Bedandbreakfast.com, thus far in 2006, generates about 1.5 unique visitors per day clicking thru to my site, with 1 proven guest.
Like most innkeepers, I object to having ads on my paid-for listing. I asked and was successful in having the adwords removed from it.
I believe I woudl likely get more traffic and guests from the site if I oculd list under my primary market area, Kansas City; however, it's far enough away so I canot even buy a second-city listing there. While my city shows up in the appropriate region, the only way to be featured there is to spend more money in the various additonal status "auctions" at the site.
The first year we listed with this site, our listing cost $199 (I think it was an 'introductory' rate). The next year it cost us $229. This year, if we wanted to renew, it would be $249! This is more than TWICE the cost of our best producer of unique visitors: bbonline.com.
I am not renewing my listing with them. Seems that our click-throughs have gone down since the year before. I don't like that I can't have my Webervations link through them without spending $50 extra PER YEAR. Just for an added link! I am also very wary about them adding reviews. Why would I pay them money to have people posting possibly poor reviews of my property?? And I don't like that they have Google ads on my PAID listing page.
I don't think the innkeeper is the main source of income for this site, and it shows. I feel like my needs and wants are at the bottom of the list. I will spend my money elsewhere this time around.
The owner of this directory has a long history of putting his bottom line way before the needs of the innkeepers and the industry as a whole. We were with them for probably 8 years and the last 3 or so years their productivity dropped off quite a bit. We finally dropped them because they kept going up and up on their prices for less and less actual clickthrus. He also admitted about 5 years ago that the hit data he sent to innkeepers was vastly inflated. He puts your competators Google ads right on your paid site. Unbelievable. His bottom line is supreme. He has been toying with the concept of doing Inn Reviews on his site and has put out some information quoting the legalities of doing these reviews for inns not even on his directory. You can get a sneaky bad review from your competitor pretending to be your guest (ala Trip Advisor), on his site even though you are not a member of his site. He seems to be willing to hurt the innkeepers, so that he can start getting the Trip Advisor type revenues. I think if he does this review thing, he will finally lose the very innkeepers who are the ones bringing people to his site so that he can get the ad revenue. We felt that we owed it to the industry to no longer support his site. We will place our ad dollars with the more ethical directories.
I received 631 unique visits for a one year period ending on 7/31/2006. I am renewing but have noticed a decline in the number of referrals each year. I have the Silver listing. I did not signup for the gift certificate program because of the cost and the redemption policies.
Their site is easy to update and allows me full control over everything. I don't have a need to send emails to their support center to get updates.
The company seems to have become less 'innkeeper friendly' over the last couple of years. They appear to be trying to turn an ad directory site into a B&B travel site. The difference lies in the fact that travel sites don't charge the locations listing (e.g., Expedia, Orbitz, Trip Advisor, etc). Bedandbreakfast.com needs to either be a B&B travel site or and advertising site.
I'd like to address the comments posted here about BBCOM by the anonymous and non-anonymous posters.
It is unfortunate for me to hear anyone say we are unethical. We feel we go out of our way to make sure we make decisions that are fair to our members. A good example is Bill's comment about wanting to be listed in Kansas City. We have spent a tremendous amount of time in determining how to best handle where a property is listed to make sure we were fair to all members and that our solution worked for cosnumers - as it has to work for both. We require innkeepers to list their property where it is physically located. Some innkeepers tried to list where they receive their mail. That is not where guests sleep. We then want to allow innkeepers that are close to a bigger or more well-known area to be able to list their property their as well. As you can imagine, it has to be within a reasonable distance that a consumer would consider it acceptable if they booked a property thinking it was in Kansas City and then got to Kansas City and realized they had an hour drive ahead of them to get to the property. We also have to be fair to the innkeepers in the destinations (kansas City). They purchased a property in a more competitive area, so they probably paid more, they probably have higher taxes, etc. We do not feel it would be fair to then let every innkeeper that was not in Kansas City to list their. Then the innkeeper soutside of the cities would be happy but the innkeepers in the cities would not. We do our best to utilize technology and our understanding of the industry to create fair solutions for our members. That is why we allow a secondary listing if it is within what we feel is a "reasonable" distance. We provide these at half the primary listing price. This prevents every innkeeper from automatically requesting to be listed in a secondary or tertiary city.
