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In January of 2005, the leaders of CABBI
asked me to present the findings from our National
Bed and Breakfast Lodging Guide Shootout at their upcoming conference.
Following our research and ranking of the national lodging guides,
we were curious to see which guides performed best at the state
level. To answer this question we completed the California Bed and
Breakfast Lodging Guide Shootout and presented the ranking report
included below. The slide show for the presentation can be viewed
by clicking here.
For a complete explanation of why we ranked the lodging guides,
please click
here for our original article and also some follow-up
notes.
How we ranked the California Bed and Breakfast Lodging Guides
We tested the rankings of 185 web sites all of which were Bed and
Breakfast Lodging Guides.
Each of these guides was checked in Google, Yahoo and MSN's new
search engine which are the top three search engines currently.
We used a total of 465 search terms including generic California
terms such as "california bed and breakfast" and terms
for 221 California cities such as "santa barbara bed and breakfast."
To ensure we did not simply give higher scores to the guide with
the greatest number of listings we only scored a limited number
of listings and also compared these scores to average aggregate
scores
All of the above constitutes the objective score each guide received.
A bonus subjective score was then applied to each guide based on
a variety of complex factors. These two scores combined established
our rankings and final scores. In the end, 137 lodging guides scored
well enough to be included in this report.
Two more quick notes:
Expectations:
We expected to find a completely different set of guides performing
well at the California state level as compared to our National
Guide Ranking Results. However, most "of the top guides"
performed similarly to their national rankings with a few exceptions.
State Favorites:
Some national guides perform better in certain states and regions
and some guide only appear at the state and regional level. In California
for example, BBExplorer
performed very well due to it’s roots as a West Coast regional
guide. CABBI.com was also an
obvious state favorite for California due to their state focus.
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