Reviews
Review: InspectedInns.org
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.
My Ratings:
| Overall Average: |   |
| Site Design: | |
| Site Content: | |
| Site Usability: | |
| Site Reach: | |
| Browser: | |
| Clicks to Link: | |
| Internal Pagerank: | |
| Credibility / QA: | |
| Value: | |
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
Discussion
2 comments for “Review: InspectedInns.org”
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Thanks for the heads up we will stay away from this one.
Thanks, I came to the same conclusion on the nearly daily email spammers. Also, they won’t remove me from their list which I’ve requested multiple times. Think that’s against the rules — which says a lot about them and the way they do business.
Any views on findbnb.com?
With the economy plunging, I’m trying to purge a lot of questionable sites I’ve been paying for…
So disappointed that bbonline has lost so much since Randy sold…he was so responsive and committed. His regional search systems came from recommendations I’d made to him, as did numerous other improvements that used to make bbonline the absolute best bb website.
iloveinns pulls well for me. I finally paid bedandbreakfast.com tho they aren’t much good for those of us who aren’t in a major city — and they don’t care.
The Innkeeper.com has always been very pleasant and consistent — and paid attn to click thrus before most others, reporting the info regularly. Wish they were higher in the search engines tho.
Also, any comments on google search pay-per-click would be appreciated.
it’s nice to have someone else doing this. The B&B friends I used to compare notes with have closed and not a lot of innkeepers are very internet savvy.