Archive for the ‘Business Intelligence’ Category
In a nutshell, the Travel Promotion Act is: “A bill to establish a non-profit corporation to communicate United States entry policies and otherwise promote leisure, business, and scholarly travel to the United States.”
International travelers are an important customer in the US travel industry. Visits to the US are below 2000 levels, and this has a great impact on the North American economy - especially the micro-economy of the travel industry.
Some B&B owners and innkeepers have do not support this bill because it would involve a new $10 fee on travelers from visa-waiver countries. Compared to what Americans pay in similar fees when visiting European countries (most fees are hidden in taxes and fees in your airline ticket) this is very minor. The question is whether $10 fee that is good for two years would prohibit people from traveling to the US.
PAII.org, the Professional Association of Innkeepers International, supports the bill. For more information on what the bill might mean to your bed and breakfast business, please see their blog at:
http://www.innkeepingblog.com/2009/09/action-alert-to-innkeeping-industry-help-pass-travel-promotion-act-now/
To understand more about the powers of the bill and how it would be funded, click here.
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Your bed and breakfast’s website is one of your most valuable assets. Like all of our assets, we wish to grow their value. But how can we do this, even in a down economy? Your website and the traffic it brings is an asset you can grow anytime.
One of the most important value “drivers” of your website is search engine ranking. Obtaining quality inbound links to your website from 3rd party sources is a major component of your search engine rankings. Most search engines consider a link to your website as a “vote” for the importance of your website. The more links that point to your homepage, the more important your site becomes when people search on major search engines.
Reciprocal linking is not the way to go, although it can be used sparingly. Major search engines today are able to figure out what links are reciprocal or not, and reciprocal links are heavily discounted, along with you website if you employ them. Reciprocal links should be used sparingly, and only with websites of actual bed and breakfasts. It’s fine to trade links with other B&Bs.
The highest-quality links are one-way links to your website that come from related, relevant, and quality websites. Building links can take a lot of time, but is worth the effort.
For another form of link that can drive qualified traffic to your website, BedBreakfastTraveler.com offers free links to your webpage with any free listing on our service. There are over 100 websites in BedBreakfastTraveler.com’s network (Instant World Booking), and an average bed and breakfast may have listings on up to 15-25 sites, all with one free listing. This means that on any of these SEO-optimized listing pages, a link to your homepage will appear. Free links on our network display your website in a shadowbox on the listing page, and do not re-direct the user to your webpage. Your entire website is visible however. Free links also do not appear on premium sites like BedBreakfastTraveler.com and InstantWorldBooking.com
Introducing Paid Links
For a small cost, paid (sponsored) links are available to gain even more traffic to your website. Paid links will re-direct the user right to your website, and paid links appear on our premium sites. Note that all our links are constructed in strict agreement with Google’s guidelines.
Again, all you need to do is have a free listing on BedBreakfastTraveler.com, and then you can access either the free links which are automatically provided to you. Or, purchase paid links by signing in to your listing at BedBreakfastTraveler.com.
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If you’ve been reading our Intelligence for B&Bblog, you know that BedBreakfastTraveler.com believes in transparency, especially when it comes to pricing of services for your B&B. Occasionally, we profile other services which compete with ours. We don’t care so much that mentioning competing services basically amounts to free advertising for those services. We’re more interested in transparency for you, our consumers and clients. So, when selecting services for publishing, marketing, and booking your bed & breakfast, please remember to compare prices. And, don’t overpay!
Rezovation offers services for property management and online reservations. As a business manager, if price is important to you, please do compare. According to the Rezovation.com website, the minimum cost for Rezovation GT Online is $50 per month. But, that’s for just the smallest B&Bs of 1-4 rooms. If you have at least 10 rooms, the price more than doubles to $110, and for large properties (50+ rooms), may be at least $300 per month, with an added setup fee of $999.00! Yes, Rezovation GT is a great property management tool for those who want to lay out the cash, but there are many cheaper alternatives for small inn businesses. Again, the prices quoted here are directly from the Rezovation website
BedBreakfastTraveler.com (by Instant World Booking) offers a premier online booking service, including credit card acceptance. Booking engines for your website is a particular specialty of ours. If you have the cash to pay for the competing Rezovation GT service, and want online bookings, there is an additional per-reservation fee up to 30%. For more on the additional fees see our separate article at:
http://www.bedbreakfasttraveler.com/blog_bb/2009/12/bedandbreakfastcom-pricing/
Now, compare with BedBreakfastTraveler.com (by Instant World Booking). If you want a fully integrated booking engine for your website, you can choose from many custom options starting at our lowest cost of just 1.9% of total reservation volume. This is the absolute industry low for a booking engine on your website.
What about credit card processing? Rezovation GT offers optional credit card processing for an additional monthly service fee and per-transaction fees. Note that this is above and beyond the fees you are paying to maintain your own merchant account. BedBreakfastTraveler.com on the other hand offers integrated credit card collection for your online bookings, and you do not even need your own merchant account.
Finally, if you want to connect to the Global Distribution System (GDS), Rezovation GT offers a premium option, allowing you to connect for just $649 + $15.50 per reservation + $250 / yr maintenance after first year.
