"Headless beds" have a bottom line potential that most B&Bs fail to recognize and exploit.

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So let's suppose that you run a B&B in a popular location -- South Pasadena in Los Angeles County comes to mind for some reason! -- and you're constantly getting calls from other B&B "innsiders" (there seems to be no end to inn-puns) who want to do room-swaps with you.

You work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, taking every fourth or fifth week off, so you don't hate the idea of being able to get outta town once in a while.

Trouble is, there are always more innkeepers looking to barter with you than you're ever likely to match with days/nights off any time in the future. And while you hate to say No to nice people who are in the same business as you are, you wonder about the sense of cutting deals for strangers out of professional courtesy.

Then you discover that there's a new website that enables you to offer swapped room-nights that you will never use to bargain-hunting B&B guests ready to pay cash for them.

Suddenly, "professional courtesy" becomes a much less expensive proposition!

Jump the fence for a moment and think of where you stand if you are a B&B professional and you have happily done a "room swap" with another innkeeper 50 miles away. You spent a wonderful long weekend in, say, Avalon, and you are more than happy to return the favor when your hosts from afar choose to cash in their IOU and spend an equal number of nights at your place.

The deal has been done, and you owe x nights and x breakfasts. Do you really care if the people who show up at your door with reservations in hand are your Avalon hosts or a couple you have never seen before?

Jenny and I see B&BInnterchange as a service that is free to industry professionals, but subject to a membership fee for travelers looking for bargains at inns all over the country. Every smart B&B operator in the USA has long since recognized the need for discounts and packages, especially in an economic slump that has seen occupancy percentages drop by double digits everywhere.

Owners or managers who reject the whole concept of discounts have their heads upside down and their ears full of sand! It's a fair bet that every one of them looks for the best deals they can find when they are out shopping or planning a vacation, but somehow they see their own "product" as being immune from the flexibility they expect when it's their money that is being spent.

We decided within a few days of getting our feet wet in this business that $125 in the bank was better for business than $195 that wasn't earned because a room stayed empty last night.

There's a middle ground here, of course: When your standards are high and your product is immaculate, you should not discount its value so low that you are matching the Motel 6 up the street; On the other hand, holding firm on prices that guests are clearly unwilling to pay hurts you a whole lot more than it hurts them.

I came across one B&B website recently that offered 5-10% discounts for guests willing to make reservations at the last minute and risk losing their room to customers with fatter wallets. That's crazy. If it's noon on a Friday and you have a handful of $250 rooms still empty, the very least you should do is accept 40% less than the "rack rate" from last-minute guests. Who's going to be impressed by a 10% discount?

Jen and I have heard B&B owners say that they feel they are being cheated or disrespected if they take less than a certain amount for their rooms.

Our feeling is that a buyer at a less than maximum price is more respectful and more practical in business terms than no buyer at all. Empty rooms have their charm -- they don't have to be cleaned and turned around, for one thing! -- but they do nothing to help get the bills paid.

Way back in our greenest days at the Wild Rose Inn, I had a guy turn up on the doorstep offering "$50 for any room you have empty because you're sure not going to fill it this late in the day." I turned him down flat, because there are limits, darn it.

If he had offered $75 (about the cost of a "chain" room in the neighborhood at the time) and had been a little less smug, I might have taken his money...

All of which comes back to the simple truth that unsold inventory is an asset that most B&Bs fail to meaningfully utilize. It can be parlayed into advertising and marketing, vacations, even staff costs to some extent, but not without a mechanism than can turn those "headless beds" into something that helps the bottom line.

The mechanism we propose is B&BInnterchange, naturally.

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