After a year or so we came to the conclusion that unsold inventory was the best resource we had to help get the word out, and so we became a lot more generous with donations to high-profile local charities in need of classy prizes for fundraisers.
We would enclose at least a half dozen brochures with every gift certificate sent out for a charity auction, requesting that they be prominently displayed at the event. We hoped that donors whose bids did not make the cut would want to know what they had missed out on, and would be blown away by what we had to offer.
It worked pretty well for us; certainly better than ads costing $500 plus in print publications that no one seems to read any more! More than once, a guest cashing in a "freebie" chose to add a second night at our regular rates.
Listing services have an important role to play in GTWO, though, because however effective your property's website might be, a would-be guest who queries one of the big search engines with "B&B, town, state" will almost always be pointed first at one of the big online reservations outfits.
When it launches, B&BInnterchange will fall into the listing services category, and it will be a while before it starts overtaking the less stellar performers.
Our business plan proposes a steady buildup up of regular visitors, and after a year or so, less than 20% of them will be B&B professionals (the majority will be vacationers looking for the getaway bargains that are promised by a slew of "discount" listings but are right now all but impossible to nail down).
Our experience tells us that a discount of less than 30% is unlikely to catch anyone's eye, especially in the current downturn, so we want to make that our minimum guarantee.
If we spread enough money around the major search engines and pick our keywords with consummate care ("B&Bs 30% off!" is a candidate phrase!) we should be able to make some headway.
The plan is that what we're offering will not bring in guests who think well ahead and prefer a reservation that's locked in at full price to savings that they might find if they wait until the last minute and take their chances.
What we want to do is help participating B&Bs to boost their bottom line by selling room nights that would otherwise be passed by. The last thing they need is to see top dollar travelers being replaced by bargain hunters paying 30% less!
That's why getaway planners referred to B&BInnterchange will be repeatedly reminded that all of the terrific deals they see before them are "subject to availability and at the discretion of the host" or words to that effect, and none of them will be a done deal until the reservation is accepted.
The logistics will be a little complicated, but certainly not insurmountable.
I went to Quantcast for a ballpark summary of monthly listings traffic, figuring that if bedandbreakfast.com trusts its evaluation methods, we can too.
During my brief encounter with CAIK, one member recommended an alternate service that he said was far superior, without mentioning that he owned a big piece of it. That's what I call good business!
Anyway, here are some numbers. Quantcast says TripAdvisor leads the "blanket" services with an enviable 7 million visitors a month, and that's encouraging because in spite of the ease with which people can post negative reviews, overall TA does a great job, in our opinion.
Of the B&B-specific options, bedandbreakfast.com is the champ, and the chart below helps explain why BBDC swallowed up Webervations last year (their own Rezovation service apparently pulls in much lower numbers, according to Quantcast).
The big surprise for us was the data Quantcast reports for Karen Brown, and the BBDC sibling, inns.com. Pamela Lanier's B&B listing does ten times KB's business, it seems, and bbonline.com does 3x better still.
I know bedandbreakfast.com is not going to challenge Quantcast's numbers because they carry them on a page pitched at B&B owners who need to be persuaded to fork out those huge fees!
The data are offered here simply as a guideline, with the caveat that they were generated by Quantcast and are in many cases described by that service as "a rough estimate."
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