For an unlimited budget, there are many services out there that can maximize your online exposure. At BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking), we offer the maximum cost-effectiveness for online exposure. Don’t pay the high prices unless you’ve tried Instant World Booking first. If you don’t like your experience, you can always try the others and pay higher prices later.
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At BedBreakfastTraveler.com, we frequently get asked how our pricing compares to BedandBreakfast.com. We’re going to answer that question. In this global economy, margins mean everything to B&Bs and inns, and BedBreakfastTraveler.com (operated by Instant World Booking) can really make a difference to your bottom line.
BedandBreakfast.com is a great service, and we would never recommend not using a competitor’s service. However, if as a B&B manager, price is important to you, please do compare prices.
BedandBreakfast.com advertises 2 participation levels for their online reservation program. This is a feature that basically allows booking of your bed and breakfast by guests directly on their website.
Here are BedandBreakfast.com’s costs :
Preferred Participation - 25% Commission
Standard Participation - 30% Commission
These prices also include some limitations. With the Preferred plan you must make available at least one room daily (properties with more than 15 rooms are required to offer two rooms daily) for an entire year. With the Standard participation, you may offer any days of the year and it doesn’t need to be an entire year. They do ask you to maintain at least 180 days of inventory in a year.
If these prices seem high, then please compare to BedBreakfastTraveler.com, which can instantly start improving your bottom line.
Here are BedBreakfastTraveler.com’s costs:
Standard online booking - 8% Commission
Booking Engine with online bookings on YOUR website - 1.9% Commission
Booking Engine with deposit collection of at least 30% from guest - 5% Commission
These are just a few examples of our pricing, and we offer custom solutions to suit your custom needs. But, the numbers basically tell the whole story.
At BedBreakfastTraveler.com, we offer Guaranteed Economics. If you currently use another provider’s service, please contact BedBreakfastTraveler.com. We guarantee that we can offer the same or improved service for better economics. All you need to do is contact us and ask.
We are not affiliated with BedandBreakfast.com, and always try to publish the most accurate information. If any reader has more recent information about BedandBreakfast.com pricing, please feel free to post it or correct us.
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Is becoming an Innkeeper right for you? Think about whether you have:
1. A business plan that includes financing prospects
2. Planning, organizational, and management skills
3. The desire to work hard, and sometimes long hours
4. Discipline and business competitiveness
5. Multitasking capability and organizational skills
6. The desire to entertain people from different parts of the country/world
7. Drive to ensure your new small business succeeds
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If you use Paypal to charge your guests’ credit cards, you may have noticed some new reserves that Paypal is introducing to account holders. Reserves amount to increased costs to you, the merchant, and result in delays in receiving your money. Instant World Booking offers alternative and better methods for collecting from your guests that will not result in delays or higher costs in receiving your money.
Here is how Paypal recently described their reserves, which may amount to 20% of your credit card proceeds:
“Why was a reserve placed on my account? Sometimes we need to temporarily set aside some money in your account to make sure that you can cover any potential reversals or chargebacks.
What are the different types of reserves? Rolling reserve: A certain percentage of the money you receive each day is set aside and then released after a certain number of days.
Minimum reserve: The minimum that you need to keep in your account at all times. We’ll hold a percentage of each day’s payments until you reach your minimum reserve.”
Instant World Booking offers the industry’s low-cost solution for booking engines on a bed and breakfast or hotel website. Compare with BedandBreakfast com and others. There are no complicated reserves to contend with. Instant World Booking also now offers IWB Payments, a convenient way to charge your guests by credit card for reservations and other services you offer. For more information, check out IWB Payments.
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Our analysts have been searching high and low on the internet for the types of credit card processing that bed and breakfasts use. Services like Securepay or RezOvation are touted. RezOvation does not actually provide credit card services, but facilitates links to external merchant processing solutions. But why are these solution so expensive? Read on below for the answer.
Instant World Booking (BedBreakfastTraveler.com) now offers IWB Payments. This payments system is unique among all the other providers in that it requires:
- No merchant accounts
- No payment gateway
- No bank or credit applications
- No credit card processors
In short, IWB Payments handles all the complicated and otherwise costly processing for you. All you need to do is charge your guests with convenience and confidence. Read more about IWB Payments here:
http://www.bedbreakfasttraveler.com/payments-systems.php
As for the other services, merchant and credit application fees, discount fees, address verification fees, payment gateway fees, monthly reporting fees, setup fees, monthly service fees, pci compliance fees, etc. can add up quickly. And yes, you will be charged most if not all of these fee categories for credit card processing. This is not to mention the complex process of handling cardholder disputes, and a chargeback fee (about $30 or more) for every disputed transaction.
With external credit card processing used by services like Securepay, RezOvation, and others these fees are billed in bits and pieces, and it can be difficult to add them all up. This is why you may be surprised to learn that these costs in some cases can add up to 10%-15% or more of your monthly charge volume.
