Published on January 30, 2008 by Innkeeper
This site, although not particularly eye catching, seems to get decent traffic and create a modest return. A long established directory, Pam Lanier’s is one of the few remaining print directories promoting bed and breakfasts. Membership in the site includes the print listing. Also includes membership via the travelguides.com URL. Recently added “featured” listings seem to be mostly a way of increasing the monetization of the site, especially since their own FAQ page states “Do I have to pay for a better listing, additional placements, etc? - Never! Pamela Lanier insists on a level playing field for all members.”. Interestingly as well, the statistics provided by their innkeeper “check traffic” pages are nearly double those that we collected through our own (multiple) methods.
The Good: Reasonable price for a strong reach. Long time travel guide has great consumer credibility. Search is fast and concise. Most prominent links are to inn website directly.
The Bad: Odd page layout gives a lot of screen real estate to their logo/header. Wordy home page stuffed with keywords. Few internal pages (Inn pages) have pagerank. Bland result pages. Photo gallery is old school and forces open in a new window. Reservation Inquiry form is unnecessary for most inns and confusing for users and innkeepers (emails innkeeper a request).
Our Inn Results: We advertise on lanierbb.com. We are in a mildly competitive area on their site, there are about a half dozen inns listed in our region. In the last 6 months we received 211 click throughs to our website from this one. The visitors viewed an average of 5 pages and spent an average of 4 minutes on our site. Of those there were 2 who followed our preset conversion path and became a reservation. (This does not account for others that may have become a reservation through alternate paths i.e. phone sale, return visit to our site or booking directly via an alternate channel). Overall, lanierbb.com ranked 12th in our paid directory click through and conversions in the last 6 months.
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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 7 years
Main Page Pagerank: 5
Number of Inbound Links: 34,907
AlexaRank: 220,361
Quantcast Monthly Uniques: 45,575
Alternate Domain Names: No
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $159
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $159
Notes about Packages and Membership: Only one package, setup fee of $40. Includes listing in print editions. $89 introductory rate on “Priority Placement” which lists you on a rotating basis on your state, region and city pages for 3 months (for $125).
Quantcast Summary: This site reaches approximately 49,051 U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a mostly Caucasian, more female, primarily older, more educated, more affluent audience.The typical visitor books lodging at bedandbreakfast.com, visits cooksrecipes.com, and subscribes to Food & Wine.
The Site:www.lanierbb.com
Review Date: January 27, 2008
Published on January 24, 2008 by Innkeeper
A-ZHotels.Net has emailed us possibly more than any other directory. Unfortunately prior to now, we havent been tracking the number of emails we have received from each advertiser, but we have started to do so in 2008. A-ZHotels.net emails are often borderline broken English and always include bizarre capitalized words and bold sentences. As for their website, I was surprised to find that it is fairly attractive at first glance. A clean front page included quick links to popular cities and a simple flash animated slideshow (of course, if these photos were of participating properties and were identified in the slides it would have earned points, but currently it appears to just be stock photos). The search function was somewhat useless, unable to find CT or VT or NH, I realized that only spelling out the states found results. Of course, these results were listed in a small grouping that is given about 60% of the pagewidth, shared with lists of nearby and local towns as well as a wordy gentleman who spews keywords… To top that off, the actual website links are masked, no pagerank being shared here (don’t worry, there wasn’t much for them to share anyhow). The listings include more broken English / wordy descriptions and seem to require you to fill out a form to get any details or even a phone number (on all but “Platinum” listings). Site claims over 90k visitors per week, but based on the Alexa rank and the PR, I would doubt that is true. In an interesting irony, the “Join” scripts are not cross browser compatible and utilize goofy and unnecessary scripting. Top it all off with an oddball domain name and I say, save your money.
The Good: Attractive layout is contemporary and clean. Google maps were well integrated and loaded quickly. Template has great potential.
The Bad: Search is all but useless. Doesn’t suggest terms, just fails on searches that aren’t exact matches. Phone numbers, when listed, are displayed awkwardly (its a European site). Text sizes are small and site text is wordy and keyword stuffed. Contact form to get phone numbers is unlikely to lead to many calls. Oddly refers to all listings as “Special Offers”. No map based search or drop down search, must start with selecting United States then typing a state name into search. City search only seeks exact matches.
Our Inn Results: We do not pay for advertising on this site and welcome results from some folks who do.
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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 1 year
Main Page Pagerank: 3
Number of Inbound Links: 204
AlexaRank: 1,509,741
Alternate Domain Names: No
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes - starting at the $20 / month package
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $156
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $240
Notes about Packages and Membership: 2 packages to chose from, gold and platinum. The gold package is $14 per month and the platinum is $20 per month. The main difference according to the website is the position on the search result pages.