We offer other options to innkeepers to feature their property in a location and we do this primarily through auctions - since our supply is limited, that allows the market to set the price. That way we have the space if an innkeeper wants it because anothe rinnkeeper cannot lock it up so we do not have to tell an innkeeper "Sorry, the Featured Property spot for Kansas City is sold out for the next 18 months".
About our prices: The anonymous poster left out a couple of years. Our pricing was $199 for a Silver Membership back in 2002. In 2006 (five years later), the same membership costs $249. That is an annual percentage increase of only 4.6%. We simply do not feel that is excessive.
I think the more imporatant question this innkeeper should be asking is if they are getting a return on their investment. They may not be, but that is what matters. If you can spend $99 a year and get a $2,000 return, that doe snot mean spending $249 and getting a $1,600 return, why would you care that one costs moree than twice as much? It is still clearly a great investment. I wonder if this innkeeper took advantage of our dedicated support team. We have four full time Innkeeper Consultants that you can reach via email or our toll-free # 800 GO-B-AND-B. Their sole job is to help innkeepers maximize the value they get out of their membership. They will walk through an innkeeper's member checklist with them and make sure the innkeeper is using all of the stuff they are paying us for. Most of the time they are not. We feel innkeepers are clearly better off focusing on the top 20% of the guides that drive 80% of their reservations and make sure they are utilizing everything these top guides offer, instead of chasing down these one-off $25-$99 directories that have no traffic and no Google Page Rank.
I found it interesting to hear that our traffic to this innkeeper was down as our traffic overall is up materially. Innkeeper's should look at independent third-party traffic sites like Alexa. While not a perfect science, it is like the Nielsen Ratings and is directionally accurate to give you an idea how much traffic the various B&B directories are getting.
Sorry to hear you do not like the idea of us adding reviews. Consumers clearly want them and are going to go to the sites that have/provide them. We can either embrace the fact and leverage the tools at our disposal to harness them to our advantage, or force cosnumers to leave our site and go to a different site that provides them. Ultimately, if we do not have consumers, we will not have innkeepers. So the way we provide solutions and the leading site to innkeepers, is by making sure we are meeting the needs of consumers. Legitimate reviews will drive reservations to good properties and help us identify the properties that truly make the industry look bad. We think that is a good thing for the industry.
As Bill said, we are happy to remove Google banners from an innkeeper's listing page with us on request. However, having the data to back up our assumptions, we know that these ads take less traffic off of an innkeeper's BBCOM listing than the previous obnoxious ads we use to use. So we truly do not understand why innkeepers are so concerned. Consumers on BBCOM are only a single click away from every innkeepers competitor (our site is a directory - to get to a listing page you first go to the city page - where all of your competitors are listed). The truth is less consumers leave an innkeeper's listing with these nice/clean text banner ads than the obnoxious shoot-the-monkey banners we used to use.
The reason I feel we have been so succesful and grown the number of member inns every month since I bougth the company back from WorldRes 4 years ago, is because we put the needs of innkeepers and the industry at the front of what we do. if you think about it, if we do not meet innkeeper's needs, we are out of business. It's that simple. We are not aware of anyone else in the industry that has promoted the industry like we have and ocntinue to do. We invest in leading technology for our members and often lead th eindustry with the latest products and services. We attend more regional, state and national association conferences to educate innkeepers by far than any pther company. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on public relations over the last few years to get exposure for the industry, our site and our members - including coverage in the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, and national tv on the CBS Early Show, MSNBC and CNN).
