The Good: Lots of unique content. Articles, stories, contests, they seem to do a lot for the innkeeping community as a whole. Excellent 2 Clicks and I am at the link to your page layout. The inns website links are as prominent as the detail page link. The search includes a map as well as an “AJAXy” auto-complete. Hover-tips include enlarging images and detail information. Social content generation with add to Del.icio.us etc.

The Bad: The Google map integration is either CPU or browser intensive. In repeated tests that function cost almost 5 seconds of pageload and in several instances froze the browser temporarily. Its not that important and not worth waiting for. The auto complete feature for the search function is buggy, selecting the auto completed text doesn’t work cross browser.

Ratings:

A 2008 Gold Medal Winner!

The Stats:
Age of Domain: 7 years
Main Page Pagerank: 6
Number of Inbound Links: 18,043
AlexaRank: 161,367
Alternate Domain Names: Yes
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes - at the $195 package.
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $135
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $295
Notes about Packages and Membership: 3 Plans are offered, no link to your site before the “Gold” plan.

The Site: www.iloveinns.com
Review Date: January 10, 2008

Again, the basic level here seems to be the best for most advertisers. Definitely worth the $149 per year; I don’t know who would really benefit from the $500 package. I couldn’t find a region where that level of service would make sense in my search, other than for those that perhaps still don’t have their own website.

The Good: Webervations integration gives availability information. Nearby Inns are given decent presentation, exposing you to more searchers. This site has the largest internet reach of all, with more inbound links and indexed pages than any other directory to date. The directory is PageRank generous, indexing the internal pages within 3 links of the main page - giving many inn pages a PR of 3 themselves.

The Bad: The internal pages for inns seem almost like a website of themselves. It would be easy for a novice

internet user to mistake the internal inn page as your inns website. To make that worse, the pages are clunky and old school (counter and all!) which doesn’t present well to a web savvy audience.

My Ratings:

The Stats:
Age of Domain: 13 years
Main Page Pagerank: 6
Number of Inbound Links: 105,866
AlexaRank: 64,276
Alternate Domain Names: Yes
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes - starting at the basic $149 per year package.
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $149
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $495
Notes about Packages and Membership: 4 levels - featured and state page listings are at highest level, extra photos etc. Basic gives link and 1 photo.

The Site: www.bbonline.com
Review Date: January 10, 2008

The Good: The site has a “web 2.0 ish” design (although I am not a big fan of the new uuber blue look), the solid reach (places on page 1 of every state search for b&b on Google) and many internal pages have good pagerank.

The Bad: The site uses a lot of flashy elements and advertising from folks other than us innkeepers. The blue text is poor from a readability standpoint. Our personal experiences with the online reservations program and the gift card program have been poor. As the industry leader, they would gain the 5th star by adding a mobile search, reducing the clicks to the inns websites and toning down the non-inn advertising.

Our Inn Results: We advertise on BedandBreakfast.com. We are in a moderately competitive area on their site, there are about a dozen inns listed in our region. In the last 6 months we received 875 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 23 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, BedandBreakfast.com ranked 1st in our paid directory click through and conversions in the last 6 months.

My Ratings:
A 2008 Gold Medal Winner!

The Stats:
Age of Domain: 9 years
Main Page Pagerank: 6
Number of Inbound Links: 82,694
AlexaRank: 53,774
Alternate Domain Names: Yes
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes - starting at the $299 per year package.
Least Expensive Membership (annual): $149
Most Expensive Membership (annual): $699
Notes about Packages and Membership: 4 packages to chose from. Main difference is the placement on the search result page as well as details of the inn and photos. Many options for bidding style placement as featured and inn of the month etc.

The Site:www.bedandbreakfast.com
Review Date: January 10, 2008