The Site:www.a-zhotels.net
Review Date: January 22, 2008
Published on January 23, 2008 by Innkeeper
Guidebookamerica.com is another directory listing site that frequently emails innkeepers to solicit their advertising dollars. The site claims that they are “the only online travel directory of its kind”. If by that they mean confusing, cluttered and a spammy mess, well then they may be top of the class. Save your money. There are few regions I could even find where google searches even returned results for this site in the first 2 pages.
The Good: One time fees for permanent listings.
The Bad: Horrible directory structure. The drop down select box for the regions is almost invisible in the link cluttered home page. Many of the links are off site, leading me to believe that they are either paid links, or affiliate programs. These links dominate the page making paid innkeeper listings far more difficult to find. The main page and several internal pages are keyword stuffed to the gills, including seemingly off topic keywords. Articles on the site are duplicates of others from the net. Site lists all lodging types. Featured area member was the smallest of all listings. Many state pages looked like link farms, with ads ranging from blinking animated gifs to flash slideshows.
Our Inn Results: We do not pay for advertising on this site and are awaiting results from some folks who do.
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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 5 years
Main Page Pagerank: 5
Number of Inbound Links: 4,261
AlexaRank: 960,102
Alternate Domain Names: No
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes - starting at the $30 package
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $30
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $240
Notes about Packages and Membership: 5 packages to chose from. Each are lifetime listings. Main difference is the placement on the search result page as well as details of the inn, background color and styles as well as photos.
The Site:www.guidebookamerica.com
Review Date: January 21, 2008
Published on January 18, 2008 by Innkeeper
Another of the mass e mailers, I turn attention today to the site inspectedinns.org. Interestingly I have received many emails to subscribe to this site, but only a few were addressed to our inn. This definitely makes the offer seem spammy. They tout that the inns listed in the directory are inspected and approved by independent associations and meet rigorous standards of the bed and breakfast industry. Of course, the variety of inspection types range from a health inspection to triple A ratings. There were several broken links and they seem to take you to bnbstar.com as a default. It seems that these 2 sites are connected pretty closely.
The Good: The simple site was easy to navigate. There is minimal outside advertising on here. When you reach the inn listings (after 4-5 clicks) you are presented a brief summary that includes a link to the inns website.
The Bad: Pretty boring site in general. The mix of simple text with limited and disconnected graphics makes the site seem amateur. The text sizes and formatting of the inn details page is awkward and creates a long page. For a site that is based on “inspected inns” there was no way to search by inspection type or rating.
Our Inn Results: We do not pay for advertising on this site, however we are listed on their partner site bnbstar.com. We are in a moderately competitive area on that site, there are about a dozen inns listed in our region. In the last 6 months we received 6 click throughs to our website from this one. The visitors viewed an average of 6 pages and spent an average of 6 minutes on our site. Of those there were none who followed our preset conversion path and became a reservation. (This does not account for others that may have become a reservation through alternate paths i.e. phone sale, return visit to our site or booking directly via an alternate channel). Overall bnbstar.com was 92nd in referral sources to our website in this time period.
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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 2 years
Main Page Pagerank: 4
Number of Inbound Links: 2,344
AlexaRank: 2,673,694
Alternate Domain Names: Yes
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes - starting at the $60 package
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $40
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $200
Notes about Packages and Membership: 5 packages to chose from. Main difference is the placement on the search result page as well as details of the inn and photos.
The Site:www.inspectedinns.org
Review Date: January 18, 2008
Published on January 16, 2008 by Innkeeper
A frequent email solicitor, the site BestRomanticInns.com also advertises under GreatWeddingVenues.com as well as ConventionsMeetings.com. That certainly doesn’t start the review process off on the right foot. The emails are sent using a third party, emailbrain.com, and therefore are full of tracking links. This is a bad practice. Track visits at the website, but don’t use actual email tracking links. As a matter of best practices, using email tracking links is becoming more objectionable each day. As a matter of fact, the current MS spam filtering standards semi-automatically dump emails with tracking links into “Junk Email” folders in outlook, which makes them that less likely to be read, or trustworthy. Putting that aside, the sites themselves are bare-bones and resemble article directories. The categories are not refined enough to be really useful, some regions included almost one hundred properties listed in the narrowest category. The links to the inn websites would be at 4 clicks, except that they are coded wrong and include email tags, which makes them crash on several inns (if they parse URIs for example). Inn pages have good image presentation, but are overwhelmed with other information and graphics in both sidebars, dwarfing the text content of the inns page, which is boring and not well organized. They brag that they are #1 in Google for the search “Romantic Inns”, which they are, however add almost any descriptor to that query (a more likely search would be “Romantic Inns New England” for example) and they fall down or off page one completely. I personally dislike “Google bragging” and think that they are well placed for many searches with the term Romantic Inn, but don’t brag about being number one on an unused search.
The Good: The site is clean up to the state search pages and has nice image maps for the states allowing you to narrow the search to a region. The result page is clean and easy to read.