I find it hard to say we are not doing more than anyone to promote this industry.
Yes, we did find an error in the way we were reporting innkeeper traffic. We immediately fixed the problem and notified all of our member innkeepers. I am not sure what else someone would be expected to do in such a situation but fix it and inform folks. Just to be clear, a part of the reaosn for this problem is that we were (and continue to be) one of the only directories that provides innkeepers with 24X7 real-time access to their stats on our site.
Again, I don't want reviews so i can have revenues like TripAdvisor. I want them so I meet the consumers needs to they don't leave BBCOM and go to TripAdvisor and find some other lodging option that adapts to the consumers needs better than we do. We feel it is our job to keep the consumers on BBCOM for our members.
I am sorry to hear someone say they feel we are less 'innkeeper friendly'. Yes, we are adidng B&B travel site functionality to BBCOM. That is what consumers want. Again, if we do not meet consumers needs, we cannot meet innkeeper's needs. We have spent a lot of time an dmoney to bring the best solution to the industry instead of selling somoeone else's hotel solution. So we built a real-time booking engine to allow innkeepers to leverage this rapidly growing trend of online bookings, and consumers to do an actual search for a specific date for a geographic area versus forcing them to click-through to each and every innkeeper's home page and find the booking page and repeat the same request. And you are right, the OTA's (Online Travel Agencies) like Expedia, Orbitz, etc. do not charge a listing fee - because you cannot be on their site unless you do reservations - period. So in their world you either do online reservations or you are off the site. We feel we are doing a good job of meeting the needs of consumers and innkeepers, which is why our traffic and number of innkeeper members has never been higher.
We will continue to lead the way in promoting the industry and bringing the new technologies ot innkeepers. Please feel free to call us with any questions you may have.
I enyoyed reading the above commments. I am a member and the results have been poor to say the least. I will not renew and put my money with the other directories. Also the pricing on selling an in was not competive
I think Eric has figured out why innkeepers don't want reviews on their site: You can't effectively respond to negative criticism. ;-)
My experience with bbcom has not been particularly positive, either. We're in Lancaster County -- a very popular area -- but bbcom points traffic to Lancaster city. As a result, half of the B&Bs in the county have taken out a secondary listing in the city. So if guests are looking to stay in the county, they only see those B&Bs listed in the city, and if customers are looking to stay in the city, they see a lot of B&Bs that are in the county. When I pointed this out to a support rep at bbcom, I got back a fairly hostile email that this was "fair" and they didn't see what the problem was.
I just signed up for their online booking because I had to if I wanted better placement on Expedia/Hotels.com. Since bbcom refuses to work with Webervations, I have to keep two calendars updated, which is a real pain. We just had a double-booking -- two people reserved the same room on the same day, before we could sync the calendars -- and we had to call one and deal with that. Not fun.
That said, I've had 22 click-thrus in the past couple of days from bbcom, compared to 5 from bbonline. I do think they try more than other directories, but some of their efforts are pretty misguided (inns.com comes to mind).
Also, thanks for the heads-up on the Google ads! Since I use Firefox with ad blocking, I never see this stuff! (I did wonder why there was a chunk of whitespace at the top of every page, though.) When I turned off the ad blocking, the first ad I saw said "Cheap Bed and Breakfast"! I've asked that the ads be removed, or at least moved to the bottom of the page.
We have advertised on bedandbreakfast.com for the past 5 years. When the site went to a fee for a reservation to be made on their site, we decided not to join this paid reservation program. We have not received any inquiries or reservations in the past year. Our bbonline site with webervations has been very rewarding to us and I highly recommend it. Since we are one of the small B and B's, it is not necessary for us to pay a third part for a reservation. Obviously we will not be renewing.
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9 comments:
Bedandbreakfast.com, thus far in 2006, generates about 1.5 unique visitors per day clicking thru to my site, with 1 proven guest.
