Closing the circle in this series on the process guests use to book lodging properties is what WIHP Hotel Marketing calls the Second Moment of Truth – the arrival of the guest at your property. We have already discussed the four-step booking decision process, how the guest becomes aware of your property (the Discovery or Stimulus step), how guests make the decision to visit your website (the Zero Moment of Truth), and the process of deciding to book with your property (the First Moment of Truth). In this article we consider the guest at your property (and beyond).

Ready to share?

How do you get word of mouth recommendations that will bring more guests?

If review sites and social sharing are the sources of discovery, then we definitely want our guests to have a positive experience, and to share that experience. How do we go about doing that?

1. The Positive Experience

People usually have a good experience when it meets or exceeds their expectations. Conversely, when the experience falls short of their expectations, it isn’t usually a good experience.

How are expectations set for prospective guests? Proceeding through the booking process we’ve been discussing, some expectation is created by the initial recommendations or reviews. These are refined further by the visit to your website and booking process. The Second Moment of Truth is when the guest arrives at your property and learns whether or not those expectations will be met.

What can you do to set expectations?

You can not do much to affect the word of mouth recommendations, but you can affect online reviews. You can respond to the reviews to

• thank guests for positive comments,
• clarify any misunderstandings, or
• explain (and show sensitivity to) any problems.

Photos have the most impact, both because they tell the story most completely, and because they can be viewed quickly. On your website you can set expectations by making sure the photos accurately show what the guest should expect. Naturally we all want to show our property to best advantage, and to use the best photographs we can in order to do so. However, if your rooms are on the small side, and you use and extreme wide-angle lens to make them look a bit larger, you are setting the expectation that the guest will have a larger room than you are actually providing. This is a recipe for the guest to be disappointed.

Make sure the website information is current. If you no longer provide an amenity, make sure your website doesn’t say you have it. If you’re close to an area attraction, certainly say so. If you’re not too close, don’t pretend you are!

Make sure your service exceeds expectations, wherever possible. You already know how to do that! There is no substitute for a guest who checks out saying, “You’ve thought of everything!”

2. Getting the recommendation

Ask for it! If you send a follow-up email, be sure to include a gentle request for a review on TripAdvisor (or any other site you feel is appropriate). Don’t be rude, or hit the guest over the head with it. Please don’t try to make them feel guilty (“If you don’t review us, we’ll go out of business”), but do ask, and ask nicely.

Let people know about your presence on the networks they are on (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Goole+, or whatever). Ask them to follow you. Ask them to recommend you. That said, don’t forget to check the rules of the review sites you request guests to use – some discourage asking for reviews, and even penalize you for rewarding positive reviews.

Not only do their recommendations reach their friends (who may remember to check them again when they plan their next trip), but they also will appear in searches for a long time to come. One of the aspects of posting things on the web, for better or for worse, is that you have no control over how long they remain available on a site operated by someone other than you.

Going around again

The cycle has the excellent potential of repeating itself. Potential guests discover your property through reviews, social media and word of mouth. They investigate further with search engines, reviews and maps. Once they have the basics, they visit your website, where your excellent site quickly convinces them to book. Once at your property, the experience is so good that they can’t wait to share it with their friends, family, and other connections. Those people learn of your property, and the cycle begins again.

By having a good presence on social media (the platforms where your target demographic(s) are found, of course) and on review sites, encourages discovery of your property. Good search engine, local, maps and review presence encourages the investigating guest to dig deeper and visit your website. A site that shows the guest the three things they are looking for (value, location and comfort) encourages them to book. And a great experience (supported by a website that has accurately presented your property – especially in the areas of value, location and comfort), encourages the guest to share that experience with the next potential guest.

This is the fourth article in a series examining how B&B guests proceed through the decision process for booking a stay. Based largely on research from WIHP Hotel Marketing, the first article describes the four-step process for booking, the second describes how a guest discovers your property, and the third examines how to provide information to get the guest to your website. This article discusses how to get the conversion – to capture the booking – once the guest has come to your site.

What is the purpose of your website? Have you ever given that some thought? Is it to (a) show off your beautiful property, (b) get people to call you for more information, (c) get people to call to book, (d) get people to book online, or (e) other? For most lodging properties, we would venture to say that the primary purpose is to get people to book online, and, secondarily, to call to book. Is it doing those things well?

The Guest Arrives at Your Website

Our guest has decided where they want to go for their getaway, they have discovered your property (and, probably, up to 10 others), they have done some initial research and learned a little about your property, and have now arrived at your website. WIHP calls this the First Moment of Truth.

What happens in the next few seconds will determine whether you get the booking or not.

What is the Guest Looking For?

Again, WIHP’s research indicates that the prospective guest is looking for three things:

• Value
• Location
• Comfort

They also found two other things that are very important: Quality websites sell better, and better booking engine design results in more bookings.

How should your website be designed?

A search on “web design mistakes” will yield many articles on poor choices in website design. Some even contradict each other. As mentioned in our previous post, Acorn Internet Services has prepared a series of checklists, accompanying their Smarter Innkeeper Series, to assist with selecting a web design company and/or SEO firm. The first article in that series includes a checklist to ask your prospective web developer, and makes a good list of things you should be planning to address with your website.

There are lots of examples across the internet of websites that are attractive and effective. For some examples, view the portfolios of design firms in our industry, such as Acorn Internet Services, Whitestone Marketing, or Insideout Solutions. While you probably don’t want your site to look just like another site, you’ll notice some similar elements on each site designed by these professionals. Large, high quality photos of the property, the rooms (comfort) and of the food (and other amenities, if appropriate). Clear, straightforward, navigation. Clear statements of rates and what you are getting for them (value). Clear descriptions of location and nearby attractions or points of interest.

