“By signing on as our newest Platinum Key Supporter, BedandBreakfast.com demonstrates its commitment to PAII and our goals to best serve our membership and the industry,” says Jay Karen, PAII’s president and chief executive officer.  “BedandBreakfast.com has always been at the forefront of promoting the industry, and this relationship is another great example of being an advocate for B&Bs,” finished Karen.

“We feel that over the last several years Jay Karen has taken PAII to new heights and we believe that if the organization and BedandBreakfast.com join efforts, we can together convince more consumers to try B&Bs and inns as a great alternative to chain hotels,” says John Banczak, vice president of BedandBreakfast.com at HomeAway,  “Once a traveler tries a B&B, they become B&B customers for life – our mission is to get more travelers to make that first B&B trip, ” says Banczak.

To kick off the new partnership, PAII was able to secure the largest member promotion BedandBreakfast.com  has had with an industry association.  Any PAII member who has not previously had a membership with BedandBreakfast.com during the past 90 days may join at the Silver Level for just $199 for a year – a savings of 47% in the first year.  PAII members who are current members of BedandBreakfast.com have the choice of either a half-price one year upgrade to either a Silver, Gold, or Platinum membership  (a savings of up to $162), or receive  a $25 credit towards a Featured Property Auction.

In addition to these great offers, PAII secured a similar offer for non-PAII members.  In addition to these great offers, PAII secured a similar offer for non-PAII members.  Innkeepers who are members of neither PAII nor BedandBreakfast.com members can now join both organizations at the Silver Level for just $289 – a savings of 47% in the first year.  Both promotions end Friday, August 20, 2010.  BedandBreakfast.com will also sponsor a part of the “Better Way to Stay” campaign over the next year and contribute half of the proceeds from new members that sign-up for PAII and BedandBreakfast.com towards promoting the “A Better Way to Stay” campaign.

“BedandBreakfast.com’s pricing offer to both existing and new PAII members is truly unprecedented,” commented Karen.  “We’ve known that membership in BedandBreakfast.com has been a wise business investment for tens of thousands of innkeepers since their founding in 1995, and now at these prices it would surprise me why any innkeeper wouldn’t want to take advantage of both BedandBreakfast.com and PAII.  We are really looking forward to seeing how much more we can boost the industry together over the next year.”

To explore the limited-time advantages, click here.

About BedandBreakfast.com:

BedandBreakfast.com, based in Austin, Texas, is a leading specialty travel website with detailed information on more than 11,000 bed-and-breakfast properties worldwide. The site helps travelers find the ideal B&B or small inns through informative descriptions, photos and more than 100,000 consumer reviews, and make confirmed reservations instantly at nearly 2,000 properties. In addition, BedandBreakfast.com offers gift cards welcomed at more than 4,000 B&Bs in the United States and Canada, with no restrictions or blackout dates. The company also operates RezOvation, the industry leader in property management systems, online reservations, website design and internet marketing for the inn and B&B market.  BedandBreakfast.com is owned and operated by HomeAway, Inc., the worldwide leader in online vacation rentals, representing more than 475,000 paid vacation rental home listings across 120 countries.

About PAII:

The Professional Association of Innkeepers International, founded in 1988, is the innkeeping industry’s largest trade association. PAII is committed to fostering a knowledgeable, caring and conscientious community of professional innkeepers, networking with each other throughout the world. PAII provides education, communications, public relations, advocacy, networking, and research services to its membership and the greater industry. PAII hosts the world’s largest annual gathering of innkeepers, The Innkeeping Conference & Trade Show, and publishes the industry’s leading trade publication, Innkeeping Quarterly (IQ), which reaches over 17,000 innkeepers and is poised to launch a new international B&B branding campaign entitled “A Better Way to Stay”.

My criticism at the time was this:  I did not particularly like the fact that they required a guest to furnish proof of stay when wanting to post a negative review about a B&B, but didn’t necessarily require it of those wanting to write a positive review.  While I realize this was an “innkeeper friendly” policy, and noted that they aimed to please innkeepers, but felt in the long run it might be a disservice.   My concern was two fold.  First, I felt it in someway violated the “spirit” of Web 2.0.  Why treat one guest differently than another?  Web 2.0 is supposed to be this great “democratization” of web content, right?  But I was also concerned that their site would be filled almost exclusively with positive reviews, because it was more difficult to post a negative review.  Who was going to spend time digging up a receipt or other form of proof of stay?  If guests browsing the site only saw positive reviews everywhere, when they anticipated encountering a spectrum of reviews, they might not consider the review portion of BedandBreakfast.com very legitimate.

