When shopping for a bed and breakfast for a weekend getaway, my wife and I noticed that many such establishments depend on umbrella sites which group dozens or even hundreds of them from the same geography, all using the same basic template and style. For instance, Massachusetts Lodging Directory of Bed and Breakfast Country Inns & Small Hotels (a subset of virtualcities.com), The Massachusetts Bed and Breakfast Inns Directory (under bedandbreakfast.com), and Rimstar International. The typical bed and breakfast page at such sites shows you photos of the interior of the rooms for rent, lets you know the prices, and gives you the address and phone number. Typically, the proprietors know nothing about the Web. They just submit their information, pay their fees, and wait to be contacted by customers. The sparsity of the information and the similarity of style often makes it very difficult to distinguish one from another and decide which to stay at.
It's a very rare case where you can see online whether there are vacancies on particular dates, much less have the ability to make and pay for reservations online. Considering these businesses typically have half-a-dozen or fewer rooms, such sophistication is probably too much to expect.
But there are a number of things that such a small business could do
to increase its Web traffic and hence bring in more customers. Ideas of
that kind started occurring to me when I got a request for advice from
my uncle who has a bed and breakfast called Edgewater in Mahone Bay in
Nova Scotia and currently has a minimal listing at bbcanada.com.
( http://www.bbcanada.com/116.html
)
First, I suggested that he keep his current page, that the new site he wants to build should be in addition to that, not as a replacement; so as not to lose the business he's getting already.
Second, when building his new site, he should keep in mind that, unlike his listing at bbcanada.com, what he posts will appear without context. He will need to build both the geographic and the business context.
Geographically, he should have maps (Eastern Canada, Nova Scotia, and Mahone, the town he lives in). He should also have driving directions from likely starting points in the US and Canada.
He should also include lots of photos -- not just of the rooms that he rents, but of his town, showing his house in the context of the block that it is on, and showing everything of interest within walking distance and within a reasonable driving distance, plus photos of himself and his family.
Business-wise, he should have a page that clearly states the prices and the business terms, and that clarifies the currency/exchange situation and what that means in purchasing power for visitors from the US. (Bed and breakfasts in New England should likewise have such explanations for visitors from Canada). He should detail the standard terms like check-in and check-out times and procedures, and anything else that he has found that outsiders are sometimes confused or surprised by. He should indicate the differences in price with season; and also indicate when he has openings.
The overall design for this Web site should be very simple -- no fancy effects, just text and photos, in plain static HTML -- so he could easily and quickly update your pages. He should be able to change the online indications of room availability in a couple minutes by hand, without the need for any fancy custom code.
Once he has taken care of those basics, he should focus on the cultural
environment, providing as much information as possible about his house,
his town, Nova Scotia, and Eastern Canada -- history, places of interest,
entertainment,
literature, everything.
He should include blurbs about and extracts from popular novels and movies that are set in his piece of the world, e.g., The Shipping News and Longfellow's Evangeline. He should include whatever he can by authors who were born or lived in Eastern Canada, e.g., Lucy Maude Montgomery, author of Anne of Avonlea, etc. -- she was from Prince Edward Island; there's a tourist trap devoted to her there; and all her works are in the public domain and readily available on the Internet. He could also include the full text of public domain books about Canadian history, which are available through the Gutenberg Project on the Web and on CD from my little publishing company.
Once he gets going, if he follows some simple design rules (like writing unique HTML titles for each page and making sure that the first couple lines of text of each page are meaningful), all this text should bring traffic to his site by way of search engines, many of whom should be people who are fascinated with his part of the world and plan to visit there.
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business success.
Reviews.
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