If your website looks less “polished” than the competition (who may not be your neighbor, but in another location, entirely), you are not encouraging your visitor to book. If you aren’t showing them the things they are looking for (value, location and comfort), you are making it harder for them to find the information they are seeking.

Finally, if your booking engine makes it difficult to see what they want, and to easily and conveniently proceed through the booking process, you are making it less likely that they will complete the booking process (you can validate this using Google Analytics and checking to see where the visitor leaves the booking system, but that is a topic for another post).

What should your website do?

The guest has chosen about 10 properties to consider, and will visit the websites of all of them. Each will have 3-7 seconds to answer their questions. The questions will primarily be (1) is this property a good value? (2) is this property well-located for my planned activities? and (3) is this going to provide a desirable level of comfort?

There may be other questions in the mind of an individual guest, but virtually all prospective guests will be asking these three questions. Consequently, your website must answer them, and answer them quickly.

1. Your design must look professional and current (the portfolios of the industry web design firms listed above will show you what is both professional and current).
2. Your site must load very quickly (this is a priority for Google, and the slower it loads, the less time a guest will wait to see if you answer their questions).
3. Your photos must be professional, beautiful, and must show the comfort and the value the guest will find at your property.
4. Your rates must be prominently displayed, so the guest can easily see the value you are providing.
5. Your location – especially your proximity to the most commonly visited attractions and points of interest – must be easy to find.

If your site answers these questions for the guest, and does it quickly, and if your booking engine makes the booking process clean, simple and easy (including on mobile devices!), you will be capturing the booking you are seeking.

Our first post in this series provided an overview of how guests find and book a lodging property, based on research from WIHP, a hotel marketing agency. The four step process assumes the future guest has selected a destination area and then proceeds through the steps of (1) discovery of a particular property, (2) seeking information about the property to see if it is a good prospect (the zero moment of truth), (3) the guest on your website (the first moment of truth), and (4) the guest at your property (the second moment of truth). Our second post discussed the process by which a guest “discovers” (or learns of) your property as a possible place to stay.

Our topic today, then, is the “Zero Moment of Truth,” or the time when the guest has decided on a location to visit, has learned of your property as a possible place to stay, but has not yet seen your website, and wants to find out more about your property.

Another 7.3% seek information from a review site (such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, etc.). After that the numbers fall off radically for travel guides (3%) and social media sites (0.8%). Just a side note – if you’re counting on your social media sites (Facebook, Google Plus, etc.) to provide the information, at the current time you’re reaching less than 1% of those who want to find you.

We would ordinarily expect Google to be the most commonly used search engine, so we won’t be surprised to find that it is. Although many articles remind us not to forget Yahoo, Bing, and others, and other articles talk about Google losing market share at the expense of Bing, in particular, these statistics don’t match up with the results of WIHP’s research. They found that 89.8% of searches leading to a property’s website came from Google, while Yahoo and Bing brought 4% and 3.6%, respectively.

Before booking, the average guest will have viewed 10 different hotel websites over 6 days, and will have visited the one they ultimately choose at least 3-4 times. This is where your competition truly exists. Your goal, at this point, is to be one of the sites (perhaps the top site) the guest will consider, and to get them to visit your website.

We talked about how to help yourself be found on TripAdvisor in our previous post, and much the same advice would apply to other review sites (though no others provide the exposure in the lodging market that TripAdvisor does). Consequently, our focus here should be on search engines – particularly Google – and map sites.

How do guests find information through search engines?

Try it yourself. What search terms would a guest, knowing the location and the name of your inn, use to search? If you’re having trouble, pick a place you’d like to travel, find the name of a property there, and try to find out more about the property using your favorite search engine. Then use those search terms for your own property and location.

What do you see in the results? In the case of our Freeport Maine bed and breakfast (while signed in to Google, which may affect the results), I see our website, then our TripAdvisor reviews, then a couple of B&B directories, a news article we are mentioned in, etc. Verify these results while logged out of Google. They may also differ by your location, so you may want to have someone repeat the search using a different location.

One thing you’ll see in all (or nearly all) the search results is a description of the page the result will link to. Although Google, at least, reserves the right to re-write the description, you can “help” by putting a well-written description META tag in the head section of a page. If your description provides an accurate summary of the content of the page, it may well be the description that is used in the search results.

Bear in mind that just because your own website is the first result in the search results, that does not necessarily mean your guests will click on it first! They may choose one of the B&B directories, TripAdvisor, or something else. Our goal is to provide information for our future guests in all of these sources, so they’ll find it regardless of where they look.

Getting found on search engines (search engine optimization or SEO) is a topic that would make an extensive series in its own right. Fundamentally it breaks down into on-page SEO (signals on the page that help the search engine determine how to index the content), and ongoing SEO efforts (such as building incoming links to your website, dealing with local listings, maps, etc.). We are planning to break out this topic, and part of the next post in this series (on the First Moment of Truth) relating to your website, itself, into a short series of its own. Consequently we’ll just hit some of the high points here. Bear in mind that our brief discussion of SEO is not meant to say it is not important. Just the contrary. It is so important that it deserves a more complete treatment than we can include in this post.

