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BedandBreakfast.com
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Editors Ratings:
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A 2009 Editors Choice!Age of Domain: 10 years
Main Page Pagerank: 7 (higher is better)
Number of Inbound Links: 82,694 (more is better)
Monthly Traffic: 756,000 Global (higher is better)
AlexaRank: 24,762 (lower is better)
PAII Member: Yes (shows commitment to industry)
Accepts Outside Ads: Yes
Direct Links to Your Website: Yes
Annual Membership Price Range: $240 - $900
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 inn, inn of the month etc. Be careful, the rates are currently listed as monthly and INCLUDE a $5 per month assumption that you will get 1 review per month (They are offering a $5 per month credit for guest reviews).
This site continues to be the forerunner in the market for Bed and Breakfast specific directories. Their recent acquisition of Webervations only strengthens both their position and commitment to the Bed and Breakfast market.
The new monthly billing is convenient and beneficial to many smaller innkeepers, however a fairly sizable price increase accompanied that offering. At the same time, with the $5 credit for reviews, it is possible that an inn could pay less in 2009 than 2008. The new “Bronze Plus” level offering includes a link to the inns website, and is available for those who use RezOvation or Webervations for $179 per year. Previously links to the inns site were only available starting at the “Silver” level.
The site hasn’t changed much on the surface in the past year and I still find it to be overwhelming and too busy for my tastes. Of course, the performance of the directory is the most important part, which is why they still earn the “Editors Choice” award for 2009.
Bedandbreakfast.com continues to be a star performer in the conversion department, converting more click throughs than any other online directory. I will add though that the lead is narrowing - there are 2 directories and several non-inn sources that are quickly catching up to bnb.com, which leads me to believe that while they have done a great job in SEO, the site design may be holding them back.
One of the biggest changes in the past year was the promotion of a new guest rating system. Everyone is jumping in on the review craze. While it’s nice that their system was designed with innkeepers in mind, offering to not display any reviews that are negative discredits the system completely (I was informed by CEO Eric Goldreyer that this is not the case, all reviews are being posted regardless of the rating, with the exception of the widget they offer - which is honesly an appropriate filter to offer on a widget for the innkeeprs site).
I still have mixed opinions as to incorporating reviews on paid directory sites at all. I understand that they drive traffic, but feel that if you are going to be a review site, be a review site. If not - stop. Perhaps it would be better suited to convert their inns.com site into an inn specific review site. Personally, I think that the solution is back to the basics, a guestbook style system without ratings at all. Let guests share their experiences, but don’t assign a “star value” to them. The justification for adding reviews are comparisons to other review sites and sites that have added review capabilities - but show me a good example of another site that charges to be listed and encourages reviews of those paid listings. I think that they are playing with fire here, but only time will tell.
The Good: Largest reach of any directory site out there. Most pageviews and uniques, and solid SEO (places on page 1 of every state search for b&b on Google). New multiple links to your site are beneficial for innkeepers as many internal pages have good pagerank. Excellent conversions of lookers to bookers.
The Bad: Increasingly clunky interface and design. The site uses a lot of flashy elements and advertising from many folks other than innkeepers, but the rates continue to climb. The blue text we mentioned last year remains poor from a readability standpoint. Repeated requests to add our inns town to the map searches (we are in Vermonts 5th largest town) have been ignored / denied. The featured ad rotator used on the innkeeper login (and other innkeeper pages) is clunky and unnecessary.
Tags: Discussion
21 comments for “BedandBreakfast.com” Displaying newest comments at the bottom.
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Agreed, as a B&B manager in Dublin / Ireland this is a must advertise in site.
We also have a free accommodation finding / booking service for all parts of Dublin called Almara Accommodations Dublin. We find and reserve Hostels,B&Bs and Hotels at no charge. Any size group from 1 to 100. If people prefer they can ask us for an availability search and we will give them contact details to reserve for themselves. See enquiry / advice form at http://www.almarabb.com/almaraa.htm or sister company at http://www.almarabb.com
We would be very interested to hear your comments.
Dear folks,
Thanks for taking the time to review our website!
