Maybe you’re considering a new booking engine for your bed and breakfast website. Maybe you’re looking for a better solution at a lower price. Here are some of the questions you should be asking:
- What do you mean by “almost cost-free solution”?
- Are my customers charged a service fee?
- Can I still keep all my other third party services and software when I use this booking engine for my website?
- Am I required to use other services or software by Instant World Booking?
- What is Full No-show (failure to arrive) and Cancellation protection?
- How do I receive my deposit payments?
- What special discounts are available if I switch today from a competing provider?
To get the answer to these and other important questions about booking engines for your website, please see: Bed and Breakfast Booking Engines and DEMOS.
BedBreakfastTraveler.com’s latest booking engine for Bed & Breakfast websites offers many advanced features not available from BedandBreakfast.com, Webervations, Rezovations, or other comparable services. Most of all it’s cheaper than the rest. Check out our Demos of B&B Booking Engines.
To demonstrate how our online reservations for your B&B website compare with other providers, here is an example of the features currently set up for a typical bed and breakfast:
Online reservations secured with a substantial deposit offer unmatched security at a low cost:
- 5% commission for reservations confirmed at your website.
- 35% deposit collected from customers.
- Zero cost guarantee: If you have no reservations, you have no cost.
- Full Protection for “No-shows” (when customers fail to arrive) and Cancellations: You still get paid the deposit even if a customer fails to arrive, or cancels late. You may select your own flexible cancellation policy. We have set your cancellation policy so that you receive a percentage of the deposit collected: 50% (i.e., 17.5% of the total reservation).
In the case of cancellations, you receive this amount, minus commissions, if the customer cancels within 14 days before arrival. In the case of “No-shows” (when customers fail to arrive), you receive full payment of the deposit, minus commissions. - Choose any cancellation penalty amount you wish, up to 100% of the amount collected, and a cancellation period of up to 90 days before check-in. Please contact us if you wish to change either of these cancellation variables.
- Service charge (optional): A small service charge will be collected from customers when reserving on your website (USD 1.50 per room, or USD 0.50 per bed for per-person prices). You will be paid 50% of all service charges collected, and this may be a beneficial way of offsetting your cost. This feature is optional, and you can select and service charge amount you wish, or none at all.
Payments we make to you:
- We make payments to you: monthly
- Your payment instructions are on file: Wire Convenient payment options include 1) bank wire, 2) EFT – electronic funds transfer, 3) PayPal, 4) bank check in your own currency, and 5) US Dollar bank check. These flexible options allow you to receive your funds either electronically or by physical delivery. All payment methods are free except the bank wire option, which includes an additional fee for every transaction.
We’ve discussed the request-only versus instant booking methods at some length, but for many bed and breakfasts, the choice continues to be request-only. This is fine, however, there are clear advantages to the instant booking method that far outweigh any administrative inconveniences. We are happy to work with our partners in any manner they wish, but find that on average, online requests end up resulting in some degree of frustration. Here’s why instant booking using an online calendar is best in almost every situation:
- The vast majority of users searching accommodation on the internet want instant gratification. If they have to wait for a response to a request, they disappear quickly. With instant booking, you capture the booking immediately, before they have time to search elsewhere.
- Instant booking has a much higher reservation success rate because of (1) above.
- Some users will submit a request simply to find out what rates are, and have no intention to book soon. This forces the innkeeper to respond to requests that will never turn into reservations.
- A percentage of all users never receive the response email because they are using some free email service (e.g., hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc.) that blocks mail from new senders as spam, and they don’t realize that this is happening. This is a simple fact that affects virtually all online services these days. A user that falls into this category will either disappear or complain that they never received a response. Nevertheless, with instant booking, this is never a problem, since the user receives confirmation directly while they’re still online.
- Innkeepers that are concerned with managing a calendar online have many options available to them. If they don’t want to use our interface directly, they can use one of several third party interfaces that feed into our system (you can contact us for recommendations).
- The risk of an occasional overbooking is more than offset by the higher level of bookings, income, and benefits mentioned above that can be achieved with the instant booking method.
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:
To understand more about the powers of the bill and how it would be funded, click here.
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.
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.
A while back we published an article on how “Fake” reviews can impact your bed and breakfast’s online business. Read it again here:
Now, there’s some new evidence posted at BedandBreakfast.com on how negative reviews can actually help your business. For more about bed and breakfasts and reviews, see the following links:
If you’re afraid of negative reviews, and whether they can hurt your B&B, or any small business for that matter, read:
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/negative-reviews-good-for-business/2075/
To check out what B&Bs around North America have to say, please check out some of our friends at their blogs below:
B&B Trends B&B Videos by .
BedBreakfastTraveler.com is pleased to announce that we now interface with BnB Manager. A special discount is being offered to Instant World Booking clients for trying the BNB Manager service (see details below). BnBManager has created a feature-packed yet simple-to-use small accommodations management system. Offering state of the art security, functionality, and usability, BnBManager makes managing your guest information and reservations simple, while also providing a wealth of features to help you manage your back-office operations. Please visit BNB Manager today for a full list of features … you will be amazed to see what is made possible by using their software:
BedBreakfastTraveler’s integration with BNB Manager means that users can now upload their calendar of availability directly to BedBreakfastTraveler.com and the entire Instant World Booking network.
A special discount is now offered to Instant World Booking (BedBreakfastTraveler.com) clients for tryin the BNB Manager service. BNB Manager will offer 10% off the full first year cost to the first 50 IWB members who join and stay beyond the 90-day free trial period. All you need to do is enter the Promotional Code “IWB123″ on the BnB Manager sign-up page.
For more information about Instant World Booking’s XML feed capabilities, please see:
http://www.instantworldbooking.com/blog_iw/category/xml-feeds/
Online Booking XML feeds by .
St. Augustine is widely regarded as the quaintest and most historic town in Florida. If you’re looking for a little sun as well as a stay in a Victorian or historic bed and breakfast, St. Augustine will not dissapoint. Check B&B reservations in St. Augustine.
For more about bed and breakfasts in St. Augustine, see:
B&B Trends by .
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