innkeeping.org

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.

My Ratings:

Overall Rating:
Site Design:
Site Content:
Site Usability:
Site Reach:
Browser:
Clicks to Link:
Internal Pagerank:
Credibility / QA:
Value:

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