The Bad: Broken (miscoded as email links) website links for every inn on main page of each category. Internal pages are crowded by 2 sidebars full of images and more links. Complicated packages including news releases(?) and multi site packages. “Google Bragging” about high rankings on obscure search terms. Category pages (listings in a region) are long and in some cases scroll through pages of inns. Offer another way to narrow the search.
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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 7 years
Main Page Pagerank: 5
Number of Inbound Links: 2,401
AlexaRank: 891,140
Alternate Domain Names: Yes
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes.
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $69
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $325.
Notes about Packages and Membership: The packages range from a simple web link only listing, at $69 to multi site listings including a press release service for $325. The press release service seems to be PRWeb, which distributes content for syndication on the web and occasionally for print. This service is available privately as well, and in a limited fashion is provided for free via PRWeb directly.
The Site: www.bestromanticinns.com
Review Date: January 2008
Published on January 15, 2008 by Innkeeper
Todays email contained several directory advertisements. I am starting with the first that I received today, from BBDirectory.com. This site invited me to update my information, despite the fact that I had never submitted any information to them. A quick look around revealed information from 3 innkeepers (nearly 9 years) ago. Aside from the obvious outdated content this site keeps with the apparent industry standard tan and faded green color scheme. The domain has been around just long enough for the account to have actually been set up by the innkeepers 9 years ago; so it was tough to tell if its just ripped content from elsewhere or if its just extremely out of date. It does seem that the site recently changed hands though. The site is an eclectic mix of links to tourism sites, other directories and even a PDF eBook that supposedly sells for $6.95 elsewhere? The site had the slowest page load times to date, again investigation shows that its a bad procedure call to the Google map. Hey, B&B web designers, how about a “Map it” link instead? Overall, it seems that there is some potential here and if there are in fact new owners of the site I look forward to whats to come.
The Good: The search function was fast and clean. Results were inns, not subdirectories. The actual page layout was clean and attractive with no obtrusive ads. The innkeeper interface is clean, easy to use and well designed. The innkeeper photo upload and preview is fast and well done.
The Bad: I personally hate when the SEO is obvious. The main page is stuffed with keywords and barely relevant text. The path to an inns actual page is a long and scrolling one - the inn links themselves are disguised in the title to the page with a small “link” icon. Links on internal pages to their own site were broken and the error pages were standard 404 pages.
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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 10 years
Main Page Pagerank: 5
Number of Inbound Links: 7,041
AlexaRank: 2,233,808
Alternate Domain Names: Yes
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes.
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $75
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $75.
Notes about Packages and Membership: I was confused that our inn is listed on here, but we havent paid. So I am unsure if there are “free” listing types or, considering that the data is 9 years old, if this is just an oversight. Some research shows that the fee is avtually $75 per year. It also seems that currently there are a limited number of “Featured” memberships being offered as part of a reciprocal link program. According to the email I received, this program will be replaced with a pay for listing program in the near future.
The Site: www.bbdirectory.com
Review Date: January 2008
Published on January 15, 2008 by Innkeeper
I was inspired to review this site after a recent PAII forum posting about their questionable innkeeper advertising tactics. Seems that they participate in the “free listing” scheme where they list your inn for you, then want you to sign up to see the leads that they have generated. This is a pretty good tactic, take for example the “A Classmate is looking for you” email phenomenon that springboarded Classmates.com into a multi million dollar industry years ago. While the psychology of this method is tried and true, it also falls into the scam category in my book. There is no way to validate that there are actual leads from these sites at all. Even after paying for the membership to “contact” these leads, they are often only email addresses and are unlikely to generate a booking. Think about how many other ways there are to find your inn. If this guest really wanted to stay with you, they would find you without problem. Especially considering the stats for this site.
The Good: Unique niche style travel site, grouped by type of travel. A clever concept, too bad it hasn’t been well executed here.
The Bad: Poor site script (off the shelf it seems) full of poor code and broken pieces. Search doesn’t return results properly, links are complicated and take the visitor in circles. Niches are confusing and lead to seemingly any inn that has advertised. No Inn contact information for most listings, if you can find them at all. Slow page load times and abundant script errors. More than 6 clicks to inn pages in many cases, with no link to the inns website when you get there. Just a link to an email form that I imagine is the source of the inquiries other innkeepers have received.
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The Stats:
Age of Domain: 10 years
Main Page Pagerank: 4
Number of Inbound Links: 69,700
AlexaRank: 82,754
Alternate Domain Names: No
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes - at the $199 package.
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $199
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $199
Notes about Packages and Membership: Membership allows you to be contacted by a guest. There is a “free trial” listing option, with no link and that allows you to respond to 10 inquiries, you must pay to become a member beyond those 10.
Update: The site owner has contacted us regarding the site (comments below) and we have updated the review with the current information. In response, the free listing information and the $149 are both listed on the sites FAQ’s right now. I notice that they do not in fact match the “advertising” page however.
The Site: www.realadventures.com
Review Date: December 2007
Published on January 15, 2008 by Innkeeper