Like most innkeepers, I object to having ads on my paid-for listing. I asked and was successful in having the adwords removed from it.
I believe I woudl likely get more traffic and guests from the site if I oculd list under my primary market area, Kansas City; however, it's far enough away so I canot even buy a second-city listing there. While my city shows up in the appropriate region, the only way to be featured there is to spend more money in the various additonal status "auctions" at the site.
Bill
Cottage on the Knoll at Cedarcroft Farm Bed and Breakfast
INNSTAR Bed & Breakfast Dorectory Reviews
The first year we listed with this site, our listing cost $199 (I think it was an 'introductory' rate). The next year it cost us $229. This year, if we wanted to renew, it would be $249! This is more than TWICE the cost of our best producer of unique visitors: bbonline.com.
I am not renewing my listing with them. Seems that our click-throughs have gone down since the year before. I don't like that I can't have my Webervations link through them without spending $50 extra PER YEAR. Just for an added link! I am also very wary about them adding reviews. Why would I pay them money to have people posting possibly poor reviews of my property?? And I don't like that they have Google ads on my PAID listing page.
I don't think the innkeeper is the main source of income for this site, and it shows. I feel like my needs and wants are at the bottom of the list. I will spend my money elsewhere this time around.
The owner of this directory has a long history of putting his bottom line way before the needs of the innkeepers and the industry as a whole. We were with them for probably 8 years and the last 3 or so years their productivity dropped off quite a bit. We finally dropped them because they kept going up and up on their prices for less and less actual clickthrus. He also admitted about 5 years ago that the hit data he sent to innkeepers was vastly inflated. He puts your competators Google ads right on your paid site. Unbelievable. His bottom line is supreme. He has been toying with the concept of doing Inn Reviews on his site and has put out some information quoting the legalities of doing these reviews for inns not even on his directory. You can get a sneaky bad review from your competitor pretending to be your guest (ala Trip Advisor), on his site even though you are not a member of his site. He seems to be willing to hurt the innkeepers, so that he can start getting the Trip Advisor type revenues. I think if he does this review thing, he will finally lose the very innkeepers who are the ones bringing people to his site so that he can get the ad revenue. We felt that we owed it to the industry to no longer support his site. We will place our ad dollars with the more ethical directories.
I received 631 unique visits for a one year period ending on 7/31/2006. I am renewing but have noticed a decline in the number of referrals each year. I have the Silver listing. I did not signup for the gift certificate program because of the cost and the redemption policies.
Their site is easy to update and allows me full control over everything. I don't have a need to send emails to their support center to get updates.
The company seems to have become less 'innkeeper friendly' over the last couple of years. They appear to be trying to turn an ad directory site into a B&B travel site. The difference lies in the fact that travel sites don't charge the locations listing (e.g., Expedia, Orbitz, Trip Advisor, etc). Bedandbreakfast.com needs to either be a B&B travel site or and advertising site.
Hello,
I'd like to address the comments posted here about BBCOM by the anonymous and non-anonymous posters.
It is unfortunate for me to hear anyone say we are unethical. We feel we go out of our way to make sure we make decisions that are fair to our members. A good example is Bill's comment about wanting to be listed in Kansas City. We have spent a tremendous amount of time in determining how to best handle where a property is listed to make sure we were fair to all members and that our solution worked for cosnumers - as it has to work for both. We require innkeepers to list their property where it is physically located. Some innkeepers tried to list where they receive their mail. That is not where guests sleep. We then want to allow innkeepers that are close to a bigger or more well-known area to be able to list their property their as well. As you can imagine, it has to be within a reasonable distance that a consumer would consider it acceptable if they booked a property thinking it was in Kansas City and then got to Kansas City and realized they had an hour drive ahead of them to get to the property. We also have to be fair to the innkeepers in the destinations (kansas City). They purchased a property in a more competitive area, so they probably paid more, they probably have higher taxes, etc. We do not feel it would be fair to then let every innkeeper that was not in Kansas City to list their. Then the innkeeper soutside of the cities would be happy but the innkeepers in the cities would not. We do our best to utilize technology and our understanding of the industry to create fair solutions for our members. That is why we allow a secondary listing if it is within what we feel is a "reasonable" distance. We provide these at half the primary listing price. This prevents every innkeeper from automatically requesting to be listed in a secondary or tertiary city.