In an excellent series entitled “The Smarter Innkeeper”, Acorn Internet Services has devoted two of the three topics to on-page SEO and ongoing SEO (the third point is on the web design itself, which we cover in our next post). In each post is a checklist of tasks you can perform (or have done for you) to make your website more easily found by the search engines and to make it more likely to be indexed for the relevant search terms. The checklists are written as something you might ask your web designer or SEO firm, to be sure they don’t miss anything, but they will do very nicely as a list of the tasks you should plan to perform, as well.

Both of the two SEO checklists make reference to creating and maintaining local listings. In addition to any local listings sites, such as Chambers of Commerce, innkeeping associations, area marketing groups, etc., the search engines have their own local listings pages. Properly setting up and maintaining these pages will help you be found – especially on the mapping websites.

What about maps?

If you have followed the steps on the SEO checklists, and your local setup is correct, you do want to be sure your location is correctly specified on mapping sites. Most will allow you to claim your listing (you did that long ago, didn’t you?), then to edit the location if it is not correct. Again, most will allow you to specify business name, phone, website URL, etc., as well as other details, much as the local sites will. Keep in mind that the search engines have a specific format for business names, addresses and telephone numbers, so you want to follow those formats and keep the information the same from place to place. If the information is not identical (for example, saying “B&B” in one location and “Bed and Breakfast” in another), you run the risk that a search engine (which is only a computer, after all) will think they are two different businesses.

When your guest searches on a map, it is likely that they want to know how close (meaning how convenient) you are to a particular location. To help them out, tell them how close you are to various attractions. There is no substitute for making it easy for the guest to find the information they are seeking!

If we’ve done all these things, we’ve made it easy for the prospective guest to learn more about our property before they come to our website. In fact, if we’ve done our job well, we have whetted their appetite to see our website! We’ll talk about what happens on the website in our next post.

In our previous post we introduced the four step process (identified by WIHP a hotel marketing firm) of a guest finding, and staying at, a lodging property, then feeding the beginning of the cycle again by telling others. In this, and the next few posts, we will break down the components and see how you can more effectively help future guests find you.

As a refresher, the four steps are

1. Discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested)
2. Zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel)
3. First moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and
4. Second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed – which will sometimes result in that reaction being shared)

We’re going to focus on the first topic in this article: How does a prospective guest discover your lodging property?

The semi-automatic reaction in today’s world would be that, of course, a prospective guest learns about your property through a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, or others). That is not what the data indicates. The results of WIHP’s inquiries indicate that the guests are most likely to learn about a lodging property from friends or family, an online travel site, or TripAdvisor. Specifically, their statistics indicate that nearly one-third of people who learn about a property discover it from friends or family (32.7%), followed by roughly a quarter who discover it from Online Travel Agents (OTA’s – 27.9%) and TripAdvisor (23.1%). Other sources have far smaller influence (see the infographic on WIHP’s site).

If you think about how you would find lodging for your getaway, this makes a good deal of sense. Most of us, I suspect, would decide first on the destination (“I want to go to Maine” or “I want to go to France”), not on the lodging property. Only after the destination has been selected (at least tentatively selected), and we’ve checked to see that there are things we want to do or see there, do we move on to the details of making the travel arrangements.

This indicates that, whether based on recommendations of friends and family, or other sources, the destination is selected first, then the accommodations. Why is that important? It greatly affects two things: (1) they type of search people make to find your property (more on that topic in our next article), and (2) the specific information your website should contain (for example, if you have relevant information on activities in your area, your site may come up during the search for information about the area).

With this in mind, how can we increase the likelihood that prospective guests will find us? Let’s look at the three ways they tend to locate a property, and see where we can make it easier for them to find us.

1. Friends and Family

Family is, well, family. But the definition of who is a friend, and the way we make/find friends today, has changed significantly with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google+ and many other platforms. A few years ago friends were people we knew in our neighborhood, or met at work or within other social settings. Today we add to that our online friends, whether or not we have ever met in person or spoken by phone. Our network of friends is many times larger, and far more widespread, than ever before.

So the question becomes, how do those family and far-flung friends learn of our property, so they can recommend it to our prospective guests? Perhaps they have stayed at our property in the past, and have shared their impressions with friends and family. To the extent they haven’t stayed with us, in most cases they have heard about our property from someone who has stayed with us, or is otherwise interested in our property.

How can we improve our reach to these people? We can think of at least a couple of ways.

First, encourage every guest to share their story of how they enjoyed their stay (hopefully this will be positive comments). If they will share with their network of friends and family, offline or online, it has the potential for a huge reach, and will help to reach those prospective guests.

Second, encourage them to submit reviews on one or more review sites. Be a little careful, as some sites (Yelp comes to mind) forbid you to ask for reviews, while others, like TripAdvisor, encourage you to do so. In addition to these well-known review sites, most bed and breakfast directories allow reviews, and reviews can be placed directly on Google and on several of the OTA’s. Even a “Like” on Facebook or a “+1″ on Google will help pass on a favorable impression of your property (and may help with search presence).

