The ratings and reviews that you post are tabulated for the overall ratings.  My vote counts equally to yours, so if the majority disagree with my vote, then you can bump up or down the overall rating.

So get to it and start your rating!  Lets put this review script to the test and share some insight with fellow innkeepers!

For those of you who are technically inclined and would like to start your own review site, be sure to check out the great new review script we are using. Of course, you will need to know your way around Wordpress and php, but its a great tool for getting a review site up and running.


Click here to get your own copy of this new script.

Thanks for your patience and we welcome your feedback on the new look.

Then came the pitch, these posters cost $199.00 each and at our property 3 were required by the Department of Labor.  Uh huh…

It’s a shame that these folks prey on small businesses.  It makes it difficult for real reputable companies to be able to get through to their potential customers.  Case in point, just last week a magazine contacted us about being the “featured inn” in a story about our area.  Immediately when I got the call I had the tone of “whats this going to cost me”.  Turns out, it was an actual publication and they were actually running a story.  I was probably only seconds away from hanging up with a “thanks anyway”.  It’s unfortunate that we have been conditioned by these scam artists to the point that we almost give up on a real opportunity.  Luckily we didn’t miss this opportunity, but how many “$199 labor posters” are we away from just hanging up on anyone other than a booking…

Coincidentally, I saw a posting about this same topic today on the PAII forums (clearly these folks are working their way down the Inn directories…).  Ingrid, a helpful PAII staffer, did some research on the topic and found that the posters are available online at no charge at the department of labor website or by calling them directly.

If you have been subject to a scam of your own, please let us know so that we can spread the word!

The best part is that the only thing that most people will need to add to their existing stereo or equipment to make this work is what is called an FM modulator. Some of you may already have one of these (albeit on a smaller scale) if you have an “iPod” dock for your car. What an FM modulator does is take an input signal (which can be anything, CD player, Satellite radio, etc) and rebroadcast it over an empty FM station.

So here are the simple steps to setting this up in your Inn as well as links to the equipment you will need to make it work.

1. Find yourself a good FM modulator. Due to FCC rules, the size of the unit you need is often only sold as a kit, but you can often find these pre-assembled on eBay which saves you a lot of trouble. Look for quality units from a company like Ramsey.

2. Find an empty spot on your radio dial. If you are like us in Vermont that won’t be a problem at all. But for you urban innkeepers, you may have to hunt for a small piece of the radio dial to use.

3. Set the station on the modulator to the empty spot. Connect a source to the modulator. We use Sirius satellite radio, but you can use an existing CD player or whatever you have. You can either use the “RCA” style outputs from the stereo or even the headphone jack of a portable unit. You may need an adapter or special cable for this connection, but they are easily found at your local Radio Shack for under $10.

4. Once you power up the modulator and start the music, tune a nearby radio to the station you picked earlier. You should hear the music you are broadcasting. Use a portable radio to walk around and see the coverage that you are getting with the position and the channel you selected. It may take some tinkering to get things just perfect and to ensure that you cover the whole inn.

5. Set a preset button on your rooms clock radio or stereo (if you have one in the room) to the station that you just set up. Be sure that as part of the room setup you include turning on the radio to spread the music.

Guests are often wow-ed by the fact that we “pipe” our contemporary jazz through the Inn. It creates a comfortable and welcoming experience and is one more way to kick it up a notch against the big guys.

Let me know how it goes for you. I’d love to hear from some other innkeepers who have tried this themselves. What music are you sharing with your guests?

Project Summary:

• Difficulty: Easy
• Time: 2 Hours
• Cost: About $250
• Tools: None
• Materials: FM modulator and a music source. Radios to receive music broadcast.

When I became an innkeeper I quickly realized that finding good information about Inn specific products and services was really hard. In particular deciding where to spend ad dollars was challenging and I was overwhelmed with the number of directory solicitations I was receiving every week. I started making a spreadsheet of them to keep track for myself.

I still do some consulting and development work on the side with a group of fellow geeks. We had been working on customizing a star rating plug-in for wordpress for a client. I was tinkering with site names on a spinner site for a domain name to use for the demo and came across innkeeping.org. I was as surprised as anyone that it was available and snatched it right up. With input of the whole crew, we put together some blog posts containing reviews with star ratings, based primarily on the spreadsheet I had been keeping. It was a great way to demo our rating script work.

One day we saw a crazy spike in traffic to the domain. It turns out that the robots.txt file we had set up to block indexing of the site got incorrectly edited and to top it off, some of the posts were then published in an rss feed. Within days the site was getting traffic and comments from innkeepers all over the blogosphere.

Unfortunately with the interest also came some rather evil emails from some of the directory site owners. My first instinct was to pull the site, after all it was never intended for public use anyhow. However, after weighing the positive emails with the negative, there was far more support to keep the information available.

We decided to leave the content live and use the site to develop a 2 way rating system that would allow users to submit their own ratings to wordpress. That got to be far more complex than we had anticipated. Ultimately what I have decided to do is create a separate ratings and review site “behind” the blog here.

In the coming weeks I will be sending anyone who has commented on any of the posts on innkeeping.org a link to register (for free) as a beta tester of the new site. Think of the new site as a “trip advisor” for innkeepers. You will be able to rate any and everything and share your thoughts and experiences in an organized and searchable fashion. Find some great towels, the perfect glasses for juice, an amazing graphic designer - you’ll be able to share those stories with others and help us all out. Only innkeepers will be able to join and see the content (you will have to use a published innkeeper email address to register) so that it can be truly an open discussion amongst fellow innkeepers. I hope that it will become a great resource for innkeepers and aspiring innkeepers.

In the immediate future, I look forward to putting together some posts that are no longer directory centric. I have plans to share a lot of good information here, especially technical information and how-to’s. I have had a lot of fun “tweaking” our inn and am looking forward to sharing some of my tricks with you. I hope that you will do the same here!

That said, if you would like to contribute some content, please email me (innkeeper at innkeeping dot org). Contributors will be listed with a link to their inn on the main page of this site. If you have an innkeeper related product that you would like us to look at and review, please contact us as well. We do not “sell” reviews or participate in pay per post programs however.

Thanks for the many great emails supporting the concept of this site and I look forward to your continued participation.

The no longer mysterious - Innkeeper…

The reason that we have decided that we should remain anonymous is that we do not want our opinions, expressed here, to impact our primary business, our Inn. Our Inn is our livelyhood and based upon some of the heated emails that we have received regarding our reviews, it is clear that we made the right choice in remaining anonymous.

If you feel that the ratings are biased, or that they do not reflect your opinions, don’t read them.

To the directory site owners, this site was started as a resource for innkeepers - it is clear that many of these directory sites are not pleased with what we have had to say about them. I would hope that you would use these reviews as a tool to improve your sites and better serve the needs of the Innkeeping community. I am certain that your time would be better spent doing that than emailing us.

We are working right now on implementing a user review / rating system, which will allow our visitors to rate each directory on their own. These user ratings will be displayed along side of our own ratings.

Until this user rating system is complete, we have decided to pause posting new reviews.

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).

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