We offer other options to innkeepers to feature their property in a location and we do this primarily through auctions - since our supply is limited, that allows the market to set the price. That way we have the space if an innkeeper wants it because anothe rinnkeeper cannot lock it up so we do not have to tell an innkeeper "Sorry, the Featured Property spot for Kansas City is sold out for the next 18 months".
About our prices: The anonymous poster left out a couple of years. Our pricing was $199 for a Silver Membership back in 2002. In 2006 (five years later), the same membership costs $249. That is an annual percentage increase of only 4.6%. We simply do not feel that is excessive.
I think the more imporatant question this innkeeper should be asking is if they are getting a return on their investment. They may not be, but that is what matters. If you can spend $99 a year and get a $2,000 return, that doe snot mean spending $249 and getting a $1,600 return, why would you care that one costs moree than twice as much? It is still clearly a great investment. I wonder if this innkeeper took advantage of our dedicated support team. We have four full time Innkeeper Consultants that you can reach via email or our toll-free # 800 GO-B-AND-B. Their sole job is to help innkeepers maximize the value they get out of their membership. They will walk through an innkeeper's member checklist with them and make sure the innkeeper is using all of the stuff they are paying us for. Most of the time they are not. We feel innkeepers are clearly better off focusing on the top 20% of the guides that drive 80% of their reservations and make sure they are utilizing everything these top guides offer, instead of chasing down these one-off $25-$99 directories that have no traffic and no Google Page Rank.
I found it interesting to hear that our traffic to this innkeeper was down as our traffic overall is up materially. Innkeeper's should look at independent third-party traffic sites like Alexa. While not a perfect science, it is like the Nielsen Ratings and is directionally accurate to give you an idea how much traffic the various B&B directories are getting.
Sorry to hear you do not like the idea of us adding reviews. Consumers clearly want them and are going to go to the sites that have/provide them. We can either embrace the fact and leverage the tools at our disposal to harness them to our advantage, or force cosnumers to leave our site and go to a different site that provides them. Ultimately, if we do not have consumers, we will not have innkeepers. So the way we provide solutions and the leading site to innkeepers, is by making sure we are meeting the needs of consumers. Legitimate reviews will drive reservations to good properties and help us identify the properties that truly make the industry look bad. We think that is a good thing for the industry.
As Bill said, we are happy to remove Google banners from an innkeeper's listing page with us on request. However, having the data to back up our assumptions, we know that these ads take less traffic off of an innkeeper's BBCOM listing than the previous obnoxious ads we use to use. So we truly do not understand why innkeepers are so concerned. Consumers on BBCOM are only a single click away from every innkeepers competitor (our site is a directory - to get to a listing page you first go to the city page - where all of your competitors are listed). The truth is less consumers leave an innkeeper's listing with these nice/clean text banner ads than the obnoxious shoot-the-monkey banners we used to use.
The reason I feel we have been so succesful and grown the number of member inns every month since I bougth the company back from WorldRes 4 years ago, is because we put the needs of innkeepers and the industry at the front of what we do. if you think about it, if we do not meet innkeeper's needs, we are out of business. It's that simple. We are not aware of anyone else in the industry that has promoted the industry like we have and ocntinue to do. We invest in leading technology for our members and often lead th eindustry with the latest products and services. We attend more regional, state and national association conferences to educate innkeepers by far than any pther company. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on public relations over the last few years to get exposure for the industry, our site and our members - including coverage in the USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, and national tv on the CBS Early Show, MSNBC and CNN).