2. OTAs and Directories

As mentioned in our earlier article, we think that, for the bed & breakfast or small lodging property, online directories should be included with OTAs as a source of discovery. How can you use these tools to help your prospective guests find you? In this case it should be somewhat evident, but here are our thoughts:

• Be sure you are listed on the directories which place well in search results for your area. Most directories show up well in most areas, but some are better than others in specific areas. Go to Google, Bing and Yahoo and search for lodging in your area. Try “bed and breakfast your area”, “your area bed and breakfast”, the same substituting “b&b” for bed and breakfast, do it with and without the “&”, and substitute “lodging” and “hotel”. See what directories appear on the first page of the results (even if it is their listing for a competitor). Be sure you’re on those directories.
• If you’re not already, consider getting on the OTA’s. Bookings through them come at a high price (commission), but the exposure you get may be worth it. You can negotiate a specific arrangement with a Global Distribution System (GDS) provider, or work through some booking system providers, like ResNexus or RezOvation. Tnooz publishes daily reports on which travel sites have the highest market share in different markets. Choose OTA’s with strong penetration in your target markets.

3. TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor has its own way of doing things, and many innkeepers are not happy working with them. Regardless of your views of their system, TripAdvisor is a fact of the innkeeping life today. The best thing to do is to try to work with their system, to help your prospective guests find your property.

First of all, be sure to set up your property information in the TripAdvisor Management Center. You don’t have to like the way it works (we aren’t particularly fond of it) to use it. Make sure your information is current and correct – especially your contact information. As an aside, be sure your business name, address and telephone number are set out exactly as they are in your Google Place Page.

By default, TripAdvisor includes basic information on your property, but no link to your website, and no phone number. To help prospective guests find you, our second suggestion is to consider getting a Business Listing (paid), which will result in TripAdvisor displaying your telephone number and a link to your website. This is especially valuable to the mobile user, who can just click the phone number to call you.

While innkeepers of smaller properties are sometimes reluctant to spend the money it would require for a TripAdvisor business listing, and for the commissions on OTA sites, or even for some of the directories, if the objective is to increase visibility and therefore help your prospective guests find you (and through that process increase your occupancy), these are the areas where the prospective guest is looking, so they are also the areas most likely to produce results.

A few of you may have noticed that we seem to have taken a bit of a hiatus over the past several weeks. In fact, our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast had a very busy summer, and there wasn’t much time for About the Inn writing. Now that our busy summer and fall foliage seasons are behind us, it appears things will be back on a more even keel, and we hope to be able to publish more regularly.

How do you attract B&B guests? In the past several years, most smaller lodging properties have become aware of the importance of attracting guests through an online presence (oddly, though, some still seem to question the need – or maybe they question the long-term viability – of an internet presence). Gone, or nearly gone, are the days of buying print or television ads in huge volume, in hopes that a few visitors will be enticed to become guests.

For the smaller properties, in particular, this is a good thing, as few can afford the high prices charged for print advertising, let alone the several additional orders of magnitude for television campaigns – all for ads for which there is little hope of tracking their success, and for which industry analysts say the return on investment (ROI) is very small indeed.

So, then, all a small business needs to do is find a way to slap up a small website, and all the marketing is done, right? Unfortunately, many small properties seem to have adopted exactly that strategy, and are beginning to pay the price in reduced occupancy.

Print media (with the exception, to some degree, of direct mail), and for that matter television, tries to sell by sending an uninvited message to a large, but generally arbitrary, audience. The primary reason online marketing is more effective, is because the prospective guest is looking for you. They are, by definition, part of your target market. They are seeking exactly what you are offering: some type of lodging for a temporary purpose.

How do you reach the prospective guest?

It seems like an over simplification, but in order to get the prospective guest, seeking lodging like yours, to connect with your property and make a booking, you need to be found where they are looking. Which means that you need to know where they are looking, and be found there.

Where are they looking?

We usually begin by assuming that the guest has decided to come to your area, and needs to find lodging. This is because there are many, many different ways the prospective guest may decide to come to a region. However, you can play a role in this, by getting information about the area in front of the guest – either by more traditional means such as print or television, or by having that type of information on your web site.

Once the decision is made to come to an area, the question of lodging must arise.

According to WIHP, a hotel marketing firm, there are four distinct steps in the process of deciding on a lodging property: discovery or stimulus (where the guest learns of a hotel and gets interested), zero moment of truth (the guest begins to research the hotel), first moment of truth (guest finds the hotel website and begins to determine if this is what they want), and second moment of truth (guest arrives at the property and is either happy or disappointed). There is little doubt that these steps apply more or less exactly for smaller properties, as well.

Let’s look a bit more closely at these four steps:

1. Discovery or Stimulus

How does the prospective guest find out about a lodging property they may want to consider? WIHP’s data indicates that the most likely source of information is friends or family, followed by online travel agents (known as OTAs, including Expedia, Travelocity, Priceline, Booking.com, and the like), then TripAdvisor, and then, to a much lesser degree, other sources like Facebook, Travel Agents, Magazines, etc.

Because we’re interested in the smaller lodging properties, we would suggest that bed and breakfast directories could be included with the OTAs, at least for the guest who is interested in considering bed and breakfast lodging.

2. Zero Moment of Truth

How does the guest research the lodging property he/she is interested in? The data from WIHP indicates that nearly 73% will use search engines to find the hotel. Did you pick up on that? Most of our search engine optimization is around industry-specific keywords, but most of our prospective guests are searching by the name of the hotel!

Of the remaining 27% or so, guests will search map pages (9.6%), review sites (7.3%), travel guides (3.0%) and social media sites (0.8%) to find the lodging property.

3. First Moment of Truth

Once the guest arrives on the property’s website, you have between 3 and 7 seconds to help them decide to stay at the property. The average visitor will have looked at 10 other property websites, read reviews, checked rates, and verified the location on a map.

WIHP says the guest wants to know:

• will this save me money?
• will this save me time?
• will this make my life better?