After a couple of years of hindsight and speaking or emailing with hundreds of innkeepers on the topic of online reviews, I think requiring proof of stay when wanting to post a negative review is a good policy, simply because the damage that a false negative review can cause is too detrimental.  I think the online review phenomenon is certainly a net-positive for our industry – no question about it.  But when transgressions can be prevented, they should be prevented.  Innkeepers work too hard to fall victim to fraudulent, false reviews.  Maybe I was thinking as much as a consumer as an industry representative…concerned that I wouldn’t see negative reviews that might have made it to the site if it weren’t for a restrictive procedure.

I understand the challenges that TripAdvisor would face if they started requiring proof of stay for any negative reviews, since there are over 50,000 hotels and 19,000 B&Bs on their site.  They would have to add a heck of a lot of staff to verify the negative reviewers; and even then the system would not be foolproof.  A challenge, indeed.

Maybe what the NFL is doing at www.nfl.com is a happy medium.  If the buyer actually bought the product (i.e. a Philadelphia Eagles jersey) from their site, then the site indicates the reviewer is a “Verified Buyer.”  People can still review an NFL product, but if they didn’t buy through NFL, then the “Verified Buyer” badge is omitted.  I like this, because as a consumer I can choose to read only the Verified Buyer reviews…or all of them.  The verification adds legitimacy to those reviews, and that’s a good thing.

In the end, the B&B has everything to lose and the reviewer has nothing to lose.  So, it’s a good thing to offer some protections to those who have everything to lose.

Limited-time TripAdvisor Promo with PAII

We’ve worked out an arrangement with TripAdvisor, so that all innkeepers in the B&B industry can continue to receive the 50% off deal for their new Business Listings Program through April 8^th .  You must use discount code TRIPDISC to get the deal.  If you haven’t investigated their new Business Listings program, I encourage you to check it out.  Basically, for a fee you can now add your email address, phone number and hyperlink to your inn’s web site on your TripAdvisor property page.  This is a new program for the entire lodging industry, and they’ve had several thousand properties already sign up.  I think innkeepers should sign up for three reasons:  1) you’ve poured a lot of time and effort into your own web site, and by having a direct link, you stand a better chance of getting TripAdvisor guests over to your site, 2) through your web traffic analytics program, you now have the ability to directly track the traffic coming to your web site from TripAdvisor…many innkeepers are now reporting this web link as one of their top sources of traffic, and 3) the 50% off price is low enough to give this a shot for at least the first year.  Properties with fewer than 11 rooms would normally pay $600 and properties with 11-25 rooms would pay $1,000 for this link – innkeepers can pay $300 and $500 respectively with this coupon code.  Go to www.tripadvisor.com/BusinessListings to sign up!

HomeAway Purchases BedandBreakfast.com

It was just announced a few days ago that HomeAway purchased BedandBreakfast.com, as well as their other companies RezOvation and Webervations.  Click here to read the press release, and you can read Eric Goldreyer’s post on our forum (as well as some responses) by clicking here.  If you want to read Trent Blizzard’s (internet marketing expert who works in both the B&B and vacation rental industries) reaction, click here.  My two cents?  First, I’m very happy for Eric.  He poured his heart and soul into ELG Hospitality and all its programs and services – what resulted was a highly successful operation.  There were bumps along the way and he could always count on a wide spectrum of reactions from innkeepers about their products and terms, but it’s hard to deny that he helped innkeepers move into the 21^st century and brought them plenty of business.  No company has generated more PR for our industry.  Every company that goes through a major change like this will announce that things will still be great, even with the new owners.  For some it’s true, and for others things can change dramatically.  HomeAway prides itself on marketing alternatives to the typical hotel stay, which aligns nicely with what the B&B industry likes to portray.  I think the best case scenario will be if the new ownership gives the old staff in Austin, TX and Logan, OH, all the latitude they need to stay highly involved in the B&B industry.  The people at BedandBreakfast.com care a great deal about the industry, so I hope HomeAway allows the leadership at BedandBreakfast.com to maintain a great deal of control and authority.  But HomeAway can leverage their much-greater resources to bring fantastic amounts of attention to our product and industry, and I hope they do this.  HomeAway, after all, was one of the few companies that ran a commercial during the recent Superbowl.  In addition, I’ll bet there are forms of technology, business practices and other aspects of running a successful business that HomeAway will share with BedandBreakfast.com to keep them on the path of continual improvement.

