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BedandBreakfast.com, Rezovation, and Webervations Raise Prices

BedandBreakfast.com, Rezovation, and Webervations have raised prices again.  Upon recently visiting their websites to update our analysis of comparative pricing, we discovered that another wave of price increases have been rolled out in the last 6 months.  But don’t take our word for it, visit their websites for yourself.

BedandBreakfast.com for example now charges about $433 per year for a “Silver” membership.  This is up about 8.5% from last year’s price.  Apparently BedandBreakfast.com, which was bought up by a vacation site holding company called Homeaway in 2010, believes that their hold on the North American B&B industry demands more value.  Their increase in pricing seems to ignore the fact that many specialty bed and breakfast directories (BedBreakfastTraveler.com included) still offer B&B memberships for free.

This is not to say that BedandBreakfast.com doesn’t offer value for their price.  For example, the price you pay enables a B&B hotel to participate in BedandBreakfast.com’s online reservation system.  This is a system that will charge a B&B an additional 25% commission (on top of the membership price) to publish their availability on the BedandBreakfast.com-owned sites, as well as Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and a selection of others.

So, Bedandbreakfast.com does offer some value for B&B’s who absolutely want exposure to Expedia, Hotel.com, and other premium sites.  But is 25% too high a price to pay (we didn’t mention that they charge 30% to some properties, depending on the specifics of their arrangement).  Consider BedBreakfastTraveler.com’s new IWB Channel Manager service (presented by Instant World Booking).  With  a free membership at BedBreakfastTraveler.com, B&B’s have access to join IWB Channel Manager, which offers connections to Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Booking.com, Travelocity.com, and others for a total commission rate of only 18% (compare to BedandBreakfast.com’s 25% – 30% commission).  Assuming an average reservation value of $200 and about 60 reservations per year (conservative assumptions), after considering all membership fees, commissions, etc., BedBreakfastTraveler.com comes in at savings of about 31% versus a BedandBreakfast.com Silver membership, or about $1,260 in the first year.  Quite significant savings indeed.

What about Rezovation and Webervations?  Well, Webervations have now increased their pricing for the smallest B&Bs by 11% – 18% over last year’s prices.  This is really quite a substantial increase in a down economic cycle.  But, let’s consider Rezovation, which now offers a more full service set of options.  Prices for Rezovation GT Basic software increased between 20% – 33% in the range of property sizes between 1 and 19 rooms.  A price increase of 33% represents an increase of a full third of last year’s cost.   The Rezovation GT Online product, and online offering which starts at a higher price than Rezovation GT, now has prices between 13% – 20% higher than last year, also substantial increases.

Rezovation has a rather dominant market position, and perhaps their price increases reflect this.  But, considering that a B&B with 5 rooms may now pay $90 per month for Rezovation GT Online (or a 15 room B&B $130 per month), is this still a positive value proposition.  Sleek alternatives like IWBFrontDesk.com will cost only $16 per month for the same property ($28 for the 15 room property), a significant savings pocketed.  But, what about Rezovation’s built in service suite, including a website Booking Engine.  Well, BedBreakfastTraveler.com can bundle Booking Engine with IWBFrontDesk.com, essentially the same product set as Rezovation GT Online, and still save up to about 60% of the cost a user would pay for Rezovation GT Online (as much as $1,000 savings per year given the assumptions above, for a 15 room B&B).

When it comes to Channel Management, Rezovation offers connection to the GDS or BedandBreakfast.com’s third party website connections (like Expedia).  The GDS connectivity will cost $649 just to get the process started, and then there are ongoing 15% commissions, $15.50 per reservation, and $250 per year after the first year.  If this sounds expensive, it is.  The connection to BedandBreakfast.com’s online reservations may be cheaper for some B&Bs.  But, as mentioned above, with commissions of 25% – 30%, this is still quite an expensive undertaking.   This is why BedBreakfastTraveler.com can bundle GDS connectivity, or connectivity to Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Booking.com, Travelocity.com (or about a hundred other choices), right into the IWBFrontDesk.com solution.  So, an end to end solution including property management system, booking engine for your website, and channel management, can save you $1,000 or $2,000 every year versus Rezovation’s and BedandBreakfast.com’s new pricing.

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Property Management System for Bed & Breakfasts

Get your Demo today

Engineered as an alternative to products like RezOvation ®, Webervations ®, SuperInn, Resnexus ®, Hostel Power, HostelMate, etc., IWBFrontDesk has one major advantage: lower cost.  In our last article, we showed price comparisons indicating savings of 30% to 75%+ versus many of the most popular PMS providers.  Now, for complete details, pricing, and to get started with your free trial, please go to:

www.IWBFrontDesk.com

IWBFrontDesk offers all the features you would expect from a property management system (PMS), and much more.

  • Availability Calendar Management
  • Guest Management
  • Reservation Management
  • Accounting and Reporting
  • Billing Statements
  • Fully online solution (no backups or software updates needed)
  • Attractive, Uncluttered, and Effortless Interface
  • Full Customer Support

Your IWBFrontDesk free trial features no setup fees, and hassle-free startup.  In just minutes you can begin loading your rooms, calendar, and start taking reservations.

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Introducing IWBFrontDesk, a Full-Featured PMS

At BedBreakfastTraveler.com, we have received a literal outpouring of interest in IWBFrontDesk, a new full-featured property management system to be released in just several weeks.  At Instant World Booking, one of our core principles is that technology should not only make your life easier and more efficient, it should also reduce your costs.  IWBFrontDesk certainly achieves these goals.

IWBFrontDesk is priced at a significant discount over many popular front desk systems.  Here are just a few examples of typical savings, but rest assured we’re prepared to beat any competing price.

Rezovation GT Online      65% – 75% typical savings

Webervations 2.0            10% – 30%

HostelPower                   5% – 35%

SuperInn                       40% – 55%

Resnexus                       65% – 80%

IWBFrontDesk offers all the features you would expect from a property management system (PMS), and much more.

  • Availability Calendar Management
  • Guest Management
  • Reservation Management
  • Accounting and Reporting
  • Billing Statements
  • Fully online solution (no backups or software updates needed)
  • Attractive, Uncluttered, and Effortless Interface
  • Full Customer Support

With this level of capability, our PMS makes it easier and cheaper to run your property and front desk.  It’s also nice to know that IWBFrontDesk has no setup fees, and hassle-free startup.

To learn more about IWBFrontDesk, please check this blog for updates, or add yourself to our distribution list.  We will notify you as soon as this excellent new system is ready for demo and purchase.  And remember, don’t overpay!  Switch to Instant World Booking today for all your online booking and marketing needs.

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New Booking Engines, Lower Prices for 2011

Following is a letter published to our fellow members of the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (paii.org):

We wish to introduce to you our new Booking Engines (Online Reservation System) for 2011.  They’re available right now!  BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking) believes that this announcement is quite timely.  Economic conditions in North America, and for the B&B industry as a whole, are still quite lackluster, despite earlier forecasts.  Like you, we feel that internet technology should not only make our lives easier, but also save money … and lots of it.  Instant World Booking has introduced a pricing model for Booking Engines that does just that.

In short, BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking) guarantees you a much lower cost for your website’s booking engine than your current provider.

And what’s more, you even choose the way you want to pay: commission pricing, monthly cost, per-transaction cost, etc.  We can customize a pricing plan to meet your specific needs, as well as reduce your costs.  You choose the pricing model that’s best for you.  What really matters is — you’ll be saving money.

For years now, we’ve been reading our competitors’ websites and blog posts explaining their cost structure.  You’ve probably seen some of these articles, trying to justify commission costs of 25% – 30% for online reservation programs.  And, if you use a competing Booking Engine for your website, you may be paying from $50 per month (that’s the absolute lowest) up to $300 or more per month, plus a commission for every reservation.  And, then there’s the setup fee (as high as $999), and plenty of restrictions on how much availability you need to allocate to avoid higher costs.

If there’s any one message I want to get across here:  Please Don’t Overpay!  It’s no wonder that in the last year, some of these competing providers have been bought out by major corporations or conglomerates.  This has been widely publicized in the news.  Let’s just see which direction their prices go in the next year.

There’s no secret to why BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking) can offer the same, and better, services for a much lower cost.  We’ve been developing better Booking Engines and online marketing services for close to a decade.  And, we’re passing on the savings of our smart solutions to you.

Check out a demo of our Booking Engine for your website here:

http://www.bedbreakfasttraveler.com/booking-engine.php

Then, contact us and tell us how much you pay for your current solution.  We guarantee a lower cost, and you can even get set up for free in just 24-48 hours.

Check out our blog for more innkeepers’ intelligence, and get the real breakdown of pricing for some of our most popular competitors:

http://www.bedbreakfasttraveler.com/blog_bb/category/business-intelligence/

Even if you’re not in the market for a new Booking Engine just yet, list your property with BedBreakfastTraveler.com today for free.  You get 15+ pages of web-optimized, translated content about your B&B (we translate your B&B descriptions for you).  This comes complete with custom searchable maps and extras.  This is an unprecedented value.

http://www.bedbreakfasttraveler.com/listings/add_property.php

Thank you for your valuable time.  I promise you that, after spending a couple of minutes checking out our Booking Engine demos, you’ll be saving a lot of money in 2011.

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Webervations Booking Engine? Switch Now and Get $200 Back

If you’re using Webervations’ Booking Engine for your bed & breakfast or inn website, switch now and receive up to $200.00 back.  Contact BedBreakfastTraveler.com (Instant World Booking) for more information, or see the following page to learn more about our booking engine services:

http://www.bedbreakfasttraveler.com/booking-engine.php

Not only does BedBreakfastTraveler.com offer a better and more flexible solution than Webervations, but we’re already a lot cheaper.  Don’t overpay for a booking engine on your B&B website!  And, in addition to our lower rates, BedBreakfastTraveler.com is offering a special promotion for up to $200 back when you switch today.

There’s no obligation to set up a demo booking engine for your website, so check us out today and save.

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RezOvation Pricing

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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BedandBreakfast.com Pricing

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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Avoid Paypal Reserves

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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Return on Investment and the Lifetime Value of a Guest

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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Free Online Advertising and Marketing is King among Bed and Breakfasts

It never ceases to amaze me how online services continue to require hefty membership fees. The internet is the most efficient information distribution tool ever invented. In today’s lean economic environment, bed and breakfasts are seeking value in their marketing and advertising budgets. With the wide array of services available to inn managers for free, why do we continue to pay year after year those annual membership fees for services. This is the perfect time to re-evaluate our spending on those annual memberships that we sometimes blindly pay year after year.

One example I can highlight is a recent advertising email sent by PAII, the Professional Association of Innkeepers International. The email is targeted at bed and breakfast innkeepers like you, and professes how the PAII is advocating on your behalf. Specifically addressing problems the PAII sees with TripAdvisor, they indicate how some of the operations and policies of the Tripadvisor site have flaws that can cause significant financial hardship to your business. They say that this the message innkeepers all across the country have been letting PAII know loud and clear. They ask what the individual innkeeper can do to address this most critical area? After citing that PAII’s President & CEO has been tirelessly meeting and negotiating with the management team of TripAdvisor advocating for you, the rest of the email basically amounts to an advertising pitch to sell memberships in their organization at a reduced rate (for 6 months as opposed to a full annual membership).

Let me be clear that the PAII is a reputable organization which adds value to bed and breakfasts and inns in the U.S. However, know that membership in one or more of these types of organizations can cost between $100 and $300 EACH per year. When you start looking at how these memberships hit your bottom line, what you need to focus on are services “support services” that bring in business, not “support groups”. Also, beware of organizations that claim to be international, but boast a membership of predominantly North American companies.

So, as the new year approaches, look for some new opportunities to build your online footprint with some truly global services. Pay special attention to services that do not charge a membership fee. There are many such valuable services easily available. And, think about eliminating some of the more expensive annual memberships that are not really critical to the operation of your business.

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