For the property, this translates to:

• Is this the best value I can get?
• Is this located near the points I am interested in?
• Is the comfort going to live up to my standards?

How your website stacks up in answering these questions for the guest determines whether or not they will book.

4. Second Moment of Truth

When the guest arrives they will either be pleased with their selection of your property, or they will be disappointed. In either case, the results are likely to be posted on social media and review sites, and shared with friends and family. In exceptional cases, they may even appear in blog posts.

When you consider the likelihood of these results, whether positive or negative, being shared with friends and family, as well as the review sites and social media connections, you can see that these results will also become part of the Discovery or Stimulus phase of someone else’s search for lodging property. That makes it imperative that the experience be a positive one.

WIHP has provided a video infographic to illustrate these points clearly and concisely. The YouTube version is below.

In upcoming articles we’ll be looking at the ways we can reach the prospective guest in each of the decision-making phases of the booking process.

Groupon, Living Social, Woot, SmartBargains, Name Your Own Price, Cheap Fares, Last Minute Deals, Bargain Travel, and the list goes on and on. Whether we like it or not, we’re all influenced by things around us, and the loudest voices in marketing at the moment are those screaming “Get [whatever you want] at a discount.”

Giant Value, photo by Jason Schlachet

Value vs. Price?

We came across an article a few days ago that really brought this home. It was an article by a woman telling of her first visit to a B&B. She intended the article to be a glowing commentary on the website that helped her locate the B&B, but the article drew such telling contrasts between her B&B visit and her “bargain” hotel stay the night before, we couldn’t help seeing the difference in value.

Traveling on a tight budget, the woman and her daughter looked for places to stay. The first night was in an inexpensive hotel, the second in a similarly priced bed & breakfast.

While the hotel price fit the budget, it smelled of cigarette smoke, was tiny and “dingy”. When she overslept, the housekeeper awakened her to let her know she had to get out.

Fortunately, the next night was an entirely different experience. The B&B was located much closer to the area the woman wanted, was clean and attractive, and she was greeted by a friendly and courteous host. The list of amenities will sound familiar to B&B owners:

• Free juices and water
• Entertainment system
• Free WiFi
• Cable TV
• DVD collection
• Access to the owner’s iTunes collection
• and, of course, breakfast

The price? A few dollars less than the smoky hotel! Now that is a demonstration of value over price (and in this case, it was even a lower price).

This scenario, with a few local variations, is played out in virtually every location in America, and, no doubt, elsewhere as well. B&B’s usually provide charming accommodations, at a variety of price points, with a long list of included items that are often either unavailable, or only available at an additional charge, at the nearby hotels. Naturally, price can vary greatly, depending on the location, the particular properties involved, amenities provided, etc., but in many cases a B&B provides much, much more, for the same or lower cost than a hotel.

Does discounting work?

Even so, with the drumbeat from the media of “discount, discount, discount” we in the B&B industry are constantly asked to give more, and discount our rates. Despite being priced below local hotels, we feel this constant pressure at our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast. Yet study after study has shown that discounting does not bring in enough additional business to offset the discount. In other words, discounting, by itself, can only result in loss of revenue.

How does that work? The math makes it clear. If we discount a room rate by 10%, in order to make up the lost revenue from the discount, we must increase the number of rooms sold by 11% just to break even. To actually increase revenue we need even more volume. That means you must couple the discount with publicity that will increase occupancy by more than 11% for every 10% of discount given. For most small properties, that publicity isn’t going to happen, because advertising is too expensive for their budget.

More exposure is the best answer

One thing stands in stark contrast between the smoky hotel and the cheerful B&B in our example: the B&B is clearly the “better way to stay.” That should be the emphasis of any publicity or marketing. Thankfully, the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII) and several partners, have created a campaign called “Better Way to Stay“, attempting to bring attention to this fact.

The first campaign from Better Way to Stay, called “B&B’s Kick Gas“, and responding to the sharp increases in gasoline prices, will include a variety of creative ways to spend less on gas, from free gas card giveaways to packages with alternative travel options.

We’re delighted to see such a large effort to promote B&B’s as a better alternative. While we think the sensitivity to gas prices presents an opportunity, the optional “giveaway” part seems a bit too much like discounting for our taste. Fortunately, innkeepers can choose to creatively participate.

When we combine the story of the woman contrasting her irritating hotel stay with her pleasant B&B stay with the study results showing the ineffectiveness of discounting, we think the message is clear: We need to get the word out about the great value offered at a bed & breakfast!

As if you needed another reason to claim your Google Place page, the most compelling reason yet has now appeared. It is ridiculously easy (unless or until Google has fixed it) for a scammer to claim someone else’s Place Page if they have a mailing address in the same town as the business.

Don’t believe me? Mike Blumenthal uncovered the way to do it, and it is quoted in detail at Search Engine Roundtable. Read it yourself, but here’s the essence of it:

Google allows you to verify your business either by phone or by receiving a postcard from Google. In either case, you get a PIN number that you can use to verify that you are the owner.

The scam comes from the difference between the way the US Postal Service interprets the address, and the way Google uses it. In a two line address form, such as

1234 Anystreet Rd, PO Box 8910, Somewhere, TX 87654

where 1234 Anystreet Rd is the physical location and PO Box 8910 is the delivery address, the US Postal Service delivers the mail to the address closest to the zip code. In other words, to the PO Box.

