The Innkeeping Blog

It’s a simple picture of a simple item found in my closet at the Lookout Point Lakeside Inn in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where I stayed last week.  This is a plastic laundry bag, and its presence in my closet made me smile.  Why?

I smiled because I rarely see such a thing at B&Bs and inns, and I see a lot of B&Bs and inns.  A generic, plastic laundry bag hanging in a closet can be seen at just about any hotel, but it is a rarity at B&Bs.

I suppose I am a typical traveler, in that I bring more clothes than I end up actually wearing on a trip.  This creates a little problem, because I now have dirty laundry and clean laundry, all of which needs to go back into my luggage.  Sometimes I remember to bring a plastic shopping bag that I saved from a trip to my local grocery store, in which I can put my dirty clothes.  But if I forget my own bag, the bag provided by the hotel or inn is a great thing to see.

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Anyone paying attention to the travel industry these days knows about the rise and success of the vacation rental as a popular lodging option.  Sites like VRBO, HomeAway, FlipKey and others have skyrockted in popularity.  Many cities around the world are concerned with the increased use of houses, apartments, and condos as vacation rentals, possibly altering the culture of buildings and neighborhoods.  Everyone in our industry knows that HomeAway bought BedandBreakfast.com last year, so it brought the vacation rental question into the forefront for our industry.  But how are innkeepers supposed to see the vacation rental market?  Friend or foe?  Of course, it’s not so black and white.

Activities undertaken by the vacation rental industry and its major players may end up benefiting the B&B industry.  For two years now, HomeAway has run commercials during the Super Bowl promoting the hotel alternative.  Since B&Bs compete with hotels (and we do, for those who say we don’t compete with hotels), I like this advertising.  It gets people thinking about alternatives to what can be the “cookie-cutter” experience.  HomeAway received a big infusion of capital from Google Ventures not long ago, and they recently filed to become a publicly-traded company.  The escalating scale and scope of this company will hopefully mean more propaganda to get travelers moving in the direction away from hotels.

Popular vacation rental web sites also provide another distribution channel for innkeepers to market their rooms, cottages, or cabins.  Not all rental opportunities on these web sites are condos and entire houses – some property owners rent rooms as well.  Many innkeepers have months during which occupancy drops to single digits.  Vacation rental web sites may be a great place to experiment with renting the entire B&B out to groups for days or weeks at a time.  I know several innkeepers who are having great success renting rooms on sites like HomeAway.  Think about it this way – there could be some kind of corporate sales training or other group-type function happening near you, and people booking blocks of rooms may not be thinking “B&B” when doing their homework.  But I’ll bet many are looking at vacation rental web sites.

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The time has come – we’re stepping out on the limb and going public with Better Way to Stay with our “B&Bs Kick Gas” promotion.  While this is not the point of my column, I will now insert my short pitch to participate…come up with your most creative promotion/special/package that plays off the rising gas price phenomenon, and upload it at www.betterwaytostay.com.  The campaign team will subsequently broadcast the campaign to tons of travel media, with the hopes of attracting much-deserved attention to B&Bs from coast-to-coast.  Now, onto the real purpose of my column this month…

When Brand Pandemic showed us their first mock-up of the BWTS web site, which spotlights the “Kick Gas” promo, my immediate response was, “I love it!”  They used text message shorthand to make fun of how high the gas prices are getting.  Seeing “WTF” in a B&B-related promotion got me excited!  But I have to admit, my immediate follow-up thought was, “Uh oh…innkeepers aren’t going to like that.”  I showed the image to a few friends and colleagues, and they all thought it was funny and really creative.  Those to whom I showed it were all under the age of 50, so my comfort level about the average PAII member’s potential response wasn’t necessarily changing.

Then I fly out to Des Moines, Iowa, to speak at the Iowa Bed and Breakfast Guild conference in Panora.  I had about 60 minutes to talk about Better Way to Stay, why we’re doing it, what’s happening, etc.  I thought I’d give a sneak peek of the web site and the gas price image – just to see what kind of reaction it would elicit among a group of innkeepers that I figured would probably be the most likely to not appreciate the humor.  To my surprise, when I showed the mock-up, there was ample laughter and head-nodding in the audience (as well as a fair share of puzzled expressions on the faces of those not familiar with text lingo).  I breathed a sigh of relief.

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On Facebook, is what I mean.  I encountered an example of how an inn is simply not “with it” when it comes to social media.  They’re missing the boat, and I wanted to share with PAII members about the missed opportunity at the Boar’s Head Inn in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Recently I attended the Bed and Breakfast Association of Virginia meeting in Charlottesville.  I arrived by train and took a cab to the Boar’s Head Inn – a classic inn up the road a couple of miles from the UVA campus.  I worked and lived almost across the street from the inn about 15 years ago, so I was excited to be back in the area.  As I waited for the cab driver to run my credit card at the entrance of the Boar’s Head, I thought that I would “check in” to the inn on Facebook.  The relatively new Facebook Places feature allows Facebookers to “check in” at various places, i.e. restaurants, parks, stadiums, hotels, attractions, etc.  One uses his or her cell phone’s Facebook application to let their friends know where they are at that moment.  It’s just a way of sharing news with your friends.  Click here to learn more:  http://www.facebook.com/places/

When I attempted to find the Boar’s Head Inn on Facebook on my cell phone, I couldn’t find them!  I was hoping to tell the 700+ friends of mine that I was checking in, and maybe some of my local buddies might see that I was in town.  But, because it appears no one at the Boar’s Head is on top of the social media side of marketing, they missed a golden opportunity for me to tell hundreds of people that I was staying there.  To confirm my suspicion that someone is asleep at the social media wheel, I went to their web site and could not find a Facebook logo anywhere.  No invitation to become a fan or “check us out” on Facebook.

When I searched Facebook for “Boar’s Head Inn” this is what appeared:

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