Just wanted to update you on a few things:
- The blue text will be changed soon.
- A mobil app has been on the schedule for a couple of months and should be out by Summer.
- I would love some additional information on what is meant by “reducing the clicks to the inns websites”. You can search by Inn name right on the home page. So it is one-click to a property from most pages on the site (including the home page)…?
Thanks!
Eric Goldreyer
Founder & Owner
BedandBreakfast.com
Also new to the site is actual direct links. Prior to 2 days ago they were re-directed (click counter) links that were less valuable to your website. Now they are completely direct, with pretty useful anchor text to give the link meaning and your own website a bit more of a boost.
@innkeeper, you may want to alter your rating system as you seem to show any link to a B&B website as “direct” even when they are actual re-directs. DIrect links are more valuable than re-directs.
As a tiny B&B with a correspondingly tiny marketing budget I wish bedandbreakfast.com would include a link to my website in their lowest membership level. Only one B&B in my town even advertises on this directory, and they are rethinking whether it is worth the cost.
Otherwise, yes, it is a pretty and professional looking site.
BedandBreakfast.com is amazing!!!
In the past 30 days I’ve netted more than $5,000 from their referrals! BedandBreakfast.com is my #1 referring website - over 3X more than BBonline for customers, and almost 20X Lanier.
I couldn’t be making it without the support of BedandBreakfast.com - they, along with their ReZovation web design, technical support and easy to use resevation software, have done eveything they could to make my site and my business more successful.
The Staff both at BedandBreakfast.com and ReZovation are fantastic and are constantly working to improve my results. I consider them my best ally and would be at a complete loss without their support - and all for less than $100 per month - WOW! I love em! thanks guys!…..
The above comment should have included my Inn’s name “Inn on the Riverwalk” in San Antonio, Texas and website address for verification http://www.innontheriverwalksa.com Please feel free to add.
thanks!
J
We’ve read a lot of recent critiques about Alexa’s lack of accuracy, and suggest that you considering references Quantcast either instead of Alexa, or in addition.
Thanks, Sandy
I wish bedandbreakfast.com looked less like a discount travel site. That blue they use everywhere is garish and all the ads and lists all over the place are overwhelming. I get a headache trying to use the site. A cleaner, simpler design would better represent the kind of quality experience every b&b aims to provide.
Sandy,Thanks for your feedback. As you can see on the more recent reviews, iIn our new format we do include the Quantcast statistics. The main issue with using them exclusively is that if a site has not been “Quantified” by the site owner, their statistics are not very accurate. Our site is a work in progress and we appreciate this kind of input. Hopefully in the next few weeks the new site will launch, which includes user ratings - allowing our visitors to post their own ratings and results.
Chris - we couldnt agree more about the blue! If you look at Erics post earlier, he seems to indicate that the blue is going away… Lets hope he is correct!
Innkeeper, you may want to update your review. I just found out that bedandbfast.com raised their rates! As if they weren’t pricey enough! The lowest package with a link is now $350 (sorry, $349). At this price, you might want to advise your readers to check how this directory places in the search engines for their specific town, not just their state. There are lots of towns and small cities where bedandbfast.com don’t show up well. Small BnB’s in these areas might have to think a little harder before forking over this kind of money. Every situation is different, and I don’t think there are any ‘musts’ that apply across the board.
We are on BBonline as that comes up first in almost all searches for our area.
I have asked bedandbreakfast.com a question that bugs me about their website and never received an answer.
When you search on their website for a B&B in Charlottesville, Virginia, the B&Bs from other towns - some over 35 - 40 minutes drive away come up, sometimes before the actuat B&Bs IN Charlottesville. Towns like Orange, Nellysford and Waynesboro.
But when you search these other towns (Orange, Nellysford and Waynesboro) you don’t see any Charlottesville B&Bs.
So not only is it expensive for us Charlottesville towns, other smaller towns are getting twice the exposure for the same pricey cost as we are, and I don’t think that is fair.
Erika
Hi Erika,
Since most of our B&B markets are very small and very spread-out, we have always allowed inns to pay for additional listings in nearby cities. This is what you are seeing here. If you wanted to list on Orange as well for example, you could do so. Hope this helps to explain, JB.