2011 Innkeeping Show Dates and Location

Mark your calendars for January 11-14, 2011 for a trip to Charleston, SC for next year’s Innkeeping Conference & Trade Show!  After some extensive research about innkeepers’ preferences on the best times to get away for a trip to “innkeeping’s main event,” and preferred locations to visit, we landed on January in South Carolina at the Charleston Area Convention Center.  We realize there is no perfect time or location for all innkeepers (a few innkeepers near ski resorts aren’t too happy about the move in dates), but please know we did a lot of homework to figure this out.  Thank you to all the innkeepers and the Committee of 100 for participating in our surveys last year.  We negotiated very good room rates at adjoining hotels ($119 per night, which includes breakfast and internet) and we’re going to take a hard look at how we can bring down the costs of attending.  Stay tuned!

2009 Year-End Performance Survey

Now that we’re about to enter the Spring season of 2010, we hope you’ve wrapped up your 2009 numbers and are ready to share them for the sake of reporting our industry’s performance.  At the end of 2009, we had approximately 800 innkeepers share their year-end data. We’re hoping to beat that number this year and top 1,000 participants!  We have put together a brief, online survey at www.innkeepingsurvey.com that asks for data such as occupancy, average daily rate, revenue/expenses and a few other tidbits of data.  This survey is not nearly as lengthy as the bi-annual Industry Study of Innkeeping Operations and Finance, so it will take you only a fraction of the time to complete.  This is our industry’s one shot at collecting rich information about the performance of B&Bs and inns.  We will share the results with the industry, and we’ll break out data by state where there has been sufficient participation.  Please take a moment and print out your year-end P&L statement from your accounting software and take our survey at www.innkeepingsurvey.com.  Any innkeepers who give data, as well as PAII’s Gold and Platinum members, will have online access anytime to dig into the data and compare your results to aggregate data by state, number of rooms, budget size and other factors.  This is a new feature!

Now is a great time to be an innkeeper and involved in your professional trade association! Not yet a member of PAII?  Join for as low as $89 at www.innkeeping.org.

Onward and upward!

Jay

Every property page has a “Best Deals” box on the right side, in which are likely included sponsored links to various properties in your area.  Prior to the change, the title of the box would have said something like “Best Deals: 1889 WhiteGate Inn,” only to find links to competing properties that are completely unrelated to the 1889 WhiteGate Inn.  It was misleading and felt unfair to the people at the inn who worked hard to develop their business and brand.   I understand that business on the web and within TripAdvisor can buy Pay Per Click advertising using terms that might contain competitors’ names.  For example, if you Google “iPhone,” the first ad you’ll see on the right side is for Blackberry (I can’t imagine what they’re paying for that, by the way).  It would be wrong if the Blackberry ad said, “Best Deals for iPhones” and took you over to the Blackberry page.  That’s sort of what this “Best Deals” box felt like.

The small change TripAdvisor made (thanks to the staff I’ve been working directly with and their CEO), is that the box now says, “Best Deals: Asheville,” in the case of the 1889 WhiteGate Inn in Asheville, NC.  It no longer conspicuously uses the name of the B&B to drive traffic to competing properties.  I believe this results in a better experience for the web site visitor and is much more palatable for innkeepers everywhere.  Thank you, TripAdvisor, for listening and acting!

And, while I had seen these changes in the works while I was at the TripAdvisor offices earlier this month, I see today that BedandBreakfast.com members now have a direct link to their listings on that directory within that “Best Deals” box.  These links to the BedandBreakfast.com listings (while they say “Official Website”, which isn’t totally accurate unless your BedandBreakfast.com listing is your inn’s official website) are a good way to maintain the industry’s competitive  approach to hotels.  Before this addition, you’d most likely only find competing hotels in that “Best Deals” box.  Efforts to keep potential “inngoers” looking at potential inns instead of being baited to hotels are good in my book!

BEFORE:

AFTER: