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The reasoning behind why we rank the bed and breakfast lodging guides
was included in our original
report which was written for our National
Bed and Breakfast Lodging Guide Shootout. If you have not already
done so, we encourage you to read the full report for a better understanding.
Here's the short version for those in a hurry:
1. Innkeeper Confusion
For over ten years, innkeepers have been asking us which lodging guides
to sign up for and which ones they should ignore. So, our primary reason
for ranking the guides was to provide innkeepers with a reliable resource
to guide their decision making process.
2. Definitive resource for our upcoming book
As we sat down to write the new edition of our upcoming book, Marketing
Guest Rooms Online, we had to decide which lodging guides to include
and which to ignore. While we had a personal knowledge of the most effective
online lodging guides, we also felt further research was necessary to
prove our assumptions.
3. Flaws in existing research
We began our project by searching for existing research as a foundation
for our own. Unfortunately, the only similar research we found was, in
our opinion, severely flawed and misleading at best.
4. Personal Interest
It's a well known fact in the industry that we are the publishers of the
Bed and Breakfast Explorer which
is one of the bed and breakfast guides tested. Because our guide covered
only the Western U.S. for many years, innkeepers are unfamiliar with our
expansion to include all states. When we expanded the directory to cover
all of North America, we were pleasantly surprised by how well the search
engines ranked our site. However, to simply say that we've spent hundreds
of hours performing this research for our own benefit would be a shallow
assumption. Anyone who knows us would have to admit that we've spent a
decade teaching innkeepers about marketing. Our latest research is no
exception. There are times when our directory performs very well in the
results and there are times where we perform poorly. This is true for
nearly every guide we test. In the case of our own directory, we perform
better in the states were we've had a long history, such as Oregon, Washington,
California, Idaho, Alaska and Hawaii. In such instances, we outperform
many of the other top national lodging guides. However, when you choose
a state where our guide is relatively new, we perform much worse than
the other top guides. So, while we freely admit we completed much of this
research for our own purposes, we assure the reader that there is no bias
in our findings.
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