INNtelligent National Bed and Breakfast Lodging Guide Shootout

An INNtelligent way to quickly increase your occupancy! By Scott Crumpton and Dan Cunningham of INNtelligent.com Online lodging guides are the quickest and most cost effective method of increasing traffic to your Web site, and increasing traffic to your Web site is the most effective way to increase your occupancy. Therefore, you should sign up for each and every online lodging guide you can find - right? In short, no. So the questions remain, which lodging guides will bring you the most bang for your buck? If you're on a limited budget, which directory should you sign up for first? For the last 10 years, innkeepers have asked me which lodging guides they should spend money on and which they should ignore. So as I began writing the new edition of "Marketing Guestrooms Online", I was faced with the dilemma of which guides to include. Through the years, many of the top guides have continued to rank highly. However, many more have become ineffective, and new B&B directories seem to spring up weekly. Unfortunately, without a ranking system from a reliable source, thousands of innkeepers are wasting their money on guides that once produced results and new guides that have never produced results. The purpose of the INNtelligent Ranking System: The purpose of our ranking system is to rank, comprehensively and scientifically, each lodging guide based on its potential for increasing your occupancy. Furthermore, it is our intent to provide innkeepers with an ongoing information source which tracks the online lodging guides to ascertain changes in these rankings and to identify and rank new guides as they are created. How the guides were picked: The criteria for ranking a directory were that it must be a national B&B guide as opposed to state and local guides. We started the selection process by adding in every major national lodging guide we have seen in the last 10 years. To ensure we didn't miss a relevant guide, we performed 20 searches in Google, Yahoo and MSN for terms like "Bed and Breakfast," "California Bed and Breakfast," "New Orleans Bed and Breakfast," etc. From these results, we compiled the listings from the top 150 entries for each search term. And lastly, we searched the pay-per-click search engines, InnStar.com, PAII.com and a few other places just to be sure we hadn't missed anyone. From this research, we came up with 67 online guides (many we'd never heard of!) to include in the rankings. How the guides were ranked: The guide rankings are based on two sets of criteria. The first being an objective search engine ranking and the second being a subjective bonus score based on many other factors. Together these two scores are added together for their final INNtelligent rank. To determine the search engine score of each guide, we started by utilizing three different online services to ascertain exactly what people are searching for with regard to B&B lodging. Then, we compiled six nation-wide generic terms, 50 state terms and 121 individual city terms (at least two from each state) for a total of 177 search terms. Each of these search terms was given a weighted value based on its search popularity. We then performed searches for each of these terms in the three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN, for a total of 531 searches. Lastly, each guide was given a score based on its position in the first 30 listings of each search for each engine. There are many factors affecting the bonus score value, including participation in pay-per-click search engines programs, historical effectiveness of the guide, statistical reports from individual B&B websites, etc. Together these two scores gave us a very clear picture of the potential for each lodging guide to bring you new reservations. Caveats Although we ranked 67 different guides, it is quite possible we missed a few. However, due to our exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) research, the likelihood that we missed a guide that would have ranked even moderately well is negligible. Obviously, the results of this report are dynamic and do change over time, as search engines change and lodging guides enact more or less aggressive marketing plans. Furthermore, these rankings were accurate at the time of this writing. So, it is with great pleasure that we introduce to you the winners of the 2004 Lodging Guide INNtelligent Choice Awards! 2004 INNtelligent Choice Award Winners The following 10 online bed and breakfast lodging guides have garnered the 2004 INNtelligent Editor's Choice Award for excellence in performance. Rank Bed and Breakfast Guide Minimum Annual Price w/Link 1 bbonline.com $120.00 2 bedandbreakfast.com $229.00 3 bbexplorer.com $99.00 4 lanierbb.com $185.00 5 ibbp.com $130.00 6 bnblist.com $110.00 7 virtualcities.com $115.00 8 bnbfinder.com $99.00 9 iloveinns.com $150.00 10 innsite.com Free For complete rankings of all 67 guides we researched click here Final Thoughts The rankings presented here represent only 10 of the 67 guides tested. While these top 10 guides represent the greatest potential for increased traffic to your Web site according to our testing, by no means should your marketing be limited to these guides. Despite the lower rankings, many of the other guides in our full report can be quite cost effective. Furthermore, our testing provides results for the entire industry and not one specific area. While these main guides perform well overall, it's quite possible the lower ranked guides perform better in your area. Lastly, if there are no inns from your area listed in a guide, it probably won't rank well at all until you sign up. As the only listing in your area, you will receive the full attention of the potential guests coming to your area. After 10 years of watching and analyzing the online lodging guides, we felt it was time someone took a scientific approach to ranking their performance and potential effectiveness. We sincerely hope this information serves to increase your occupancy!