Not so with Google. Google uses the first line of the address to locate the business. So what, you ask? So this: If there is a business with an unclaimed listing (in some areas, this is the majority of the businesses), and if a scammer is in the same general locality, the scammer can claim the business listing by requesting verification by mail, and putting the business address in the first line, and the scammer’s address in the second line. The postcard with the PIN number will be delivered to the scammer’s address, who can then “verify” that they are the business owner.

Naturally, we are NOT recommending that you use this technique to claim place pages other than your own! We are pointing this out as a matter of urgency to encourage you to claim your place page listing NOW.

If you’ve never thought it was important, please reconsider. Even if you only claim it and do nothing else, claim it.

Mike Blumenthal includes the following important quote at the end of his post:

I do not know if this technique is still viable. It was reported to Google approximately two months ago. They have not informed me whether it was patched and I have not tested whether it still works. If you try it for yourself (in the name of science and discovery only!), let me know.

Instead of re-writing the article, we will simply mention and link to the great information provided by our friends at Acorn Internet Services showing a comparison of statistics on bookings from before there were Google Place Pages and currently, and also noting which directories produce bookings. This is obtained from Acorn’s customers who use Acorn’s Intell-A-Keeper tracking software.

We will comment more on this topic before long.

Enjoy this useful information!

Not so many years ago, as the use of the internet technologies was maturing, there was a lot of talk about the leveling of the playing field, allowing the smaller businesses to compete with the larger. You don’t hear so much about that, these days. As businesses of all sizes have turned to internet marketing and social media to build relationships with customers and potential customers, the scales have reverted to the same imbalance as in traditional marketing. Big business as well as small have devoted significant effort to using these technologies, and to finding their way to the top of the search results, especially on Google.

If you’ll indulge me a bit, this scenario seems a little familiar…

For Americans of — ahem — a certain age, there was a science-fiction television series in the late 1960′s that was very popular with teenage boys, called Land of the Giants. I was a few years too old to be interested, but my younger brother was hooked on it. The show involves a group of travelers, marooned on an Earth-like planet, where the inhabitants resemble humans but are 12 times larger than the cast of heroes. Each episode involves the group seeking a way to return to Earth, while avoiding the dangerous giants. Though the giants cause problems, there is always a happy ending, except that the crew never escape.

How does that science-fiction program relate to marketing lodging properties? Or, to borrow from a television commercial, what can a 1960′s sci-fi program teach us about internet technologies? Read on…

The Land of the Giants

For the purpose of this article, the giants are not those who compete directly against us, but those who are ostensibly here to help us. There are a number of these giants. We could consider Google, of course, Microsoft’s Bing, and surely others could be added. In the travel and tourism area we could consider the likes of Expedia, TripAdvisor, and other online travel agencies (OTA’s), as well as some of the larger directories of lodging properties. You get the idea, I’m sure.

All these “giants” (I know, some are much larger than others, but to a small B&B or similar property, all of them are giants) are in business to make money for themselves and for their shareholders. That is perfectly appropriate, and as it should be. However, there is an ethical side to being a giant that some (perhaps most) of these companies seem unwilling to consider.

The Responsibilities of Giants

Nearly all of the “giants” named above have a dual purpose: (1) helping the consumer to find, or to make informed decisions about, or to book, among other things, lodging properties; and (2) helping the lodging properties to be found by interested consumers, or to provide the relevant property information to interested consumers, or to provide booking information to the consumer.

In most areas of business, the decision to provide assistance to others while seeking to make a profit for yourself, carries with it a responsibility to provide that assistance fairly and truthfully, or bear the consequences (legal consequences, civil or even, in some cases, criminal). In other words, you make money offering a useful service, that is good. If you fail to deliver as promised, or if you spread false or inaccurate information, you are responsible for any damage your error causes. To go a step further, if you didn’t know the information was false, you are not usually responsible so long as you correct or retract it when the error is brought to your attention.

Not so for our giants. They seem to do as they please, letting the chips fall where they may, and always hiding behind 5000-7500 words of legal mumbo-jumbo, the essence of which is as if to say, “We’re not responsible for any errors – ours or otherwise” and “By using our site you have agreed to this ridiculous proposition.” If that isn’t enough, they also hide behind legal protections designed to keep a web site provider from being liable for content posted by someone else. However, they use it to shield themselves from ever verifying information, so they can claim they are not responsible for errors, and do not ever need to correct their errors – even when the errors are brought to their attention.

Please understand that we are not saying that the actions of the giants are contrary to the law. We are saying that they are using the law to avoid their moral or ethical obligations to treat their customers fairly and honestly.

Let’s Get Down to Cases

TripAdvisor claims to provide “real hotel reviews you can trust” and “candid reviews.” Most small lodging properties are aware that guests often use TripAdvisor to evaluate their choice of lodging. Consequently, any review, whether positive or negative, can make a big difference to the property.

Mark Stephens, of Brewster Inn in Dexter, Maine describes dealing with TripAdvisor “like going to the dentist, you don’t want to go, but you know you have to.” Like many small lodging properties, the Brewster Inn decided to try TripAdvisor’s new (in 2010) paid business listings, providing a way for the guest to read the TripAdvisor review, and click on a link directly to the property (no such link is provided for properties who do not pay for a business listing).

Brewster Inn’s problems with TripAdvisor fall into two categories. The first is that they have several positive (5 stars, on TripAdvisor) reviews which have vanished. TripAdvisor not only gives no explanation, they respond to inquiries saying that properties who have paid for a business listing do not get any different treatment than free listings. They claim to be unable to disclose the information about why the listing disappeared.