I find it hard to say we are not doing more than anyone to promote this industry.
Yes, we did find an error in the way we were reporting innkeeper traffic. We immediately fixed the problem and notified all of our member innkeepers. I am not sure what else someone would be expected to do in such a situation but fix it and inform folks. Just to be clear, a part of the reaosn for this problem is that we were (and continue to be) one of the only directories that provides innkeepers with 24X7 real-time access to their stats on our site.
Again, I don't want reviews so i can have revenues like TripAdvisor. I want them so I meet the consumers needs to they don't leave BBCOM and go to TripAdvisor and find some other lodging option that adapts to the consumers needs better than we do. We feel it is our job to keep the consumers on BBCOM for our members.
I am sorry to hear someone say they feel we are less 'innkeeper friendly'. Yes, we are adidng B&B travel site functionality to BBCOM. That is what consumers want. Again, if we do not meet consumers needs, we cannot meet innkeeper's needs. We have spent a lot of time an dmoney to bring the best solution to the industry instead of selling somoeone else's hotel solution. So we built a real-time booking engine to allow innkeepers to leverage this rapidly growing trend of online bookings, and consumers to do an actual search for a specific date for a geographic area versus forcing them to click-through to each and every innkeeper's home page and find the booking page and repeat the same request. And you are right, the OTA's (Online Travel Agencies) like Expedia, Orbitz, etc. do not charge a listing fee - because you cannot be on their site unless you do reservations - period. So in their world you either do online reservations or you are off the site. We feel we are doing a good job of meeting the needs of consumers and innkeepers, which is why our traffic and number of innkeeper members has never been higher.
We will continue to lead the way in promoting the industry and bringing the new technologies ot innkeepers. Please feel free to call us with any questions you may have.
Sincerely,
Eric Goldreyer
CEO
BedandBreakfast.com
This last essay is tooo long to
read. Have'nt the time to indulge.
I enyoyed reading the above commments.
I am a member and the results have been poor to say the least. I will not renew and put my money with the other directories. Also the pricing on selling an in was not competive
I think Eric has figured out why innkeepers don't want reviews on their site: You can't effectively respond to negative criticism. ;-)
My experience with bbcom has not been particularly positive, either. We're in Lancaster County -- a very popular area -- but bbcom points traffic to Lancaster city. As a result, half of the B&Bs in the county have taken out a secondary listing in the city. So if guests are looking to stay in the county, they only see those B&Bs listed in the city, and if customers are looking to stay in the city, they see a lot of B&Bs that are in the county. When I pointed this out to a support rep at bbcom, I got back a fairly hostile email that this was "fair" and they didn't see what the problem was.
I just signed up for their online booking because I had to if I wanted better placement on Expedia/Hotels.com. Since bbcom refuses to work with Webervations, I have to keep two calendars updated, which is a real pain. We just had a double-booking -- two people reserved the same room on the same day, before we could sync the calendars -- and we had to call one and deal with that. Not fun.
That said, I've had 22 click-thrus in the past couple of days from bbcom, compared to 5 from bbonline. I do think they try more than other directories, but some of their efforts are pretty misguided (inns.com comes to mind).
Also, thanks for the heads-up on the Google ads! Since I use Firefox with ad blocking, I never see this stuff! (I did wonder why there was a chunk of whitespace at the top of every page, though.) When I turned off the ad blocking, the first ad I saw said "Cheap Bed and Breakfast"! I've asked that the ads be removed, or at least moved to the bottom of the page.
We have advertised on bedandbreakfast.com for the past 5 years. When the site went to a fee for a reservation to be made on their site, we decided not to join this paid reservation program. We have not received any inquiries or reservations in the past year. Our bbonline site with webervations has been very rewarding to us and I highly recommend it. Since we are one of the small B and B's, it is not necessary for us to pay a third part for a reservation. Obviously we will not be renewing.
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