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.
Hi Erika,
Sorry no one got back with you. Not sure what happened there as it is a pretty simple explanation. It looks like John (JB) replied already but I wanted to clarify earlier.
For innkeepers with properties that are as we say “Geographically Challended”, but that are nearby a larger destination or more well known town or city, we allow them to purchase an additional listing (we call it a “Secondary Listing”) in the more well known location if we feel the property is within an acceptable distance (determined by what we think a traveler would consider acceptable - therefore the distance is different in West Texas than it is in the North East). We then list the secondary listings in the city/town along with all of the properties that are in the city or town, by membership level. We display the actual city/town that every property is in immediately after the property’s name on the city search results page.
Regarding the number of clicks required to get to an innkeeper’s home page, I am a bit lost. You can either enter an inn name directly into our search box from almost anywhere on the site to go directly to that property’s BBCOM listing, or you can enter a city/town name, known Point of Interest (Golden Gate Bridge, Statue of Liberty, etc.), zip code or region and get a list of property results that all have links direct to their home page. This means from almost anywehre on the site you are only 2 clicks to an innkeeper’s home page (and it means we have way better search than anyone else using an Oracle 11i database to run the site).
The blue text has pretty mcuh all been updated now and most of it is a grey text.
Thanks,
Eric
PS.
The reason you do not see properties in your town listed in the smaller towns is because innkeepers probably would not get a good Return on Investment with that so they typically do not do that. It is really only used by innkeepers in locations near a bigger destination/city/town.
Regarding the
Really bed and breakfast has promoted our bnb we were really lucky that we applied for bronze membership but we were given silver for first year that increased our reservation.
Well,
For us at The Inn at Delhi, bed and breakfast dot com
has not made much of an impact. We have had very few visitors from them. We ask all our visitors how did they hear about us and general feedback. Not one has said, so far, they came from bed and breakfast dot com - so for Indian Inn’s - it does not represent value for money.
That said, It is still early days and we will know whether it is value for money at the year end, when we see the ROI on each marketing product we are using.
Tripadvisor is generating more traffic from a free listing, at the moment!
Our experience with BandB.com has been mixed. The on line reservation linked to Expedia was a dismal failure because we were unable to work with guests prior to arrival, so we canned it. That left us in the REZ GT boat and we found that we were stuck between a significant increase in cost and no support. It feels like we got caught in the growing pains associated with their expansion plans. We thought about dropping back to Webrez, but now that is the same. You get the feeling that they are trying, but we are hoping a better choice comes along.
Well then, if the smaller towns can pay to be on our Charlottesville page, I still think they should be listed AFTER the Charlottesville inns, rather than BEFORE. I understand they are paying more, but I think the actual inns IN THE TOWN should be listed first, the outer town inns after.
Silver membership (lowest with link) is now $400. up about 15% from last year… Erik, there’s a depression going on out there! How about including a link for Bronze and being the leader? You’ll help out old and new members, as well as your own company. Your site is worth being included in but for now I’ll rely on other sites with lower link costs.
Starting on March 1 or 2009, any Webervations or RezOvation customer gets two links included with the Bronze level membership. We are calling it “Bronze Plus” for lack of a better term. We also have implemented a review credit - where any member regardless of when they renewed can get $5/month back on their membership by getting a review a month. Up to $60/yr.
These two moves will enable a lot more affordability, as well as allowing every member to pay less this year on their membership than they did last year, not to mention helping their property appeal by getting more reviews.
I like the site and had to drop another site to pay the increased membership cost. I did not want to do this but I suspect it was the goal. The Bashful Mermaid bed and breakfast is very seasonal and it is hard to pay the same as a large inn with 12 months of bussiness.Can you offer a discount in off season ,like we do or better half year memberships? Also the discount for reviews defeat the purpose because InnKeepers will only ask friends and family to write reviews when busy guests dont.The results are less people will trust reviews.I am proud of my reviews but I am seasonal.All inns will try to recoup $60 per year.Please respond I have called before. Thank You for reading our feed back. Diane