Meanwhile the guest who posted the review was told that TripAdvisor’s automated filters had identified the review as requiring “special attention.” No explanation is given, and although this guest has taken time to reply and verify that it is a real review (it is doubtful that most guests would bother), it appears that TripAdvisor’s efforts “to ensure that the information on our site is unbiased and pure” will prevent this review from being re-published.

The second problem Brewster Inn has found is that a review was published from a guest who never stayed with them. In fact it appears that the review even states that they did not stay (the review is in German, according to an online translation, this appears to be accurate). Stephens posted a management response saying the guest did not stay, and challenged the review. TripAdvisor initially removed the review, but it has reappeared. They have not removed it, despite requests, as the guest refuses to allow it to be removed.

That doesn’t sound very much like “reviews … you can trust.”

The attitude is somewhat different with Google Place Page problems. Instead of simply refusing to correct the errors, Google provides very limited ways to get in touch with them, and then seems to make changes without any regard to the business owner’s corrections.

Business in Freeport, Maine is very seasonal, with bed and breakfasts dependent on the July-October traffic for a significant majority of the year’s revenue, and guests often choose their lodging on its proximity to the primary attraction in the area. In the spring of each of the past three years Google’s Maps (on which the location information on Google’s Place Pages – formerly Google’s Local Business Center – is based) has altered the map location for Brewster House Bed & Breakfast (not the same property – the Brewster family is related to the Brewster Inn’s family, the current owners are not related).

Initially, Brewster House claimed its Place Page, and corrected its map location, which was about a block away from the correct location. A few months later (in the spring, just as potential visitors were beginning to plan summer travel) Google removed the listing entirely, without explanation. Reconsideration was requested, and the listing eventually reappeared. A few months later (in the spring), the listing suddenly was located about two miles away from the actual location, to the southeast. Efforts to correct the location were unsuccessful. Eventually, because Google Maps gets at least its USA data from TeleAtlas, this location was corrected with TeleAtlas, and the business returned to its correct location. This year, again in the spring, the location appeared in yet another incorrect location, about two miles to the south of the correct location.

Each year this incorrect map location has caused untold damage in loss of guests, who were given the wrong location information by Google. Even though Google, as part of its Place Page procedure, verifies that the person claiming the listing is an official representative of the business, they freely change its location to a location not selected by the business!

Ironically, an early corporate slogan of Google was “Do no harm.” It is not difficult to see why they have abandoned it.

These are just two examples. We could also include examples of TripAdvisor, supposedly relying on incorrect information from its parent company, Expedia, to publish incorrect rates for properties, even after they were notified of the error, or examples of directories trying to solict bookings through their own booking gateway, to the detriment of the small property who is the paying customer of the directory, and there are, sadly, many others.

Taming the Giants

Just as there is little doubt that the laws the giants are relying on to shield themselves from legal responsibility for providing erroneous information (the provisions of the US Communications Decency Act) were never intended to protect this type of behavior by the giants, there is little chance that they giants will change their behavior unless given an incentive to change.

Other than changing the law, what are the “little people” to do? Since the problem is the giants, using force (legal proceedings, pleading with them, etc.) is not likely to be effective. However, if those who are struggling with the problems caused by irresponsible or unethical behavior of the giants speak up, and share the information with the public, perhaps the groundswell will create a chorus loud enough to shame them into a more proper behavior.

Are You Fighting the Giants?

Tell us about your struggle in the comments below, and keep up the good fight!

Amid all the frenzy of keeping up with Twitter and Facebook and now Foursquare and YouTube and Blogging and sorting out which directories to list on, and responding to the never-ending flow of emails from directories telling you to hurry and post your latest specials for this month, your latest photos, your latest hot deals, your best recipes and oh, yes, did you remember that you actually have a business to run? sometimes it is nice to … just … take … a … step … back, take a deep breath, and remember what it is we’re trying to do here.

Now, that’s better.

What we try to do

All the different things we’re called upon to do, and sometimes we think we’re required to keep up on, can get so fragmented, that they can pull us in too many directions and keep us from our real job. Recently there was a thread on a B&B forum (I’ve seen the same series of questions and comments on several different forums – the topic pops up every now and then) asking, quite appropriately, how to decide which (pay) directories to list on. The discussion evolved into a discussion of the value of directory links for search engine ranking. Innkeepers must be experts in search engine optimization (SEO) and in statistical analysis of directory listing results, you see.

Meanwhile, every so often there is another blog post about measuring return on investment (ROI) from social media (meaning Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc.). Some say it is worthless. Others find value in social media. Innkeepers must be experts in determining ROI in the newest, cutting edge media, too.

And, of course, all innkeepers must be great copywriters so they can blog regularly, post to their Facebook page, and also keep the website up-to-date, post tweets on Twitter, check-in on Foursquare, and, between breakfast, cleaning, shopping and check-ins, run off a couple of quick inn videos and post them to YouTube.

But there’s a secret. We tend to think that everyone else is doing all of these things successfully, so we must do them, too. The secret is, they’re not. Most are only doing a few of these things, if any. Most are not doing them all that well. A few are doing several of them. Even fewer do them really well.

Gaining perspective

Don’t misunderstand: All these things that we busy ourselves about – social media, blogging, seeking the best bang for the buck on directories, etc. – are good things. What we sometimes lose sight of is that they are part of a much bigger picture.

Perhaps as a result of the sheer volume of new information, and the detailed information we must master, we have turned to “experts” to tell us what we need to know. The result is that we have a lot of detailed information on relatively narrow subjects. Only rarely, however, do we put these subjects together into a larger picture.