Here’s just one example of how credit card processing costs can add up for a bed and breakfast or inn. Consider a simplistic example. Let’s say a bed and breakfast charges 10 credit cards per month. The average discount rate or their charges is 4%. This is not the total cost of processing, of course, but just one of the cost categories mentioned above. Now, if just one of the 10 charges for a month is disputed by the guest, the amount charged is automatically returned to the guest by the credit card processor. However, the discount fee is NOT returned to the bed and breakfast for disputed charges. This means the overall discount rate for the month goes from (10 transactions x 4%) / (9 successful transactions) = 4.44%. So, the average discount rate for the month increases from 4% to 4.44%. That’s an 11% increase. This of course does not include the non-refundable $30 chargeback fee that the bed and breakfast will be charged for the dispute.
IWB Payments is a simple to use credit card acceptance program that may be right for your bed and breakfast or inn if you want to avoid the administrative headaches and high costs of maintaining your own merchant processing account.
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As many of you know, BedBreakfastTraveler.com is part of the Instant World Booking organization, which includes over 100+ brands of online marketing and booking engines. At BedBreakfastTraveler, B&Bs are our specialty, but we also have keen insights into other lodging markets.
While it may not sound fair, some other lodging sectors consider their marketing strategies to be at the leading edge of innovation and ingenuity. But where do bed and breakfasts figure into this? B&Bs in North America don’t have the reputation of being cutting edge in terms of marketing or technology. This also may not be a fair assessment, since there are many inn properties that are up-and-coming into the 21st century age of internet marketing. But there are some important lessons that our friends and partners in North America and elsewhere can learn from their counterparts in other markets.
Many online booking services know that B&Bs are behind the curve in technology, and they may sometimes take advantage of this fact by overcharging for their services. This is perhaps the first and greatest lesson that bed and breakfasts can learn: Don’t Overpay for online marketing services! When it comes to online booking services, many of the availability calendars out there that cater to B&Bs are vestiges of technology platforms that are 15-20 years old. Travel industry technology has undergone a revolution since the 1980’s and B&Bs should be seeking out the best technologies available for their purposes today.
So, in short, there are 2 great lessons you can learn. 1) Don’t overpay for online marketing services, and 2) Take advantage of the latest technologies.
BedBreakfastTraveler.com offers some leading edge services for B&Bs that we want you to compare with your current providers. Three areas where BedBreakfastTraveler.com can enhance your bottom line are by 1) offering the lowest cost for online booking services versus all the competition, 2) setting up custom booking engines to work on your very own website (again at the lowest cost versus any competitor), and 3) offering credit card acceptance for your business without costly merchant accounts, credit checks, etc.
So, if you’re a bed and breakfast looking to try something new, and start actively improving your profit margin, contact BedBreakfastTraveler and ask how we can beat your current provider’s services.
Tip: Don’t worry about replacing or dropping any current services you use. Evidence consistently shows that by simply adding BedBreakfastTraveler.com to the list of providers you use can improve your bottom line without dropping any other services.
Join BedBreakfastTraveler
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We recently read with great interest the blog entries by Eric Goldreyer, the CEO of Bedandbreakfast.com. Intelligent and well-spoken, Eric speaks in one article of the Lifetime Value of a Guest. In short, this is the value a B&B earns over a lifetime by bringing in one guest. Lifetime Value of a Guest is usually multiples of the earnings on just the first reservation. The article is worth reading and has several good points to be driven home to innkeepers.
Where we stopped short in our tracks is when Eric illustrates the concept with a typical example. He uses 25% as the typical cost of a reservation. He then goes through the calcuation and reinforces that ROI (Return on Investment) is a primary consideration for bed and breakfast owners.
Please allow me to emphasize, well no … proclaim loudly, that 25% is not anywhere near a good value for B&B innkeepers to be paying for a reservation. Even when the lietime cost of acquiring a client is maybe half of this (12.6% as Eric Goldreyer goes on to explain in his article), it’s still not a bargain for the hotel.
When CEOs of online booking services announce publicly that typical costs of acquiring guests are in the 25% range, it makes us wonder where all the value is going with the high technology available today. In this particular case BedandBreakfast.com is a proponent of all the right concepts, as stated in their other blog entries, including “online reservations, leveraging ratings and reviews, frequent stay programs, etc.” These are all the concepts we at BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking) have been talking about for year. Nevertheless, consider that the cost structure we are able to offer to you, the innkeeper, are roughly one-third the amount you’ll be paying as suggested by Goldreyer above.
This is why we are imploring all bed and breakfasts and small hotels to consider alternatives to their online marketing strategies. Another well-written article by Eric Goldreyer speaks of how to think about return on investment (ROI) for your online marketing spend. Read the article, then consider that BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking) charges no fees to join the service, offers more online, search-engine-optimized content for your property, more photos, and more translated online pages than the competition. Instant World Booking also offers a fully integrated online calendar, with credit card collections, for no sign-up fee or monthly fee. In short, you have zero cost unless you have bookings. And when you do have bookings, our cost is roughly one-third the cost offered by competing services. We encourage you to sign up for a free listing at BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking) today:
http://www.bedbreakfasttraveler.com/listings/add_listing.php
The blog articles mentioned in this article can be found at the links include in the comment below.
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