How to Start & Run a B&B BandBED2eBook-1 | Page 29

Duration supplements or discounts
If you have never run a hotel or B&B before, we can tell you that one of the biggest
things you learn almost from day one is the importance of longer duration bookings.
Getting one two-night booking is vastly better than getting two successive one-night
bookings – even though your income, RevPAR, and occupancy figures are the same.
Why? If you compare two one-night bookings with one two-night booking:
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You have two room changeovers rather than one: double the work
You have two arrivals rather than one: twice the waiting
You have twice the laundry bill, assuming you don’t wash linen on day two
Your bill on things like soaps will double
So one of your top priorities will always be to encourage longer stays. You can do this,
for example, with a supplement for single night stays at weekends, or various discounts
for longer stays – third night half-price, fourth night free etc.
Believe us, one of the “holy grails” in this business is getting a good number of longer
bookings. At our own B&B, we gain from a good steady year-round seasonality in
Sherborne, but outside the Spring and Summer season, much of the demand is for one
and two-night bookings, so we suffer from a relatively high average workload per
room-night. We are always delighted to get four, five or six night bookings, and do
our best to encourage them.
The incentive you offer for a longer-duration booking need not, of course, be “money
off”: it is better to give an “added value” incentive, something which has a higher
perceived value to the customer than it actually costs you financially.
An ideal incentive is a free bottle of wine or champagne, but (and not many B&B
owners realise this) it is illegal for B&Bs to give alcoholic drinks away free, unless
you have a licence. If you have a licence, try an offer such as “a complimentary half-
bottle of champagne with every booking of four nights or more between the dates of X
and Y”.
Restrictions
The incentives we discussed earlier will encourage longer bookings, bookings at weak
times etc. Sometimes, though, you will want to go further and disallow certain types of
bookings at certain times. This is what we mean by “restrictions”.
For instance, you may get a lot of family demand at half term, and these are attractive
bookings for you: family occupancy, and longer durations. If you have, say, four
rooms, accepting even a couple of one-night bookings during half-term might well
mean that you have to turn away 50% of the longer family bookings you would have
got. As a B&B owner, few things are more painful and frustrating than turning down a
five-night booking for a family because you have a one-night booking in single
occupancy in the middle of the period required!
The answer in these situations is to make a restriction: for example in the case above, “a
three-night minimum applies during half term” (or four nights – it is your judgement).
The most common instance of a restriction is against one-night bookings on Fridays or
Saturdays. This has great logic to it, but “taking the plunge” and putting that rule in
place is diffcult, especially if a good proportion of your weekend bookings have been