The driving force behind B&BInnterchange is confidence that it is comprehensively addressing a need that is currently unfulfilled, and the only way to be sure of that is to check out the competition.
We all (innkeepers and guests) know by now that there is a wide choice of B&B listing services out there, some of them free to the properties advertised and the rest costing from $25 to $900 a year.
Most of them do little more than providing a link to the selected B&B, but some do not even manage that. An address and/or a phone number is the best they offer.
Review opportunities, set up presumably to give website visitors useful "been there, done that" guidance, are increasing in number, but TripAdvisor rules in that sector and may actually be more helpful to the B&B industry than dedicated listings such as bedandbreakfast.com and its competitors.
The big problem, of course, is that some unscrupulous guests try to use them to bully their targets into giving them special treatment. Jen and I had an encounter with a woman in Glendale, Calif., who had written a scathing denunciation of the Artists Inn, claiming that she had been bitten all over by bedbugs. Her visit predated our arrival by more than a year, but I did not much like having the review out there for future guests to see and was surprised the management team that preceded us had not responded to it.
I tracked the lady down (without TripAdvisor's help, of course) and asked her to tell me more. What it came down to was that she would be willing to delete the itchy, scratchy bedbugs post if we would give her a free weekend for her and her family (presumably, they planned to sleep in Saranwrap). I refused, and the damaging review stands to this day.
(It's interesting to note that the "victim" in question has relocated to Colorado since 2003; they say fleas and bedbugs don't like high altitudes, but I doubt that's the reason!).
I have revisited this topic for two reasons, one being that the PAII blog just added some very useful information about damaging B&B reviews, including a 20-minute interview with a legal adviser. The other is that just last month, I came across a suspiciously nasty review about another Pasadena area B&B and contacted the owner to commiserate. It turned out that the guest responsible had warned her of dire consequences if the innkeeper did not, in effect, pay her to be nice, not nasty.
There is no way to know for sure how much potential guests are turned off by negative reviews, but my best guess is that they hurt, and that the injury is greater still if a calm and reasoned "management response" is not posted under them ASAP.
PAII's president agrees that bad reviews, however mean-spirited and unfair, should never be ignored.
All of which is a major digression from the topic of B&BInnterchange!
We've begun work on a website for the new service, which for now is limited to an online place-holder but can be accessed by anyone who is interested (there will be revisions almost daily even after the starting gun is fired!).
We are hoping that the service will pay for itself, of course, but making great piles of profit per some of the B&B empires on line is not the objective.
It's more about community and marketing and giving innkeepers everywhere the biggest possible bang without hitting them up for any bucks.
The business model calls for guests to help us pay the bills, not inn owners (and even Getaway buyers will not be out of pocket because they will have access to deals that will not be available anywhere else).
Bargain offers will be "searchable" in all manner of ways, from price range to region, county and nearest town, and subscribers (all of them potential guests for every participating inn) will be able to sign up for regular e-mail updates on what's on offer in locations that they specify.
At first, we saw this solely as a means for innkeepers taking part to swap room-nights with each other, track them online, and get cash back for any exchanged nights that they could not hope to use themselves.
The reason most innkeepers don't embrace room swaps is that they could never take enough time off (or travel far enough) to enjoy them, and because of that, they limit their policy, if they have one, to "courtesy discounts." That's fine, as far is it goes, but the burden falls especially heavily on properties in the most desirable destinations.
As the idea began to evolve, Jenny and I realised that B&BInnterchange had the potential to become a powerful (again, the magic word free!) marketing resource for participating inns, and perhaps restricting it to unused room swaps would limit its appeal to reservation-hunting visitors to the website.
So why not boost the inventory, aka the variety of choices for guests, by allowing innkeepers to post their own special deals whenever they feel like it?
It would mean that entries for a given property might include some that were "owned" by other innkeepers who had provided exchange hospitality for the listed nights, and others would bring revenue direct to the destination inn.
But that is not a problem, because B&BInnterchange treats each individual listed night much like a can of beans on a supermarket shelf, with a tracking number that separates and distinguishes it from every other entry without preventing it from being bundled with others if that is how the owner wants it sold.
We all love Costco, right? Think of nights on offer like items at your local Costco, sometimes sold in 2- or 3-packs, sometimes singly, but always at a better price than you will find almost anywhere else.
Inns listed on B&BInnterchange will always have complete control over the Getaway or Marketplace entries for their property, regardless of who owns the room-night described. They can hide any entries they do not want to honor for whatever reason, but they can only delete nights they have listed themselves as special discount or special package offers (think of B&Bdotcom's "Hot Deals" promo without those 30% commissions!).
And, of course, listed nights that are in effect IOUs in exchange for hospitality enjoyed at other participating inns, must always be sold before an innkeeper can generate his own entries as a marketing tool.
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