How to help a failing B&B (1st report)

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Arroyo Vista Inn

NOTES! (With apologies in advance for any redundancies)

Advertising is expensive and its scatter-shot effectiveness is iffy at best.

Your inventory – 70 room-nights a week! – is already paid for (mostly) so it’s the ideal substitute for ads, especially because you can tightly control targeting…

That leads to:

· Deep discounts (we suggest 30-40% off Sundays through Thursdays, and the same discount if a 2nd night is booked on a weekend (Friday and Saturday). Also a weekend special for reservations made after Noon on a Friday for that night and/or the next night.
· Gift certificates for local good causes, including schools (PTAs are a good target) disease-oriented charities etc., kids, animals, anyone offering auctions (they can be outright freebies, or “book one night, get one free” deals). Make friends with SP cops and firemen, too…
· Extensive canvassing of travel writers in L.A. County, Orange County and San Diego, offering them nights at the Inn in exchange for “a getaway not far away” coverage in this era of gasoline at beer prices. (OK, we’re not there yet, but it’s coming!).
· Send similar letters (via the Post Office!) to residence/accommodation contacts at L.A. area colleges, hospitals, galleries, large companies etc. emphasizing that the Inn is new and is working extra hard to get the word out. CalTech and JPL in particular are a great source of repeat business – help them get to know you using unsold room-nights as shameless bribes.
· Wedding planners and wedding venues from La Caňada in the north to San Gabriel in the south east need to know about the AVI, wedding specialty stores too…offer them all tours, complimentary room-nights, whatever it takes!

Use the (gorgeous!) website to provide more extensive info about local amenities (when Ian retooled the AI website, the maps and local attractions pages earned countless compliments!). Make sure specials and big local events are prominently featured (plays, concerts, special exhibitions at public and private venues etc.).

Get more brochures “out there” – postcards, too. Make friends with concierges at big local hotels so they’ll tell people about you when they’re overbooked. Make sure AVI trifolds and cards are scattered far and wide, wherever brochures can be found (airport car rental info desks, tourist kiosks etc., golf/country clubs…even travel agents). Also worth a connection: the 9th District court complex on the arroyo and the Pasadena and L.A. city councils, all of whom have frequent out-of-town visitors…

The website could be more specific about South Pasadena’s charms, especially its lack of a room tax (which was 14% in Pasadena last time we checked). Show rate comparisons with the major high-end local hotels as a clickable option, and the South Pas B&Bs too if you decide to implement the discounts above. And a “call us for current special deals” line is a good idea, too – once you have people on the phone, chances are you will hook ‘em!

Make friends with other B & Bs outside South Pas: Get to know the owners/Innkeepers, carry their brochures and make sure they have yours. It’s great to be friends with the other two SoPas Inns, but they’re the competition – the more successful you become, the more business you’ll be taking away from them, and you deserve to do better than them! There are some great B & Bs around So Cal…help them help themselves by helping you…

Google is obviously the premier GTWO medium today but sponsored links can easily run $3-400 a month…too much. www.bbonline.com is a better way to go. For example, entering “b & b los angeles” in Google reveals nothing for the Arroyo Vista Inn for 150 entries or more, but the Artists Inn is just five slots from the top thanks to its membership in bbo. You have to be near the top or you might as well not be listed at all! bbo’s big advantage is that it links Inn member pages directly rather than (as with www.bedandbreakfast.com) placing umbrella home pages in search reports. That means extra steps for web surfers…and they don’t like that. (Your own website needs page titles that encourage wider exposure on Google etc.; just Arroyo Vista Inn is not enough!).

AVI does fine if “South Pasadena” is part of the b & b search entry, but there are countless visitors to L.A. County who have no idea that So Pas has the best B & B in the area and is itself a perfect destination town (forget over-priced spots like Santa Monica and Malibu!). We changed the AI page titles to include L.A. County, SoCal, etc. and it worked! Google’s “crawlers” read page titles ahead of text and other content.

Expedia, Trip Advisor etc. can be useful if their Specials/Big Deals etc. links are exploited. Can’t hurt! The competition’s well covered, but not AVI. Yet.

AAA…the BH and AI both get good AAA coverage because of their 3-diamond ratings. Your Inn is superior to either of them, so AAA endorsement seems a smart priority.

Packages: Dinner-and-a-movie deals are worth exploring with the Gold Line close by to take people up to the Pasadena Paseo. Several restaurants (Yardhouse, Tokyo Wako, etc. etc. might be amenable to shared inducements, and the theater chain offers bulk-discount tickets so you can pass on savings). Promote the Gold Line – out-of-towners love it! Locally, offer mid-week specials with dinner thrown in – Firefly Bistro is your closest option, probably, and they’re nice people. Ai, the area’s first sushi restaurant, might be worth exploring, too (Shiro is working with the Artists Inn these days). Many Pasadena restaurants have 10-20% off promos in local tourist brochures and will probably be willing to work with you, too (more personal than simply handing your guests the brochures).

Also, museum packages, tie-ins with the monthly Rose Bowl flea market, etc. Take a walk around there one Sunday and get brochures, cards etc. out to stallholders (they need a nice place to stay and so do their customers!). Canning’s, the RBFM promoters, were on my to-do list when we left the AI (you’ll find them at http://www.rgcshows.com/) and there are potential mutual-aid options there!

Directions: Get pinpoint, anally-precise directions onto the website and into all snail- and e-mail reservation confirmations. Don’t use Mapquest! Or the AAA website! (AAA directions to the AI were wrong three years ago and still haven’t been fixed). The hour or two you’ll spend boiler-plating “can’t miss it” directions everywhere will repay you 100x in the next few months…texting them to cell phones should be a last resort!

Street signs down on Monterey – more and bigger! Yes, there are local regulations, but they can be worked around. Signs are badly needed on both sides of the road, spot lit if possible!

This may well turn out to be a better summer than most B & B people expect, because Europe has lost much of its allure (thanks to the powerhouse Euro, which not long ago they said would “never reach parity with the dollar” – it was $1.55 on Monday!).

Finally: “Hotel”? The word is used a lot on the AVI website. Our experience is that many guests are vehemently “anti-hotel” and think of B & Bs as a cut above (in spite of their down-homey origins!). We suggest substituting either “B & B” or “Inn” throughout all promo materials…as in your brochure.

Attached:

Arroyo Vista Inn.xls