I will admit at the outset that I am not a trained marketing expert. Consequently, I may not use “correct” marketing-speak. I may miss some things the trained marketer may know. Mea culpa. However, both for our Freeport Maine Bed & Breakfast, and for our other businesses and elsewhere, marketing has been a significant part of my experience.

Much as I dislike the term “heads in beds”, that is the bottom line for most small lodging properties. Some are thrilled to have any guests, any time. Others seek to attract a particular segment of the traveling pubic. But at the end of the day we all need to count the revenue from those guests to pay the bills.

Re-thinking marketing

The level of detail provided by the “experts” (some are truly experts in their area; others are most definitely not), seduces us into a “bottom-up” approach to marketing. We examine each individual directory, social media site, etc., and try to see if it is worthwhile.

If we step back from this a bit, we’ll see that what we are really doing with that approach is letting each of these small contributions create our overall marketing plan, with no real objectives or strategy. It becomes an ad hoc plan.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to start at the top, and see how all these things can work together to accomplish your objectives?

Starting at the Top

1. Setting Objectives

Begin by defining your objectives. It is fine to have big, general objectives (I want to make a profit), but the more specific you can be, the easier it will be to measure your progress. For most small properties, it will be selling a certain number of rooms in a year (or month, etc.), or increasing revenue (or profit) by a certain amount.

Whatever you may set as your objectives, translate them into both money and bookings, so that, based on your average booking value, you know how many bookings you need, as well as how much money you need, to achieve your goal.

Set narrower objectives, too. More visitors to the web site/blog/Facebook page (how many more?). Longer average visits to the web site (how much longer?). You get the idea.

2. Create a Strategy to Accomplish Your Objectives

All the things we started out mentioning (directories, blogs, social media, video, your web site) plus the more obvious, paid advertising, are your tools to accomplish these goals.

If blogging once a week brings you X bookings per year, and blogging twice a week brings you 30% more, will that help you reach your goals? If so, then you should be blogging twice a week.

Similarly, if adding a new directory can add 3% to your annual bookings, and you think that is worthwhile, then you should add that directory. How do you know if a directory will add 3%? That isn’t easy to determine, and results will differ by directory, by your geographic region, and, in some cases, by the membership level you purchase on the directory. Our article on evaluating directories covers many of the considerations. Be wary of claims by the directories that they can produce a certain number of bookings. While these may be based on their click-through rates, they are, at best, averages and, at worst, an effort to sell you something. Higher levels may help, but there will be no guarantees.

What about Facebook, Twitter, etc.? Most of the debate centers around the difficulty in attributing booking results to social media. In this internet age, we are accustomed to relating clicks on our web links with bookings to determine the source of a booking. Social media isn’t that straightforward. It usually requires more time and attention than a simple web page or website, and bookings don’t always come with technical data to show they originated with Twitter or Facebook.

In addition, as with directories the value may lie in more than just matching bookings to the source. Directories can provide value through their reviews, or through publicity they generate for you, despite never sending you a booking directly. Social media is relationship building. If you make friends through social media, and the friend refers another friend, you may have bookings you will never be able to identify as coming from social media, yet the investment of time has paid off.

As mentioned at the outset, discussions of directories (and other potential referral sources) often leads to a discussion of placement in organic search results. However, this is really combining apples and oranges. Listing on directories should be viewed as having value (or not) on their own merit, not whether they help your site place well in organic search results.

Why would we say that? Google’s official view is that paid listings (like paid listings on directories) do not enhance the reputation of your site. We have seen exceptions – most likely where Google has not discovered that the listing is a paid listing – but generally paid directory listings do not help you place well in general search results. It does appear that they can be of some help in local search results, however, so don’t dismiss directories as not helping at all with search placement.

One of the best summaries of the factors that help your site place well in search is Google’s own SEO Starter Guide (pdf).

3. Measure Your Accomplishments

Use a tool to help measure your results. A web-based statistics program such as Google Analytics will help you see where the visits to your web site are coming from, how long the average visitor stays, how many pages they view, etc. If you configure ecommerce tracking you may also be able to track some of the revenue to the source (this is very difficult to configure correctly using online booking systems, but can be done). Other systems, such as Intell-A-Keeper make no effort to trace web site visits, themselves, but track booking sources.

No online tool is perfect. At the very least, it is very tricky to track bookings attributable to social media. Even Intell-A-Keeper can not track a booking source if the guest last visited the referral source too long ago for their computer to have retained the information.

Consequently, you’ll need to create your own record of the things you are trying to measure, and how they are working.

Getting Started

Most likely you’ve already begun using some (or even all) of the tools mentioned. If so, you only need to set your objectives and begin measuring the results. If you need to adjust your use of the tools, to better meet your objectives, or to aid in measurement, what are you waiting for? Do it!

If you haven’t begun using the various tools, or some of them, don’t just dive in! Set up your objectives, and think carefully about how each tool fits those objectives. Decide which social media tools are right for you. Decide which directories are likely to pay off (considering all the different areas of value they may bring), and be sure you are signed up for only those who will help you reach your goals.

If you don’t have the background or the skills to do some or even all of these things, don’t despair! There are a number of bed & breakfast-centered companies (several of whom are mentioned above) who can provide help with some, or all, of these services. Others, including PAII, provide training in using these tools, to help you learn to do it yourself.

Most important of all, however, is measuring the results so that you know when you’ve accomplished your objectives!